Twisted Sisterhood

We were thrilled to have the opportunity to interview Gretchen Sisson for today's episode. Gretchen Sisson is a sociologist who studies abortion and adoption in the United States. She is the author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, based on hundreds of in-depth interviews with women who have relinquished infants for domestic adoption over the past 60 years. Gretchen is a researcher, a mom, an ally to birth mothers in the adoption community, and so much more. Posing challenging thoughts that society, and even our community, has long hesitated to ponder, we valued this conversation with Gretchen and of course, this incredible book. FIVE stars for Relinquished from the Twisted Sisterhood Podcast. We hope to keep this conversation rolling in our community!

More about Relinquished:

A powerful decade-long study of adoption in the age of Roe, Relinquished reveals the grief of the American mothers for whom the choice to parent was never real. Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the abortion debate, but little attention has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish infants for private adoption. Relinquished reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for those for whom abortion is inaccessible, or for whom parenthood is untenable.

The stories of relinquishing mothers are stories about our country's refusal to care for families at the most basic level, and to instead embrace an individual, private solution to a large-scale, social problem.

We are in a political moment in which adoption is, increasingly, being revealed as an institution devoted to separating families and policing parenthood under the guise of feel-good family-building. Rooted in a long-term, qualitative sociological study, Relinquished is an analysis of hundreds of in-depth interviews with American mothers who placed their children for domestic adoption collected over a decade. The voices of these women are powerful and heartrending; they deserve to be heard as a response to this moment.

You can purchase the book on Amazon, Bookshop, or your local bookseller! :)

Happy New Year, sisterhood! This week is about the three R's no one told you about: Roles, Rights, and Responsibilities. What is it that we owe our children? What role should we play in this arrangement, and will that change over time? What can we do to best support our kids and have a positive relationship over time? We cover so much about this complicated lifelong relationship. Tune in!

We are so grateful that we got to sit with Lacy, a great birth mom friend of ours :) Lacy Shaw is a birth mom nearly 10 years post-placement, navigating life and parenthood with two littles in Southern California.

There’s so many gems in this episode. We cover generational effects of our decision to relinquish, what life looks like after a decade of post-placement, how this decision affects us when we parent other children, and so much more. This episode will leave you thinking.

Mercedes is a birth mother from St. Louis. At 20 years old, she pursued adoption for her daughter and dealt with the child welfare system in the process. Because of this experience, Mercedes is passionate about connecting foster youth to their biological families in every role she undertakes. Mercedes has over a decade of experience serving families engaged with the child welfare system, most recently as a Field Operation Specialist for Missouri Children’s Division, overseeing the St. Louis Region with the support of data for the implementation of legislation and improvement planning.

She is passionate about gathering and analyzing data to impact policies for youth and families. Mercedes graduated from the Minority Professional Leadership Development Program (MPLD) with AdoptUSKids, where she developed a language resource group to address a language barrier that adoption recruiters faced when working towards permanency for their Hispanic youth. In short, Mercedes is an absolute rockstar.

We are back with the second episode of season 3 of the Twisted Sisterhood Podcast! Today, we talk about stereotypes and stigmas... but it's not what you think. We have grown tired of the usual conversation surrounding stereotypes and stigmas and how this doesn't foster inclusivity or bring anyone closer to community, healing, or understanding. We reject the idea of a hierarchy within the lowest rung on the adoption ladder. We encourage you to listen to today's episode with an open mind and discover how to bring people into your circle.

Show Notes:

Welcome to Season THREE of the Twisted Sisterhood Podcast! We have a great season lined up for you, you'll be hearing all about the projects that are happening in the adoption world, as well as policy changes, new books and documentaries, and hearing from more birth moms about their experiences.

Show Notes:

In this episode, we address the curious event of switching roles in the adoption community and how we can stand in the gap for others. Kelsey talks about the loss of her grandmother, and what it felt like to watch her dad grieve his birth mom. Ashley and Kelsey dive deep into what experiences they have had where others have filled in the gap for them, and how they have filled in the gap for other people. 

Erika Gonzales is a 30 year old birth mom from California. She is just over four years post-placement in an open adoption and she is here to be an ally for fellow birth moms and help normalize healthy, close relationships between birth parents & adoptive parents. In this episode we talk about the feeling of "not being in the club" when you have a healthy open adoption, classism in adoption, and what systems are in place that perpetuate the need for adoption to occur.

Our first ever non-birth mom guest is on this week! Stephie Predmore, an adoptive mom living in the middle of Illinois with her husband, daughter, and menagerie of cats and dogs. She is passionate about advocating for better adoption education and offers adoption advising for hopeful adoptive and adoptive parents. Stephie is a former ANLC client, the law center that was the focus of the TIME Magazine article that came out last week. Stephie came on this week to talk about what her process was while reading it and the days that followed, to come to terms with the ugly part of adoption and find her role in the fight for change. 

Today, an article in TIME Magazine came out titled, "The Baby Brokers: Inside America’s Murky Private-Adoption Industry" and we took a deep dive into it. We go over the article top to bottom and help explain the ins and outs in a deep dive.

To read the article: https://time.com/6051811/private-adoption-america/

To watch the accompanying video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ijqNpSqswtM&feature=youtu.be