Why Adoption Is Not A Real Alternative To Abortion

Last month, a post by the Christian adoption agency Lifetime Adoption drew ire from social media users as it went viral on X. “If you’re pregnant and homeless, the lack of a stable environment can be terrifying and overwhelming,” the since-deleted post read. “You are not alone; resources are available to help you through this difficult time. For many experiencing homelessness, adoption is the answer.” Earlier this year, the group shared a similar post encouraging pregnant people facing incarceration to relinquish their children through adoption prior to serving a sentence. You might think this “marketing” of adoption towards vulnerable pregnant people is aggressive and cruel, but unfortunately, adoption agencies often target those with the fewest resources.

Adoption has been praised as the “common sense” solution to reducing the number of abortions. During a 2009 commencement speech at Notre Dame, a Catholic university, President Barack Obama argued that we should be “making adoption more available” as a compromise with those who are anti-abortion. During the oral arguments for the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a white adoptive parent of two Black children from Haiti, suggested safe haven laws could solve the burdens of parenting for people seeking abortion.

But not only is it impossible for adoption to replace abortion — each year in the U.S., there are about 18,000 to 20,000 private domestic adoptions of infants, compared to 800,000 to one million abortions — but it grossly oversimplifies what adoption experiences look like for the parents relinquishing their babies.

Take, for example, the Lifetime Adoption post: Adoption is not the solution to homelessness, nor is relinquishing all parental rights the answer to facing incarceration while pregnant. We should instead be shifting policy to create more affordable housing options and to make communities safe places in which to raise children. And rather than advocating for coerced relinquishment, we should be challenging the practice of imprisoning pregnant people. Arguing these systemic issues can be solved with adoption or family separation is not only misleading, it distracts from the ways in which the U.S. government has harmed marginalized people and forcibly separated families under the guise of what some politicians believe is best for the children: rehoming them into non-familial situations, typically heterosexual, white, wealthy, two-parent families.

Under this system, none of us are able to decide what to do with our pregnancies freely.

As Black women who’ve had abortions, adoption has long been thrown in our faces as the solution to unintended pregnancies. But we understand systemic issues and that the issues are far more complex than whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term. That’s why we decided to break down this false narrative in our new podcast from The Meteor, “The A Files: A Secret History of Abortion.”

First, it’s important to understand that abortion and adoption are not opposites. If a person is pregnant and they do not want to remain pregnant (or they physically cannot remain pregnant), they seek an abortion. If they would like to remain pregnant, they could then decide if they would like to raise their children or not. Most birth parents who relinquished their children, we learned from our guest Dr. Gretchen Sisson, wanted to parent but didn’t have the necessary resources or support to do so. Sisson is the author of the new book Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, which is based on a decade of her research interviewing birth mothers who relinquished their children and the impact it had on their lives. The goal, Sisson explained to us, should be “about finding homes for children and not finding babies for parents.” The focus should always be keeping families together.

Sisson argues that adoption can be used by the state to control who gets to parent their children, an argument made by Dorothy Roberts in Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. For decades, conservative lawmakers have succeeded in eroding the social safety net, chronically underfunding food assistance programs, and attaching punishing work requirements to public benefit programs such as Medicaid. The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit was a rare bright spot, lifting millions of children out of poverty, but when it came time for lawmakers to renew the legislation, they let it expire.

At the same time, Sisson reminds us, liberals celebrate adoption as a progressive way to form families that aren't strictly biological; it’s a way for queer families, single folks, and people who are not able to carry a pregnancy to term to create their families. And while that’s possible, it would have to be done ethically in a system that supports pregnant people to make all of their own pregnancy and parenting decisions freely, without economic pressure or stigma or by making babies strangers to their kin. Right now that isn’t possible. The adoption agency market is dominated by Christian organizations that are invested in blocking these same groups of people from having and adopting children while simultaneously banning abortion across the nation. Under this system, none of us are able to decide what to do with our pregnancies freely.

A reproductive justice approach would allow for abundant access to abortion and other reproductive technologies for all people, while also fully funding policies to ensure that families have safe housing, ample food, quality healthcare, reliable childcare, and income that would allow families to stay together and thrive. This vision is harder to fit into a Tweet. It isn’t the pithy common ground slogan that some pro-choice legislators want to use to reach across the aisle to find compromise with anti-abortion colleagues. It demands that we actually fix our broken system once and for all.

This future is possible. But in order to get there, we cannot deny people the right to parent in order to restrict the right to abortion.

Renee Bracey Sherman is an abortion activist, writer, and founder and co-executive director of We Testify, an organization dedicated to the leadership and representation of people who have abortions. She is also the co-author of Liberating Abortion: Our Legacy, Stories, and Vision for How We Save Us and co-host of The A Files: A Secret History of Abortion, a podcast from The Meteor.

Regina Mahone is a writer and journalist covering reproductive health, rights, and justice issues. She currently serves as senior editor at The Nation magazine. Mahone and Bracey Sherman are co-authors of the forthcoming book Liberating Abortion from Amistad/HarperCollins and co-hosts of the podcast The A-Files: A Secret History of Abortion.