We are a country that continues to be shaped by outdated beliefs, beliefs that no longer serve the majority of people who live here. We are a country that continues to embrace those beliefs even when the evidence tells us those beliefs are wrong – harmful, even, when acted upon. Even when we know our beliefs come from places deeply rooted in systemic racism, white supremacy, privilege, and outdated concepts of who or what makes a family.
We claim, in this country, to care deeply for the lives of children, an argument used for overturning Roe, yet the adoption industry continues to operate largely unregulated, actively separating children from their biological families without oversight, because we would rather see a family of privilege and means spend north of $50,000 to have a child than enable a biological mother or father to parent their child.
And we know from research, including Gretchen Sisson's work, that the difference between a mother feeling she can parent and feeling she needs to place is less than 5 percent of what an adoptive family spends to adopt a child. Sisson found that when she asked birthmothers what amount of money would have let them keep parenting, the answer she heard again and again was about $1,000 (Boyd, 2024), against the $50,000 to $70,000 that private domestic adoptions typically cost adoptive families (Klaczynski, 2023). Or, to look at it another way: for the amount spent on one adoption, more than 20 mothers could have kept their children.
And where does all of that money go? Honestly, that baffles me (though some of it is definitely used to target vulnerable expectant parents). What I do know is that when birthmothers come to us at Shared Journeys Collective, most arrive never having received an ounce of support from the agency that facilitated their adoption. They are offered limited, if any, counseling. They are not assessed for perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMAD), while adoptive mothers are. They are not presented with options. And yes, we have had birthmothers come to us whose agencies called child protective services on them: not to help them out of a domestic violence situation, but to actively push for another child's removal from that mother's home, even when the agency knew that domestic violence was why she was choosing to place, and even when it had the capacity to help her.
And we have had birthparents who, when facing housing and food insecurity, still choose to absorb the cost of a visit to their child over paying rent or putting food on their table. Wouldn't you think the adoption agency and adoptive families would help cover the cost of a visit? Shouldn’t they? But Post Adoption Contact Agreements, also known as PACAs, are a whole other conversation (sold to expectant parents as a tool giving them control, largely unenforceable/unenforced).
Adoption agencies do not advocate for birthmothers by being honest about the realities of adoption trauma, not with them and not with adoptive families, doing a disservice to everyone in the adoption constellation. And then, just to rub salt in the wound, the adoption industry, society at large, and entertainment media demonize birthmothers as young, unwed, uneducated, poor, addicted, people who don't want and don't deserve their children, who certainly don't love them. Adoptive parents, meanwhile, are cast as saints for wanting these poor, unwanted, unloved souls.
Why is this still the dominant narrative? Why is it so hard for the adoption industry to acknowledge that adoption equals trauma, that we need to do this differently, better, more ethically? That maybe adoption will always need to exist, because there will always be someone who isn't in a place to parent no matter the support provided, and we need to focus on helping everyone else parent rather than capitalizing on what is often a very temporary struggle?
Maybe we need to shift the narrative: becoming a parent is not a right reserved for the privileged few who can write the big checks and have the perfect Instagram feed. Being able to write a check, or pay a photographer, or put together a beautiful profile book doesn't make you a good parent, any more than not being able to do those things makes you a bad one. It is not up to us to decide who gets to be a parent, who we deem worthy. And we certainly do not get to demonize a woman who finds herself in a crisis pregnancy.
And yet, here we are. In 2026. The federal government is drafting a rule that would extend financial support to married women who stay home with their children, using money currently drawn from the Child Care and Development Fund. Roughly 80 percent of the families who currently rely on that fund are headed by single working parents, most of them mothers, and under the proposal, they would not qualify for the new benefit (Rogers & Weiland, 2026; Levitz, 2026). Single moms need not apply.
- It is true that outcomes are better for a child raised in a loving two-parent household. More love is never a bad thing, right? (Unless, of course, you're asking adoptive families who cut their child's birth family out of their lives.)
- It is true that outcomes are generally better for a child raised with their biological family (excluding instances where the home environment is truly unsafe). A national analysis of nearly 19,000 kindergartners found that adopted children, despite growing up in homes with more educated and better-resourced parents on average, scored below children raised by both biological parents on reading, math, classroom behavior, and engagement with learning, even after adjusting for family income and parent education (Zill, 2015).
- And it is true that a mother working outside the home is not the liability the HHS proposal assumes it to be. A Harvard Business School study of roughly 50,000 adults across 25 countries found that daughters of working mothers went on to earn as much as 23 percent more than daughters of stay-at-home mothers, and sons of working mothers spent more hours each week on caregiving and household work than sons raised by stay-at-home mothers, with no difference in happiness between the two groups (McGinn et al., 2018).
Adoptive parents are wonderful people, independent of adoption, just like biological parents. And just like biological parents, they are not special, and their lives are not perfect, even if that is what the adoption agency is selling to the expectant parent. Adoptive parents get sick, they get divorced, they can be guilty of child abuse and neglect, they may have failed to deal with the very real issues that brought them to adoption, they may emotionally harm their children as a result. While adoptive parents' lives may be more stable, it is often because they are also older. And that has its own cost — adopted people may spend more time, earlier in life, caring for an aging parent, and may lose that parent much sooner than their non-adopted counterparts. Adoptive parents' lives are not magically better than the lives of biological parents.
Let's not forget: children who are adopted are significantly more likely to experience mental health and behavioral issues. Full stop. They are significantly more likely to attempt suicide, experience substance use and abuse, and end up in the criminal justice system (Keyes et al., 2013; Odenstad et al., 2008). Yet we continue to look the other way. We know. So, why are we actively choosing to ignore the evidence that is right in front of our faces, (sometimes, quite literally) screaming at us? If we claim to want what is best for our children … Why is adoption still a thing?
Which is why we exist. And believe me when I say there is not one person in this organization who doesn't wish we didn't have to. Because while we cannot undo decades of trauma going back to enslavement, the orphan trains, and the separation of Native American children from their families, we can support birthmothers by providing access to the care and support they need. And yes, we can do this while also working to educate adoption professionals, adoptive parents, and prospective adoptive parents on the realities of adoption and how we can – must – do better.
This is why we continue to Gather. The Birthparent Support Alliance is continually working to meet birthmothers where they are. What started as a little bit of assistance in the form of a bus pass or book for a class has become trauma-informed case management, therapeutic support groups, peer support and mentoring, retreats, arts grants, multi-language birthparent journals, and adoption education. And because we have seen the profound need for addressing PMAD, we are adding that capability, too.
We are doing this work while much of the world still chooses to ignore us. Because to really see us would force a reckoning, and it's hard to admit when the work you do, or your desire to be a parent, to have a baby, to be a mom or a dad, has caused enormous, lifelong trauma to another human being – one who you love, no less.
Adoption professionals aren't bad people. Most set out to do what they believe is a good thing; this is still largely how adoption is taught, if it's covered at all, in social work programs. Adoptive parents have been told they are providing a loving home to a child who lacks one, except that most adopted people were very much loved by their biological families.
I am not a birthmother. I am not an adoptive mother. I am not an adopted person. I am just a person in this world who was given a chance to sit in this space and work with and alongside those who are most impacted and most invisible within adoption, people who have been dealt a profound injustice, people the world has turned its back on. I know that I will never fully understand the lived experience of being a birthparent or an adopted person or an adoptive parent. I know that I cannot fix adoption. I cannot undo decades of trauma and family separation.
After more than a decade doing this work, I still cry when a new birthmother comes to us regretting her decision, when all I can do is sit and listen, and I can’t do anything to fix it or make it better. It's why we started Activism in Adoption – so that we could educate the adoption constellation from the perspectives of those most impacted by adoption.
Thanks for sticking with me so far. Before I let you go, I want to take a moment to address something: we are often asked why we don't support expectant parents. It's a good question, and a hard one.
- We can't be all things to all people; we don't have the resources. And even if we did, we wouldn’t be able to stop every adoption from happening, so our work with birthparents would still be necessary.
- Birthparents, whether they placed five weeks ago or fifty years ago, deserve support. They deserve someone on their side who can help them navigate their grief, no matter whether they feel adoption was the right choice or not, without judgment or agenda.
- There are organizations doing that work for expectant parents, and they are incredible; we refer expectant parents to them, and as individuals, we even donate to those organizations because we truly value their work.
- We do help birthparents figure out how to parent if they find themselves expecting again, and we help birthparents keep the children they are already parenting. We will NEVER refer any expectant parent to an adoption agency.
Until there are no more birthparents, the Birthparent Support Alliance will be necessary. We hope our work moves agencies to change their practices, moves prospective adoptive parents to reflect honestly on their motivations before adopting, and lets birthparents finally feel seen, heard, and supported. We cannot eliminate the trauma in adoption. But we can help birthmothers process their trauma and grief. And when birthparents can show up in healthy ways for themselves and for their child, outcomes improve for everyone: the birthparent, the adoptive family, the adopted person.
That is why we Gather. It's why I'm asking you to Gather MOMentum with us with a gift today, because momentum is exactly what this work still needs, and we cannot do it without you.
References
Boyd, E. B. (2024, March 24). This SF sociologist is changing conversations around motherhood. San Francisco Examiner.
Keyes, M. A., Malone, S. M., Sharma, A., Iacono, W. G., & McGue, M. (2013). Risk of suicide attempt in adopted and nonadopted offspring. Pediatrics, 132(4), 639–646.
Klaczynski, P. (2023). My adoption, my abortion: Getting clear about what counts as a reproductive choice. Project MUSE.
Levitz, E. (2026, September). The Trump proposal to pay moms for childcare may sound like a good thing. But there's a truly disturbing catch. Slate.
McGinn, K. L., Ruiz Castro, M., & Long Lingo, E. (2018). Learning from mum: Cross-national evidence linking maternal employment and adult children's outcomes. Work, Employment and Society, 33(3).
Odenstad, A., Hjern, A., Lindblad, F., Rasmussen, F., Vinnerljung, B., & Dalen, M. (2008). Does age at adoption and geographic origin matter? A national cohort study of cognitive test performance in adult intercountry adoptees. Psychological Medicine, 38(12), 1803–1814.
Rogers, K., & Weiland, N. (2026, September). Trump administration drafts proposal to pay some parents to stay home with children. The New York Times (as reported by Newser, NewsNation, Koreadaily).
Zill, N. (2015, October 7). The paradox of adoption. Institute for Family Studies.
The Birthparent Support Alliance gratefully acknowledges the adoption agencies and organizations that help make access to lifelong support and care for birthparents possible, including Adoption & Beyond, Adoption Center of Illinois, Adoption Circle, Angel Adoptions, and Lifelong Adoptions.
