Lab Note #17

Reflection

I’m writing from a beautiful rental home in Washington state with three adoptee friends. We’ve been meeting yearly for a writing retreat. Over past years, books have been written, research studies have been launched, articles have been submitted. The weekend combines two of my passions: being in community with other adoptees and working on adoption-related projects.

This year, in addition to writing this Lab Note, I am launching a new project focused on adoptee mentoring at this retreat. I received a Faculty Fellows in Community Engagement award from UW Tacoma’s Office of Community Partnership and am thrilled to partner with Adoptee Mentoring Society and AIREroots. For more information about the project, Supporting Adoptees through Mentorship and Mutual Aid, you can check out our description here.

I became a social worker in part because I was volunteering as a mentor. I began mentoring in a program focused on supporting young moms who were at risk of child welfare involvement. As a mentor in this program, I spent three years with a teen mom supporting her and her child up through her high school graduation. It was an intense program but one I was drawn to because it was so focused on family preservation and support. After that program I was asked by the agency to be a mentor in their international adoptee program and I mentored two Asian adoptees during my time in that program as well as a brief match with another teen mom.

Because of these experiences, I decided to explore social work as a profession.

Adoptees are drawn to mentoring programs in part because they want to be the mentor they themselves needed. But, depending on where they are in their lives, mentoring can be emotionally fraught. Sometimes adoptee mentors don’t realize they haven’t explored aspects of their own adoption consciousness until it comes up in the mentoring space. So mentors need support themselves if they’re going to support others. Through this project, we hope to identify key aspects of mentoring that adoptees find most helpful. Stay tuned for more on this project – we will be hosting virtual community presentations at the end of this year and into 2025.

Recommendations

On this retreat I’ve read two things I’m highly recommending. The first is Gretchen Sisson‘s powerful book, Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood. One of the important features of Sisson’s work is the longitudinal follow-up with the 17 of the 100 women (and one nonbinary) parents who relinquished a child for adoption after 2000. I can’t emphasize enough how unique it is to have data from the same people, 10 years apart. It’s important because much of the rhetoric and practices around adoption rely on narratives of recently relinquishing parents. Sisson’s work gives insight to these parents’ views about adoption as it plays out – the ways in which the first/birth parent’s lives have changed (or not), the evolution of their relationships with their child’s adoptive parents, the relationships with their child. Regina Kunzel’s book, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945 examines the early history of maternity homes and the role of social work in defining the “problems” unwed motherhood and adoption; Anne Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade picks up and tells the story of women in the “sixties scoop” who were sent to maternity homes before relinquishing children for adoption. Sisson asks if the post-Roe v. Wade landscape is different in terms of how women with unplanned pregnancies are steered toward adoption. I highly encourage you to read it (and would recommend you then go back and check out Kunzel’s work and Fessler’s book and movie if you have not already).

The second thing I read over the past couple of days was this disturbing Pro Publica article about a child welfare expert who used a self-created assessment tool that has come under scrutiny because it is biased and has been used in court cases to favor foster and adoptive parents over first/birth families.

As someone who has testified in a court case on behalf of a birth/first family, I was very interested in this article. Expert witnesses are often used in contested adoption cases and when child welfare agencies want to terminate parental rights. Often they are used as in this article, to support “psychological attachment” and favor foster and adoptive parents over birth/first parents. Here is one particularly disturbing section:

In interviews and emails with ProPublica, Baird said that she is simply opposed, in almost all cases, to rupturing the current healthy attachment of any child under 3 with that child’s foster parents, even if a birth family member is available and family and cultural heritage stand to be lost forever. She said that this is the age when kids are developing their capacity to form healthy relationships, and that they may experience being removed from their foster parents as a rejection, causing a loss of trust going forward. She also said that kids who have a history of caregiver changes and trauma, which is true of many little ones in foster care, need a sense of “permanency,” often meaning adoption.

Notice how Baird doesn’t acknowledge the rupture the child experienced when removed from their first families. Baird also seems to think “permanency” doesn’t include reunification or placement with extended family.

Finally, I want to point you to this interesting webpage on the USA Facts website.

Where do International Adoptees Come From?

Founded by Steve Ballmer, this site uses data from governmental agencies on many different topics and puts them in a format that’s easier to understand. The data for this webpage was mostly sourced from the U.S. State Department.

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I thought I’d highlight some upcoming conferences that involve adoptees! I’ll be attending KAAN, BIPOC Adoptees Conference, and International Conference on Adoption Research. Some of these, like KAAN, BIPOC Adoptees, and Untangling Our Roots center adoptee experiences. Others are academic conferences that feature adoptee scholars.

April 4-6, 2024. Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture conference, Brown University

The conference theme is Belonging.

Belonging—to whom, where, why, how, in what sense—underpins every conversation we in adoption studies have about our field. Dysregulated belonging has been framed as the source of trauma, from genealogical bewilderment to origins deprivation to a-doption disease to reactive attachment disorder for adoptees; for adoptive parents, belonging (to the category parent, as well as to other categories like nation and human) is contingent and fraught; for birthparents, belonging intersects the familial and social, the cultural shiftiness of meaning over time and between forms of adoption particularly challenging to negotiate. Dysregulated belonging has been used as an identity source for some; for others, dysregulation has been widely rejected in assimilationist stories, stories of adoption salvation, or through the abjection of the unkin(ne)d into monsters/the unhuman.

Belonging also houses the word longing with its etymological relatives (OE langian: to pine, to grieve; the prefix be-, which indicates relation by ME – belongen: to be fitting, suitable). Our field frequently looks to ideas of longing, grieving, pining, suitability, fittingness in representations of adoption. Thus belonging has the capacity to incorporate the many perspectives of our current conversations, including those around the recent SCOTUS decisions, particularly around Indian Child Welfare Act; re-homing controversies (such as that delineated by the Reuters’ report in 2013); the abolition of foster care (as in the mission of the upEND movement); and so forth. 

April 13-14, 2024. Korean Adoption and Its Global Legacies: 70 Years and Beyond, Northwestern University

Bringing together scholars, activists, adopted individuals, first families, journalists and filmmakers, conference speakers will offer new perspectives that challenge and expand our understanding of adoption’s beginnings in the context of war and militarism, while exploring present-day consequences of South Korea’s industrialized adoption practices on adopted Koreans and their first families.

April 25-28, 2024. Untangling Our Roots Summit, Denver, CO.

Our second summit to unite the adoption, assisted reproduction, and NPE communities into one amplified voice; advance awareness and education; seek truth and healing; and foster connections and understanding.

June 21-23, 2024. KAAN Conference. Chicago, IL

This year’s theme is Representation and Visibility.

July 8-12. International Conference on Adoption Research – 8, Minneapolis, MN

Celebrating its 25th anniversary, the International Conference on Adoption Research (ICAR8) is a premier event for attendees from the Global South and Global North who are devoted to ensuring permanent, nurturing family care for every child. A cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas, innovation and information, the conference explores how to improve the entire spectrum of services for children without permanent families. 

*A note about this conference – typically it is not adoptee-focused. However, several adoptee scholars will be presenting and there is one day dedicated to the adult adoptee experience.

July 25-28, 2024. Voices: A BIPOC Adoptees Conference, Portland, OR

The Conference Theme is Movement Building through Connection, Hope, and Healing. VOICES is about: validating our diverse experiences, owning our own narratives, inspiring each other, challenging stereotypes, empowering ourselves, and shaping how we and others understand adoption.