In this symposium, we gather contributors that reflect not only an array of scholarly disciplines, but a range of lived experiences related to adoption, including adopted people, birth/first parents, and adoptive parents. Any consideration of adoption that strives for comprehensiveness requires not only historians, social scientists, and legal scholars, but practitioners, advocates, and storytellers. Contributors (who wrote their pieces before the leak of the Dobbs decision) are not just responding to Justice Coney Barrett’s comments on parental relinquishment in the Dobbs oral arguments, but considering the plagued history of forced pregnancy and coerced adoption, the inherent misunderstandings of safe haven laws, the role of the family policing system in public relinquishment and separation, the current practice of adoption in the United States, and the ways in which the Court’s understanding of adoption will impact not just reproductive rights, but issues as seemingly tangential as Indian tribal sovereignty, what an adoptee rights agenda might encompass, and what adoption looks like when considered from a reproductive justice perspective.
The symposium is guest edited by Gretchen Sisson.
Editor-in-Chief: Chloe Reichel