Hand holding glass ball with inverted image of surroundings reflected in ball.

Flipping the Script: Adoption and Reproductive Justice

By Kimberly McKee

Adoption is a reproductive justice issue. Pretending otherwise ignores how adoption is used as a red herring in anti-abortion arguments. A recent invocation of this faulty logic occurred in Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s questions during the November 2021 oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Coney Barrett’s statements implied that the option to relinquish infants vis-à-vis adoption rendered abortion availability unnecessary. This line of thinking is one with which I am familiar, as both a Korean international, transracial adoptee, and a critical adoption studies scholar. 

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Austin, TX, USA - Oct. 2, 2021: Two women participants at the Women's March rally at the Capitol protest SB 8, Texas' abortion law that effectively bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.

Organizing and Activism of Adopted and Displaced People

By Lina Vanegas

I am a transracial and transnational displaced person. I was separated from my country, language, and culture and taken to Michigan, which has no connection to me or my ancestors. I was taken there to create a family for strangers who had the privilege and resources to buy me. I had family in Colombia and I was far from being a true orphan. I was bought in Bogota, Colombia and sold to a white couple living in the Midwest in 1976. 

I use the word “displaced” intentionally, because the word “adopted” does not define my lived experience in an accurate way. The word “adopted” is language that was created by the child welfare-industrial complex, also known as the adoption industry. I do not subscribe to any of the constraints or barriers that they attempt to put onto my life with their language choices. Using the word “displaced” defines the intentional separation from my family by the child welfare-industrial complex. 

My lived experience has informed who I am and has inspired and motivated the work that I do online and in the world. It is very rare that adopted and displaced people’s lived experiences are seen, heard, validated, centered, and believed, so my mission is to do that online, on my podcast, Rescripting The Narrative, and in the work that I do as a social worker and with the organization Adoptees for Choice.

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woman with iv in her hand in hospital. Labor and delivery preparation. Intravenious therapy infusion. shallow depth of field. selective focus

A Birthmother Reflects: The Perpetuation of Adoption Myths

By Angie Swanson-Kyriaco

During opening remarks for Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on December 1, 2021, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated that the “obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy” and the “burden” of parenting are eliminated through adoption.

It is no surprise that a conservative, anti-abortion, adoptive parent would have an over-simplified opinion about adoption, expectant parents, and birth parents. In her remarks, Justice Coney Barrett demonstrated a common lack of understanding about the complexities of adoption, and a blithe unawareness about adoption ethics and the need for adoption reform.

As someone who worked for over a decade in the field of reproductive health and rights, and now as the executive director of one of the only nonprofit organizations in the country that exclusively serves first/birth mothers who have relinquished infants for adoption, I know both how detrimental the lack of access to abortion can be, and how significant the lifelong impact of an adoption can prove.

And, as a first/birthmother, I have a deep personal understanding of the significant trauma of placing my own child for adoption, and the lifelong grief and ambiguous loss that follows relinquishment. 

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Lexington, Kentucky / United States - 06 28 2020: Fire Station 22 in Lexington, Kentucky in the early morning idle hours.

Safe Haven Laws and Anti-Abortion Politics

By Laury Oaks

During the Supreme Court oral arguments for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, Justice Amy Coney Barrett acknowledged that previous cases addressing abortion rights relied on a consideration of the burden of parenting and forced motherhood. For Justice Coney Barrett, this consideration was a non sequitur: “Why don’t safe haven laws take care of that problem?”

The so-called “safe haven” laws to which Justice Coney Barrett was referring were passed in every state from 1999 to 2009, to designate places where or people to whom an unharmed baby may be legally and anonymously relinquished and then adopted. A Florida safe haven advocacy group argues, “Safe Haven babies are given a chance for a future. A Safe Haven baby might become the President of the United States, a Supreme Court Justice, a scientist finding a cure for cancer or most important, a great mom or dad to their children.”

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Abortion rights protest following the Supreme Court decision for Whole Women's Health in 2016

The Danger of Forced Pregnancy

By Laura Briggs

When Amy Coney Barrett suggested that adoption and safe-haven laws were an adequate substitute for abortion care for people who did not want to be pregnant, she was essentially insisting that they do a kind of high-risk, uncompensated labor to produce a baby or child for adoptive families like hers. 

Like the anti-abortion movement that supported her nomination for the Supreme Court, Coney Barrett is not shy about acknowledging that she is in favor of forced pregnancy, and that this labor — in both senses of the term — could benefit other people who were childless or had fewer children than they wanted. 

We know this work has value; people who hire women in the United States to carry a surrogate pregnancy pay them $30,000 to $50,000. Denying abortion to women who want them, and then expecting them to relinquish the resulting baby for adoption, is asking them to do that same labor for free.

As Black feminist legal scholar Pamela Bridgewater has pointed out, there is a word for forcing people to do unpaid reproductive labor on behalf of others: enslavement. In fact, as she argues, forced pregnancy was key to the historic labor system of slavery in the United States — the children of enslaved mothers were themselves enslaved, and once the importation of African people for purposes of enslavement was banned in the United States in 1808, it was how slavers kept the system going and increased their own wealth, including by raping enslaved women. Slavery was outlawed in the United States with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, but Coney Barrett apparently means to reinstitute a version of it. 

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Woman holding sign that reads "I can't breathe."

Anti-Bias Training is Needed to Counter the Public Health Threat of Systemic Racism

By Megan J. Shen

With the recent confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, many public health issues are seemingly on the line, including the Affordable Care Act, women’s reproductive rights, and access to in vitro fertilization. But Coney Barrett’s lack of awareness of the rampant, systemic racism in the U.S. – an oversight that generally was left out of the flurry of media coverage around her confirmation – is symptomatic of an even more pervasive and dangerous public health threat.

Senator Cory Booker’s questioning of Judge Amy Coney Barrett during her Supreme Court Confirmation hearings revealed her apparent lack of awareness of systemic racism. Booker brought up Coney Barrett’s ruling on a workplace discrimination case.

“This employee claimed that he had been subjected to hostile work environment, and that the supervisor called him the N-word,” Booker said, “But you ruled that the employee had failed to make the case that he had been fired in retaliation for his complaints about race discrimination.”

This instance is one of the clearest demonstrations of the systemic racism prevalent in the U.S. due, in large part, to a lack of anti-racist training and education.

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