The prominent UCSF sociologist is changing the national conversation around adoption and motherhood
When the U.S. Supreme Court was hearing oral arguments in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, Gretchen Sisson said, she realized that the book she’d been working on for a narrow academic readership would now have to speak to a broader national audience.
“Her research is super important,” said Diana Greene Foster, a UCSF professor whose Turnaway Study on the lifelong experiences of women who gave birth after being denied abortions was cited in the Dobbs oral arguments. Stories of adoption tend to focus on rescue and family-building. But what’s little discussed, Sisson’s research found, is that it’s also a story of family separation.
Only 9% later relinquished their infants for adoption. In that light, Sisson argues, policymakers should spend less time prioritizing expanded access to adoption and more on programs that enable existing families to stay together, such as living wages, access to housing and affordable child care. In 2009, Sisson was working with poor teen mothers at the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy just as MTV’s popular reality TV show “16 and Pregnant” was taking off.
Buzzy Noe Valley restaurant to close 2 years after opening Chef of Birch & Rye, the only Russian restaurant featured in the Michelin Guide, citing"unsustainable" production costs Sisson shot back in the Washington Post op-ed, saying, “What Alito overlooks ... is that most women who relinquish infants want that suitable home to be their own.”
With out-of-wedlock childbearing still stigmatized and legal abortion not yet an option, white girls and women were pressured to hide their pregnancies and relinquish their infants upon birth. “We’re not going to make progress on these conversations until we have policymakers who have had abortions, who have had to make hard decisions, who have had to figure out how to feed their family and who have had to negotiate the social safety net,” Sisson said.
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