The Dark Side of Adoption Politics in the US

Aug 18, 2025 5:40 AM

A photo illustration of several different babies with each of their faces covered with a single red dot

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Adoption, the broad cultural consensus holds, is a beautiful win-win-win. People who desperately want to have children become parents. A baby gets a loving home. A woman gives a family its greatest gift—and then, of course, recedes appropriately into the background.

But as efforts to increase adoption on pregnant women expand thanks to the proliferation of anti-abortion laws, those of us who care about women and children need to look at the reality of adoption and take a stronger stance for women's and children's rights. Adoption can be a beautiful thing. But it is always a complex thing. Adoption essentially always begins with a tragedy: a mother who cannot parent her child, or isn't being permitted to parent her child, or doesn't have the support to parent her child, or who is dead. And we should try to avoid the kinds of tragedies that lead to adoptions in the first place.

Adoption, in other words, should be safe, legally regulated, and rare.

But that is not what the religious right is aiming for in a post -Roe America. With Roe v. Wade overturned and abortion criminalized across the South and much of the middle of the US, adoption is becoming a big talking point for conservatives—and in their view, it should be encouraged, unchecked, and frequent. High on their many victories criminalizing abortion, they're now trying to impose their adoption ideology on the nation, to the detriment of women and their babies.

A new podcast from Wondery, Liberty Lost , is a must-listen if you want to understand why the rosy depiction of adoption from the religious right is so dangerous for women and children alike. Hosted by journalist TJ Raphael, it tells the story of Liberty Godparent Home, a maternity home at the evangelical Liberty University—a home that is still open and operational today—that several women say mistreated them, confined them, lied to them, and manipulated them into placing their newborns for adoption when they were teenagers. (Liberty Godparent Home has said it rejects “claims of this tabloid podcast as irresponsible journalism to undermine this important work and to minimize the importance and effectiveness of pro-life organizations.”)

Some girls who went through the home weren't teenagers at all but pregnant preteens—children whose pregnancies were by dint of their age extremely physically and psychologically risky. According to their accounts, many of the teens and tweens at Liberty Godparent Home were raised in evangelical households and were spirited off to the home as a kind of spiritual corrective or face-saving mechanism by parents who seemed to care more about their own reputations than their daughters' well-being. Others were from vulnerable backgrounds—for a period, the home worked with the child protective services system to take in pregnant foster girls—without parents capable of or interested in advocating for them at all. And the home was not meant to simply help girls in crisis make free choices about how to proceed. It was explicitly anti-abortion and pro-adoption. Its “ partner ministry ” is an adoption agency. And that agency is clear about the kinds of people they think make for fit parents, because there's only one kind of parent they'll place children with: Married, churchgoing Christians. The kinds of women having babies after stints at the maternity home? They don't qualify as good enough.

Maternity homes like the one at Liberty are part of the anti-abortion crusade to make America a “pro-life” nation. Since the end of Roe, the number of these homes has grown significantly , with at least 450 of them opening as of last year. And the Liberty Lost story should make us fundamentally reconsider why adoption has received so little scrutiny for so long—and demand better for women as the conservative right tries to force more and more of us into childbearing, if not into motherhood.

Like most Americans , I long held an ambiently positive view of adoption. Unintended pregnancies happen. Many people morally oppose abortion, or simply don't believe it's right for them. Women, being people, are a pretty varied bunch—and just like men, some are really not suited to parenthood. The uncomfortable truth is that parents are more often child abusers than other people in a child's life, and mothers are more likely than fathers to carry out abuse (although, a caveat is necessary here: Mothers also spend much more time with children than fathers and are more likely to be raising children alone). There are hundreds of thousands of children in foster care, and even though that system is notorious for overreach, many of those kids really were abused, neglected, and abandoned by the people who should have loved and cared for them.

It really is harder for someone who is a child themselves to mother a baby—and we know that preteens get pregnant, given that anti-abortion forces have tried to refuse abortions to shockingly young pregnant girls (not just tweens—which is bad enough—but 10-year-olds and 9-year-olds ). Women with serious addiction or mental health issues may not be capable of safely parenting. I know several people who have adopted children, and certainly could imagine myself adopting a child if the circumstances warranted it. And you, like me, may have seen the Adoption Plot on television, where an attractive, healthy twentysomething woman is pregnant and simply wants to gift her child to a wonderful couple who could give him a better life. What could be wrong with any of this—with a woman making the free choice to place her child, and with women who aren't capable of being good mothers giving their children a chance to be cared for by someone with greater capacity?

The first crack in my thinking came when I read Kathryn Joyce's book The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption . To the extent I had really thought about international adoption, it struck me as a good thing: Who would ever oppose needy orphans from poor countries finding good homes? One argument Joyce makes in her book, though, is that there just aren't all that many true orphans in the world, even with war and disease. Most “orphans” listed in pro-adoption propaganda have one living parent. Even those who don't are rarely without care. Think about most children you know: If one or both of their parents died, would they go straight to an orphanage? Or would there be a wide network of family members and friends who would step forward, and someone would take them in? Communities from Guatemala to Ethiopia aren't all that different. But Christian adoption agencies faced rising demand for transnational adoptees from Christian families who were hearing from their churches that adoption was part of a Christian obligation to rescue the world's orphans and raise them as Christians (a “rescue” that, Joyce finds, may not be a rescue at all, but rather an act that confers significant status on the white parents of “rainbow families” who adopt kids from the developing world). That evangelical hunger for adoption fueled baby-selling, baby-stealing, and created, Joyce wrote, “a boom-and-bust market for children that leaps from country to country.”

The Liberty Lost podcast has been just as illuminating for domestic adoption. As many states impose greater restrictions on abortion, powerful conservative Christian groups have moved the other way on adoption, pushing for fewer protections, especially for birth mothers, and less government oversight. Many conservative Christian groups have advocated hard to allow adoption agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ parents, single parents, and non-Christians, or to only adopt children out to people who are married or who hold a particular religious faith . Pro-adoption groups label as “ adoption-friendly ” the states that offer the fewest protections to birth parents—those that don't require the consent of the father, for example, if he and the mother were never married, or that give birth mothers shockingly short windows to reconsider their decision to place a child for adoption. In Alabama , a birth mother has just five days to change her mind. In Utah , her consent is irrevocable the second she signs the paper, and adoptions cannot be undone even in cases of fraud. As a result, some adoption agencies encourage pregnant women considering adoption to give birth in these “adoption-friendly” states—which are, in fact, states in which birth mothers have far fewer rights than they might have at home—by offering them housing, health care, and cash if they travel. Some, an investigation by Julia Lurie in Mother Jones found , even advertise that pregnant women can get paid for adoption (paying women for their babies is illegal, but “adoption-friendly” states often allow agencies to pay “reasonable” expenses, a term that seems intentionally vaguely defined).

If adoption really is a win-win—if it is a practice that's overwhelmingly entered into with the full and free consent of birth mothers—then why does the adoption industry so regularly push to shorten the window within which a birth mother can change her mind? Why do they make it so hard for women to get their children back? Why, even in supposedly “open” adoptions, do birth mothers have virtually no rights to remain in contact with their children if the adoptive parents change their minds? Why oppose oversight, regulation, and enforcement?

The answer, of course, is that many adoption agencies and “pro-life” pregnancy homes use high-pressure tactics , shame , manipulation , and coercion to transfer babies from mothers they believe are unfit to the kinds of two-parent Christian households they deem optimal. If women are given more resources to parent, more of them will; if women are given more time to change their minds, more of them might. And that's not actually the outcome that many religious adoption proponents want.

If you think you've heard the story of exploitative maternity homes before, that's because these homes have a rich history in America (and in many other parts of the world). In the Baby Scoop Era of the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s, religious norms heavily stigmatized single parenthood, and religious organizations ran maternity homes that pregnant but unwed women and girls were shunted to. Scores of women born in secret and largely surrendered their children for adoption. Some 1.5 million babies were removed from their birth mothers and adopted into other families during this period. And while some birth mothers made the affirmative choice to place their children, many others say they were pressured, coerced, or even forced; that the maternity homes, adoption agencies, and those groups' lawyers and advocates wore them down and simply outgunned them; and that an unforgiving and moralistic society made them doubt their own goodness and their ability to mother.

I've been writing about the anti-abortion movement for the better part of 20 years, and one thing that's often the hardest for those not in the weeds to fully understand is that abortion is only one part of the anti-abortion movement's ideology. Of course they oppose abortion. But they see abortion as one part of a broader cultural dysfunction that deprioritizes not just fetal life, but the whole traditional religious patriarchal structure that they believe is the best model for society. In that model, women have lots of babies and are primarily tasked with caring for them. Ideally, those women should be married to men who work for pay. And if they aren't, then their babies can find better homes with married Christian couples. This was the model during the pre- Roe Baby Scoop Era. And it is the America that many anti-abortion organizations want to remake.

Abortion bans are one piece of the puzzle. And the desire for more adoptions helps to explain a long-flummoxing reality of “pro-life” politics, which is the movement's general hostility to contraception. Given that contraception is the surest way to prevent unintended pregnancies and by extension abortions in a nation in which the vast majority of adults have sex before marriage (and many married women have abortions), one would think that contraceptive access would be a point of broad agreement between the abortion rights movement and the anti-abortion movement. But it's not. Because the goal is not actually fewer pregnancies women don't want. It's fewer abortions as a response to those pregnancies.

These views aren't held by every anti-abortion vote in the US; most abortion opponents, like most Americans , support contraception access and use contraception themselves. But it is the animating ideology behind most anti-abortion organizations and leaders. It's why almost no major American pro-life organizations support broad contraception access. And it's why adoption comes up again and again: Because, as the Liberty Lost podcast also argues, it's not about saving babies or helping women; it's about restoring the patriarchal family, and enforcing a sharp distinction between good mothers who should raise children and bad ones who should not.

The women who spoke with Raphael about their time at the Liberty Godparent Home described being promised loving support, and then being locked inside and told to submit to God's will; they say they were shamed, isolated, and “counseled” about all the ways in which they would not be able to provide for a child. And the Godparent Home certainly wasn't offering housing, health care, or the kind of significant support a young single mother might need after they had their babies. Abortion rights advocates often argue that the “pro-life” movement is less about affirming life and more about patriarchal control over women; from Raphael's reporting, the Godparent Home seems to embody that control.

What really got me to conclude that American adoption needs a major overhaul was listening to the stories of the birth mothers and biological fathers , including those Raphael interviews for Liberty Lost . Yes, there are women who feel good about the decision to place their children for adoption. The thing about adoption, though, is that the vast majority of women don't choose it when they have other options; according to the conservative Institute for Family Studies, women choose abortion over adoption by a rate of 50 to 1 . Conservative groups have some interesting theories on this, most of which amount to “women just don't understand”—they think women simply don't know adoption is an option, or misunderstand what adoption is, or don't really consider it. But given the fact that most women who have abortions are already mothers , I think the problem is that most pregnant women do understand exactly how difficult adoption is—and conclude it is much more difficult than abortion.

Carrying a pregnancy to term is physically hard work. Delivering a child is among the most difficult things human beings do. And there is a raw, primal bond developed over centuries of human evolution that ties mothers to our offspring—and these ties tend to grow stronger as pregnancy progresses, and stronger still after birth. This is one reason why, as shattering as miscarriage can be, few would say that a miscarriage at six weeks is as life-altering as having a child die at 6 years old, or 6 days old. Some of the women in the Liberty Lost podcast describe an emotion I imagine other parents will feel deep in their guts: A vibration, through every bone in their body, that they needed their child with them, and a howling, animal devastation when that child was taken away.

The bulk of the research on birth mothers is clear that relinquishing a child “is often fraught with intense feelings of grievance, loss, shame, guilt, remorse, and isolation,” “is a profound experience that can have life-long emotional and interpersonal effects,” and leaves behind “a theme of chronic grievance that negatively impacted birth mothers' health, mental health, and relationships,” according to one study out of Baylor University—a Christian institution and not exactly a bastion of adoption-critical feminism. That same study found that grievance and distress after adoption often increases with time—as birth mothers get older, their sadness about the adoption grows more significant. This is not true for abortion , which women overwhelmingly do not regret. Individual experiences of course vary, but women generally do not seem to carry nearly as much pain and sadness from abortion as they do from adoption. Women who feel the best about their adoption choice seem to be those who were not coerced in any way, and who maintain contact with their child.

Neither of these factors have been priorities of the “pro-life” adoption movement. Outlawing abortion, after all, is itself coercive—a woman who cannot choose to terminate a pregnancy has already seen her choices constrained. And the anti-abortion movement is pressing forward with this part of its post- Roe agenda. Some anti-abortion groups are hoping a new adoption market may have just opened up thanks to their efforts to criminalize abortion. Texas , for example, just threw $200 million at anti-abortion pregnancy centers, adoption agencies, and maternity homes. Project 2025 includes plans for the government to prioritize adoption of an abortion alternative.

While anti-abortion groups are pushing pregnant women to place their babies for adoption, what many of the country's most “pro-life” states aren't doing is strengthening the systems that would make it easier for women in crisis to raise their own children. Notably, abortion opponents make this argument about abortion, too: that more women would choose to give birth if only they had more options. And abortion rights supporters generally agree, and say: OK, then let's get universal health care, let's get universal child care, let's offer paid leave to all new parents, let's get homeless mothers into safe housing, let's get pregnant women struggling with addiction treatment rather than punishment, let's decrease the stigma around single motherhood. Yes, please, let's make it more possible for women to choose among the widest possible range of choices! (It's the abortion rights movement, too, that seeks to decrease the abortion rate by making contraceptives widely available.) And over and over again, the “pro-life” party votes down the very things that would make it easier for women to choose to parent, and simply criminalizes abortion.

For birth mothers, adoption is at best emotionally complex, and more often a wrenching decision that doesn't feel like much of a choice at all. That so many in the anti-abortion movement see this same reality and say “Let's do more of this” is cruel beyond belief. That conservative and anti-abortion groups are the ones typically pushing against greater regulation of adoption and for things like shortening the amount of time a birth mother has to change her mind about severing her parental rights? That gives away the whole game.

With abortion still more accessible than in the pre- Roe days thanks to blue states and abortion pills, and with the stigma of unwed motherhood vastly diminished, abortion opponents have a tough road to restoring reproductive norms to what feminists would call “the bad old days.”

But they're trying, with the full force of a right-wing government behind them.