Abortion and adoption are twinned in the minds of many Americans who have endured the never-ending heated debates over abortion. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, sociologist Dr. Gretchen Sisson releases the results of her decade-long study of adoption, revealing what she says is the grief of American mothers for whom the choice to parent was never real.

Adoption has long been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as mutually agreed common ground in the abortion debate. But little attention has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish infants for private adoption. For her book Relinquished, Sisson draws upon hundreds of interviews with mothers who placed their children for domestic adoption. She finds their voices to be powerful and heartrending, deserving to be heard.

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