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Who Gets to Be a Mother?
Why you can trust usApr 23, 2024 
“Many of the women in the book were preyed upon by for-profit adoption agencies or anti-abortion clinics and, in their words, coerced into giving up their children. Some would have chosen to parent if they felt they could.”
Illustration by Adobe Stock
Making motherhood accessible for all requires moving away from punitive models—including foster care—that criminalize poverty.
The “birth mother” has become a somewhat mythical creature in the United States. Some of the earliest birth mothers were enslaved Black women whose children were forcibly taken and sold to other plantations. At the same time, Native American mothers also became birth mothers as their children were involuntarily rounded up and sent to boarding schools to be assimilated into white American culture.
In the decades since, the birth mother has become a paradox. According to mainstream media depictions, she is both brave and lazy, selfless and selfish, loving and careless, a heroine and a villain. She is a drug-addicted, abusive lay-about who makes the ultimate sacrifice–relinquishing her child to give them a better life.
And when her children are adopted into their “forever home,” she disappears.
The term “birth mother*” is often used to refer to a woman whose biological child is adopted by another person, either voluntarily or forcibly. Often left out of happy adoption stories, villainized, or shamed into silence, these mothers are rarely given a platform. Now, three authors are aiming to change that.
The idea of the birth mother is the beating heart that connects three recent books: We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Roxanna Asgarian, which explores the murder of six Black children by their adoptive white parents; Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood by Gretchen Sisson, which spotlights mothers who relinquish their children through the private adoption industry; and Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services—Notes of a Former Case Worker by Jessica Pryce, which takes on the foster care system.
While the books examine foster care, adoption, and motherhood from different angles, they all surface and center the voices of the mothers who have (voluntarily or forcibly) relinquished their children. Their stories are at turns compelling, heartbreaking, rage-inducing, and sometimes—but rarely—hopeful. Together, they create a choral voice of pain and loss that cries out for a world in which their children could have remained theirs, and illuminate a path toward that world.
Mothers Who Are Missing, Martyrs, and Murderers
We Were Once a Family goes behind the headlines of a 2018 story that captured the country’s attention: Jennifer and Sarah Hart, a white married couple, drove their six Black adoptive children off a cliff along the Pacific Coast Highway in what was ruled a murder-suicide. While news coverage of this tragedy often centered on what drove the Hart mothers to commit such a violent act, little was reported about the children other than the abuse they endured. Even less attention was paid to their birth families.
In fact, as Asgarian uncovers with dismay, neither Sherry Davis, birth mother of three of the children, Devonte, Jeremiah and Ciera, nor Tammy Scheurich, birth mother of the other three children, Markis, Hannah and Abigail, were informed by authorities of their deaths. Because their parental rights were terminated, there was no law that required this humane act.
“If [Shonda, my lawyer] hadn’t found out, I don’t even think they would have told me,” Davis told Asgarian.
Asgarian tells the story of these birth mothers and their family members who fought to keep the children with precision and care, interweaving their narratives with details and data about the Texas foster care system that ultimately tore these families apart. Asgarian does not ignore the Harts in this story, but her focus is more on why the Harts escaped CPS scrutiny despite multiple reports of abuse, while Davis and Scheurich did not.
In sharp contrast to the abuse the white, middle-class Harts were able to get away with for so long, Davis—who is Black and poor—and Scheurich—who is white, poor, and struggling with mental illness—did not receive the same benefit of the doubt. Importantly, both women did not lose their children due to charges of abuse; the impetus for the termination of their parental rights was Davis’ positive test for cocaine after giving birth to Ciera and Scheurich’s charge of medical neglect after she struggled to secure a ride to a hospital to treat Hannah’s pneumonia.
“The children’s birth families were not beating their children or starving them,” writes Asgarian. “They were clearly struggling with substance use and mental illness, but instead of receiving help, the parents were punished.”
In Broken, Pryce, a Black woman who became a CPS caseworker after college to help ensure children were safe, explores the system from the inside.
In the author’s note, Pryce explains that over the course of writing the book, she decided to focus on her own experiences as a case worker and the stories of women she knew or worked with personally.
“My publisher and editor challenged me to dig deeper,” Pryce writes. “It required a level of vulnerability and culpability. But it also created an opportunity to get to the essence of how CPS plays out with families.”
The result is a deeply honest, intimate, and harrowing narrative. I desperately turned its pages to find out whether these women and their babies would be OK, and followed alongside Pryce as she slowly and painfully shifts from believing in the child welfare system to questioning it and ultimately aiming to dismantle it entirely. While never shying away from the brutal realities of the system, Pryce also shows deep compassion for her fellow case workers, many of whom are Black women, and her younger self.
“I saw humanity in my colleagues even in the face of difficult cases and complex circumstances,” Pryce writes.
The stories of the birth mothers threaded throughout this book are that much more fraught because of Pryce’s personal stake in them. One woman, Erica, takes in the 4-year-old daughter of a dear friend who is struggling to parent, only to find herself under investigation by CPS for abuse—and Erica also happens to be Pryce’s best friend. Pryce even admits to reporting her own sister to CPS over concerns of an abusive ex-partner. As these stories unfold, we watch Pryce evolve from an uncertain intern to an expert advocate as she realizes all the ways in which Black mothers bear the brunt of a system that, in Pryce’s words, requires not just an evolution but a revolution to truly serve the purpose it claims to.
Relinquished takes a look at another group of birth mothers—those who relinquish their children within the private adoption industry. Unlike the mothers from Asgarian’s and Pryce’s books, the mothers whose stories we hear, often firsthand, voluntarily gave up their parental rights, often just a few days or even hours after giving birth. Yet through these stories, we learn just how often the choice isn’t really the mother’s at all.
Many of the women in the book were preyed upon by for-profit adoption agencies or anti-abortion clinics and, in their words, coerced into giving up their children. Some would have chosen to parent if they felt they could.
Taylor, who discovered she was pregnant when she was in her early 20s without a stable income or partner, received misinformation about birth control and abortions at an anti-abortion clinic. When she Googled “help for single moms,” she was flooded with ads for adoption agencies. She reached out to a large Christian adoption agency who connected her with a financially stable couple who she thought could provide for her son where she couldn’t.
“I was starting to feel unsure and I wasn’t ready,” Taylor said of her time in the hospital after giving birth. She was told she had already signed her termination of parental rights paperwork while she was on pain meds, something she didn’t remember doing. “I sobbed. [The agency worker] never told me I had a revocation period, nothing.”
Common among the birth mothers’ stories is the expression that a small amount of money—as little as a few hundred dollars—could have allowed them to parent their child. Instead, they selected adoptive parents from a set of profiles of two-parent households with steady incomes and homes with yards. These profiles presented a life for their child they could not imagine themselves providing under their current circumstances.
The stories in Relinquished can feel repetitive in their similarities, but the ubiquitous nature of the experiences is also the point. One scene that is repeated over and over again: the sobs of the birth mothers that follow the moment when their child is taken from their arms forever.
Many of the women in Relinquished express feelings of regret, guilt, depression, and anger years after their child was adopted, but they also have ideas about how the industry could better support them: required waiting periods between birth and termination of parental rights, less money involved in the process, true options counseling that includes abortion, lifelong support for relinquishing mothers, and legally enforceable open adoption agreements. Some believe in adoption abolition, which means erasing the situations, like poverty or lack of housing, in which adoption becomes necessary.
“You just have to learn to find your voice,” says Erica, a birth mother. “That’s what the oppressed need to do: find their voice.”
A Radical Reimagining of Motherhood
That is ultimately what these three books do: give voice to the women who have been silenced, coerced, and shamed. “The stories we tell about adoption are part of both cultivated and incidental efforts to promote adoption as a social good,” Sisson says.
Giving visibility to these women is just one of the many steps these authors see toward a better, more just world for all mothers. Pryce argues that the incremental changes the child welfare system has undergone, such as mandates requiring foster children see a therapist or doctor within their first few weeks in state care, added funding for programs, or improved training for case workers, while positive, is not enough. “It’s time to dig into the foundational assumptions, mindsets, and biases that guide every policy and operational procedure within the system,” she says. “And yes, that digging will pull apart a system that we have always known—and it will take courage to create something new.”
Asgarian presents similar calls to move beyond the current systems. She says that a true abolition of the system requires a “radical reimagining of what support for parents looks like.” This would include monetary, mental, and social support that prevent situations that require—or even suggest—the need for child removal.
In Relinquished, Sisson speaks with Renee Gelin, an advocate for family preservation who lost one of her own children to adoption. Gelin founded Saving Our Sisters, a small collective of birth mothers who help women looking to parent but are feeling pressured into adoption. She spoke of a long-term dream in which a “commune of mothers who are all parenting without partners and can help each other.”
“It’s about being a village,” Gelin said.
At the core of all of these solutions is that village, one that reimagines what family and family support means. That village includes systems that don’t punish mothers for poverty or mental illness but provide the monetary and health support that allows them to be the best mothers they can be. Systems that elevate the importance of kinship when determining necessary temporary placements. Systems that do not abide the heteronormative, white-centered ideals of what a family should look like. That reimagining means a society that views motherhood not as a solitary role deserved by a select group, but as the foundation for the growth of the happy and healthy children we claim to want to see thrive.
*It’s important to note the language “birth mother” is offensive to some, while welcomed by others. Other terms with similarly mixed reactions include “first mother” and “natural mother.” Birth mother is primarily used in the texts we’re discussing so I chose to use it throughout this article.
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Andrea Ruggirello
has written for Electric Literature, Shondaland, We Need Diverse Books, Bitch, Catapult, and other publications. She holds an MFA in fiction from West Virginia University and has attended the Tin House Writers Workshop. She was born in Korea, adopted as a baby, and now lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, where she is working on a novel.
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