When the state becomes involved in parenting it often does more harm than good, as several forthcoming books demonstrate. The authors of these titles use reportage, critique, and historical research to illustrate how the system hurts vulnerable and disadvantaged families.
Adoption Memoirs
Marianne Novy. Temple Univ., June
Literary critic and adoptee Novy examines 47 nonfiction books and films that recount the conflicting emotions around adoption, with an eye toward improving policies and practices. Memoirs such as Emily Prager’s Wuhu Diary, Jane Jeong Trenka’s The Language of Blood, and Jesse Green’s Velveteen Father, she writes, complicate prevailing narratives and reveal the social justice issues inherent in the adoption process.
Broken
Jessica Pryce. Amistad, Mar.
Black women—both those who have worked within child protective services and those who have been affected by it—play a central role in this memoir-manifesto by a former case worker. Pryce illuminates how Black families are vulnerable to state intervention due to implicit and explicit racial bias, and describes the experiences of child welfare professionals who must balance personal ethics with procedural requirements.
Relinquished
Gretchen Sisson. St. Martin’s, Feb.
Sisson, a sociologist, draws on hundreds of interviews with women who have placed infants for domestic adoption to counter the largely unchallenged view of adoption as a social good. The author “shows that today’s private adoption industry continues in the tradition of separating disadvantaged families,” per PW’s starred review, delivering “a devastating and urgent condemnation of America’s adoption industry.”
Who Is a Worthy Mother?
Rebecca Wellington. Univ. of Oklahoma, Apr.
This overview of fertility, motherhood, and adoption in the U.S. over the past century examines the ways in which various policies have influenced cultural understandings of the “good mother.” Wellington’s experiences as an adoptee frame chapters addressing broader context, such as the forced sterilization of women and girls of color by the North Carolina state eugenics board in the 1930s, and the separation of Native children from their communities by state child welfare and private adoption agencies prior to the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.
