Rebecca Wellington answers questions about her book, Who Is A Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption.

Question: Rebecca, thank you so much for writing Who Is a Worthy Mother?, a detailed and unflinching history of American adoption. You hold a doctorate in Education History and are a university professor of education. Why did you write a history of adoption in the United States?

Rebecca Wellington: If you had told me 6 years ago that I would write a book about the history of adoption in America and weave my personal story into that history I would have been floored. In fact, my response probably would have been more like “hell no!” My point is to say that this was not in the plans. This history is somewhat far from my academic research, although I have come to see some interesting connections around assimilation. But I see this book as requiring me to write it. I did not seek it out, it demanded it from me. Two things, birth then death, pitched me onto the trajectory of writing this book. In 2010 and then 2011 my two daughters were born (20 months apart). To this day they are the only two people I know who I am biologically related to. Their births were hugely transformational for me. Their births fundamentally altered a belief I had held all my life that adoption is insignificant and giving birth to a baby and then giving it away is easy. Five years after my second daughter was born, the same year I completed my doctorate in education history (2017) my sister died of a drug overdose. She was also adopted and she had relinquished a baby for adoption. Her death really broke me and pitched me into a space where I had to find answers about my adoption. And I couldn’t find anything because my birth records are still sealed away by the state of California. So I decided to start researching everything I could about the history of adoption in America as a way to get some answers. And from there the book was born!

Q: The subtitle is An Intimate History of Adoption, and you weave your personal adoption story through a deeply researched report of the evolving practice of adoption in America. Why did you include your own story?

RW: While I was researching adoption history in America, after the death of my sister, I was also doing grief therapy. My therapist suggested that I write about my childhood and my life growing up with my sister as a way to walk through the trauma of her death. So I was simultaneously reading and writing about the macro level policy of history of adoption and also writing really personal stories from my childhood. And the two stories began to intersect in so many ways! The history helped me make sense of many of the things I had heard and experienced growing up as an adoptee. When the editors at University of Oklahoma Press came to me with an interest in my writing, they explicitly said that they wanted both in the story, the personal narrative and the history.

Q: Why did you dedicate the book to your also-adopted sister Rachel and your two daughters?

RW: Again, this writing and research came out of my journey (which I am still on) of grieving the loss of my sister and trying to make sense of many experiences we both had as adoptees. The biggest hurdle I have faced in processing my sister Rachel’s death is the enormous amount of regret I feel in not understanding her struggles while she was alive. She was like a trickster, the mad woman in the village square who is constantly calling out the insanity of her situation but nobody is listening to her because everybody thinks she is the crazy one. And yet she is the truth teller. Rachel was that in our family, calling out the insanity and dysfunction, much of which stemmed from our adoptions, and yet everyone, myself included, ignored and discounted her. This book is in part my apology to her for not listening and my way of sharing with the world her truth, demanding that we all hear it, finally.

I also dedicate this book to my daughters because in many ways they saved me. Again, they are to date the only two people I know who I am biologically related to. I describe them in the book as my two anchors, tethering me to my past and my future. It has unequivocally been the greatest healing joy of my life bringing them into the world and raising them, and now watching them set off on their own journeys as teenagers. They are brilliant, beautiful, brave and wise and I am so incredibly proud of who they are.

Q: Among other subjects, you examine the sordid history of family separation in America, babies and children taken from enslaved, Indigenous, immigrant, and poor white families; the way society is rigged for and against certain mothers; and the downsides of intercountry and transracial adoption. My view of social workers will never be the same. From your research, what were some of the surprising things you learned about adoption?

RW: All of it surprised me! All of it! I found it horrifying, shocking, disgusting, disturbing. But most of all, as I was reading this history and writing it into my narrative, I was outraged that I hadn’t known this history. I teach history and I was clueless! This was especially disturbing.

I love disruptive history. My focus as a historian has always been to tell the stories of those who have been deliberately silenced. I write in the book,

“History, the true stories of the past, became my way of speaking truth to power for Rachel now that she had lost her voice in death. History is constantly sticking its fingers into our present, everyday lives, whether or not we are aware of it. History has incredible power. It can paint pictures of where we came from and how the world and people in it looked, acted, and believed. This is weighty because how we understand ourselves and the world around us in this current moment is largely defined and shaped by what happened in the past. This is the power of historical narratives and historical memory. When people’s lives in the past are silenced, this, in turn, silences people’s lives in the present. But when these stories are told, it changes our understanding of the present world. When people’s stories are shared, especially the lives of people who are deliberately traumatized and silenced, those awoken historical narratives directly affect the lives of people in the present. We start to view the world and our place in it differently, and then we actually start to act differently. And this, in turn, impacts the future. History is powerful.”

I have always known intellectually as a historian that historical amnesia and historical ignorance and silence perpetuates a lot of abusive practices, policies and ideologies. And as I read this these histories of adoption, my history!, for the first time in my early forties I knew that for us as a nation to work our way out of abusive practices around adoption and reproductive autonomy, practices that target especially vulnerable women, we had to wake up to this history. We need to know this history in order to move forward in a different direction.

Q: What is your hope for the future of adoption in America?

RW: “The history of adoption in America is defined by deceit, lies, and policies that weaponize “bad” women’s fertility as a commodity to be used against them. Our society continues to dehumanize mothers deemed bad, particularly poor mothers and mothers of color, which then justifies policies and practices that strip women of their fertility autonomy and parental autonomy. As long as adoption practices depend on the dehumanization of people involved in the adoption transaction, it will continue to traumatize our nation.”

I think we still very much live in a societal paradigm of bad vs. good mothers. This binary pits women against each other and again and again validates and elevates those who fall under the ‘hegemonic mother’ umbrella- cis-gendered, heterosexual white, middle class women. We need to blow apart this binary. This is a big ask and takes a lifetime of work. But I think it starts with 1.) ensuring reproductive autonomy for all women so that they have resources and choices without coming to a place of absolute crises of having no option except to relinquish a child (or worse, being forced to relinquish). 2.) we need complex systems of support for all mothers. This involves our society valuing all women and mothers. 3.) we need supports systems for all the members of the adopting triad when adoption is the best course of action for both the birth mother and the baby. This necessitates an understanding that adoption is traumatic, and healing and support needs to be in place when it happens. 4.) we need to abolish sealed birth records policies. Knowing our past and our roots is a human right.

Visit our Reading Essentials section to discover the best bookshelves, reading chairs, book lights for reading at night, and more!

Receive top book recommendations directly in your inbox.