Keeping It 101: A Killjoy's Introduction to Religion Podcast · Profs. Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Megan Goodwin

RELIGION & ADOPTION: Reproductive Freedom

·1 hr 5 min·2 clips

Overwhelmingly, people seeking abortions are already parents: the majority, 60-plus percent, who know what raising a child costs.

1. Keeping It 101 devotes its fourth Religion and Adoption episode to how adoption, abortion and infertility get tied together, with the hosts arguing that the connection rests on "white Christian nationalism." 2. Megan Goodwin, a scholar of American religions, race, gender and politics, and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, a historian of religion who is an adoptee, co-host and bring both research and personal experience. 3. The thesis arrives in two opening "facts": adoption is not a solution to abortion, and adoption is not a solution to infertility, because adoption is "the solution to a child without a permanent home." 4. Fuerst cites medical studies in the New England Journal of Medicine and American Academy of Pediatrics journals showing health disparities between adoptees and non-adoptees, including colic, PTSD, OCD, and mental health effects that grow with multiple placements. 5. Goodwin traces the conflation to 1973 and the 2022 Dobbs decision, describing pre-Roe maternity homes run largely by Christian and Catholic organizations and a post-Roe alliance of the adoption industry, anti-abortion advocates and people with infertility, which she calls a "supply chain." 6. Goodwin says 60-plus percent of people who seek abortions are already parents, and she cites Amber Thurman, a Black mother in Georgia who died of sepsis after a medical abortion did not fully clear. 7. Fuerst repeats the phrase "fully functioning, realized society" to describe a place with reproductive technology access, health care, child care and guaranteed income, where in her view there would be no orphans and no adoptions. 8. Drawing on 40 years of literature, Goodwin says birth parents who relinquish children report satisfaction but also regret, sadness and rage, worsened by coercion, class and "religious guilt or shame," while few people regret abortions. 9. Both hosts say "no one is owed a child," extending this to queer couples, to whom they say adoption's roots in white Christian nationalism should matter, and they describe online backlash against adoptees who criticize the system. 10. Suited to listeners interested in religion, reproductive justice and adoptee perspectives.

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