Virtual Tenement Talk – Relinquished

This Women’s History Month, join us on March 7th on YouTube Live for a conversation about Relinquished, a new book from author and sociologist Gretchen Sisson sharing the stories of American women who relinquished infants for private adoption.Based on hundreds of interviews with women over a decade, Relinquished looks at how women came to their decisions, how they navigate a societal lack of support, and how they manage their ensuing grief. Relinquished reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for those for whom abortion is inaccessible, or for whom parenthood is untenable.

Sisson will be joined in conversation by Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan Train, a novel looking at stories of children sent out for adoption in the mid-19^th century. Sisson and Kline will draw connections between past and present and shine light on these stories that deserve to be heard about a response to this moment.

Gretchen Sisson is a sociologist, researcher, and author who studies abortion and adoption in the United States. She is a researcher at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, part of the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research examining adoption decision-making after abortion denial (as part of The Turnaway Study) was cited in the Supreme Court’s dissent in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health from Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor.

Christina Baker Kline is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including The Exiles, Orphan Train, and A Piece of the World, and the author and/or editor of five nonfiction books. Kline’s latest novel, The Exiles (2020), captures the hardship, oppression, opportunity and hope of a trio of women’s lives—two English convicts and an orphaned Aboriginal girl — in nineteenth-century Australia.