Evening, Meteor readers,

It’s Leap Day! Which means I spent most of the morning googling, “What is the point of a leap year?” (Something to do with keeping the solstices in proper order. We love to be orderly!)

In today’s newsletter, The Meteor’s Rebecca Carroll talks to Dr. Gretchen Sisson about her new book on adoption. Plus, we look at a huge blow against IVF protections and some weekend long reads.

Leaping,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

• Mitch McConnell announced yesterday that he will be stepping down from his post as Republican Senate leader in November of this year. The man who enabled some of Donald Trump’s worst moments as President and then actively worked to prevent him from being convicted for stirring an insurrection will not be missed. In lieu of a eulogy, I will simply leave you with this 2020 Jezebel article in which my fellow writers and I took McConnell to task with sniper-like accuracy.

• In more Senate nonsense: Yesterday, Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have provided federal protections for IVF treatments. (The bill has been on the table for a while, but its revival was in response to an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that classifies embryos as children.) Cue the gentlewoman from Mississippi, GOP Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, who said, “I support the ability for mothers and fathers to have total access to IVF and bringing new life into the world. I also believe human life should be protected.” So why’d you block the bill, girl?

• On Monday, climate justice activists held a protest outside The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) during an annual meeting at which fossil fuel companies meet with energy regulators to negotiate the prices we’ll all pay for things like gas and electricity. The problem? Activists say the fees get elevated in order to fund the companies’ anti-climate-change lobbying. They’re circulating this petition, demanding pricing transparency and more clean energy options for consumers.

NATALIE MEBANE, CHIEF PROGRAM OFFICER OF THIS IS ZERO HOUR. (PHOTO BY MARIAH MIRANDA)

• The United Nations’ special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, has found that Israel is “intentionally starving Palestinians.” “There is no reason to intentionally block the passage of humanitarian aid or intentionally obliterate small-scale fishing vessels, greenhouses and orchards in Gaza,” Fakhri told The Guardian, “other than to deny people access to food…In my view as a UN human rights expert, this is now a situation of genocide.” A UN report released in January confirmed that one in six infants under the age of two in Gaza are “acutely malnourished.”

• Yet another allegation has been levied against Sean “Diddy” Combs. This latest comes from a producer on Diddy’s 2023 album, who alleges that Diddy “sexually harassed, drugged, and threatened” him. The producer also claims to have footage of Diddy and some of his friends “providing laced drinks to minors.” Diddy’s lawyers deny all allegations.

WRITERS ON WRITERS

Gretchen Sisson on Inequality  in the Adoption System

“It is so often framed as a ‘reproductive choice,’ but I think it’s better understood as an expression of resourcelessness and constraint.”

BY REBECCA CARROLL

America loves an adoption story. It’s got all the feel-good elements we love to romanticize: A baby is born to parents unable to care for it, a hopeful family is given the gift of an unwanted child, and everyone lives happily ever after. But the truth, many experts say, is that the institution of private adoption in America is mired in dysfunction, exploitative practices, and systemic inequities—and in far too many cases, almost no one lives happily ever after.

This dysfunction is what interests Dr. Gretchen Sisson, a qualitative sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and author of a new book called Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood. Through over a hundred interviews with American mothers who placed their children for adoption between 2000 and 2020, Sisson’s book aims to debunk myths around an institution I’ve thought a lot about myself: As a transracial adoptee whose memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, is cited in Sisson’s book, I was eager to sit down to talk with her about the politics of adoption. And so, an adult Black woman transracial adoptee meets a white woman sociologist on Zoom. Here’s what happened.

Rebecca Carroll: You chose to interrogate the institution of adoption through the experiences of birthmothers—why? 

Gretchen Sisson: The question that brought me to the work in the first place was understanding how women end up choosing adoption. “Choosing” is a loaded term, but how they end up on the path to relinquishing their children, and what the circumstances are around that.

And what were your main findings?

I think the two most important takeaways are, first, that adoption does not offer any meaningful alternative to abortion access. Not only are people who need abortions generally uninterested in adoption, but people who relinquished for adoption usually wanted to parent their children. Adoption is so often framed as a “reproductive choice,” but I think it’s better understood as an expression of resourcelessness and constraint. Rather than an “empowered option,” it is often a reflection of a lack of power. And, second: that adoption generally does not serve relinquishing mothers well. The grief, trauma, and disconnection of adoption belie the idea that it is unambiguously “beautiful”—and nearly all mothers came to a place of critique and cynicism that acknowledged this, with many carrying complex feelings around regret and loss.

You write in the book about how, in popular culture, birthmothers are generally portrayed as either happily moving on or becoming pathologically dangerous. Were there depictions that birthmothers you spoke with felt accurately reflected their experience?

Many of the mothers were drawn to The Handmaid’s Tale. The entire history of Handmaid’s Tale is very complicated, and I don’t want to gloss over that, but that [book] resonated most for them. That one, this extractive child-taking was acknowledged as a loss within the context of the show. And two, that the forces that were separating [birthmothers from their children] were driven by these regressive, religious, racialized, patriarchal ideas.

WEEKEND READS 📚

On the pitch: There’s a new professional women’s soccer league in town, but is a second major league sustainable? (Front Office Sports)

On de-girlboss-ification: Sophia Amoruso is bidding farewell to the Frankenstein’s monster she accidentally created: #girlboss. “It’s not that I’m embarrassed by it, but I don’t want to be defined by it.” (Elle)

On integrity: In December, The New York Times published an investigation into sexual assault by Hamas on October 7. But now, some of that reporting is coming under fire as misrepresenting the facts to “bolster a predetermined narrative.”  (The Intercept)

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