Understanding practices of family separation and child removal necessitates considering the impacts of globalizing capitalism, colonialism, empire building and the establishment and normalization of systemic racism. In Reproductive Justice, Adoption, and Foster Care, the authors situate the colonial legacies of family separation, what it means to center the right parent, and Reproductive Justice and transnational feminist frameworks in conversation with one another in order to elucidate a more nuanced and comprehensive approach to recognizing the significance of contemporary examples of family separation. In doing so, the book showcases the connections between adoption and foster care within the intellectual and activist frameworks of human rights, Critical Adoption Studies, Reproductive Justice, and transnational feminisms. Epistemologically, Reproductive Justice and transnational feminisms meet at the point where both consider and interrogate globalizing capitalism, neoliberal economic and political ideologies, and the ways that various people—mostly people of color, poor people, women, children, and Indigenous people—are considered disposable. Critical Adoption Studies also importantly highlights the ways that adoption and foster care function as forms of family formation and as mechanisms of globalizing capitalism and state formation. Thus, it is critical that any exploration of the reproductive experiences of marginalized individuals interrogate and complicate notions of “choice” to advocate for justice. Reproductive Justice, Adoption, and Foster Care will be of interest to students of sociology, psychology, and social work, as well as scholars, activists, policymakers, and adoption and foster care practitioners.

2019 High Plains Book Award (Creative Nonfiction and Indigenous Writer categories) 2021 Barbara Sudler Award from History Colorado In Bitterroot Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West. When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her “real” parents. He replied that they had died in a car accident not long after she was born—except they hadn’t, as Harness would learn in a conversation with a social worker a few years later. Harness’s search for answers revolved around her need to ascertain why she was the target of racist remarks and why she seemed always to be on the outside looking in. New questions followed her through college and into her twenties when she started her own family. Meeting her biological family in her early thirties generated even more questions. In her forties Harness decided to get serious about finding answers when, conducting oral histories, she talked with other transracial adoptees. In her fifties she realized that the concept of “home” she had attributed to the reservation existed only in her imagination. Making sense of her family, the American Indian history of assimilation, and the very real—but culturally constructed—concept of race helped Harness answer the often puzzling questions of stereotypes, a sense of nonbelonging, the meaning of family, and the importance of forgiveness and self-acceptance. In the process Bitterroot also provides a deep and rich context in which to experience life.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, advocates of legal abortion mostly used the term rights when describing their agenda. But after Roe v. Wade, their determination to develop a respectable, nonconfrontational movement encouraged many of them to use the word choice--an easier concept for people weary of various rights movements. At first the distinction in language didn't seem to make much difference-the law seemed to guarantee both. But in the years since, the change has become enormously important. In Beggars and Choosers, Solinger shows how historical distinctions between women of color and white women, between poor and middle-class women, were used in new ways during the era of "choice." Politicians and policy makers began to exclude certain women from the class of "deserving mothers" by using the language of choice to create new public policies concerning everything from Medicaid funding for abortions to family tax credits, infertility treatments, international adoption, teen pregnancy, and welfare. Solinger argues that the class-and-race-inflected guarantee of "choice" is a shaky foundation on which to build our notions of reproductive freedom. Her impassioned argument is for reproductive rights as human rights--as a basis for full citizenship status for women.

Expanding the social justice discourse surrounding "reproductive rights" to include issues of environmental justice, incarceration, poverty, disability, and more, this crucial anthology explores the practical applications for activist thought migrating from the community into the academy. Radical Reproductive Justice assembles two decades’ of work initiated by SisterSong Women of Color Health Collective, creators of the human rights-based “reproductive justice” framework to move beyond polarized pro-choice/pro-life debates. Rooted in Black feminism and built on intersecting identities, this revolutionary framework asserts a woman's right to have children, to not have children, and to parent and provide for the children they have. "The book is as revolutionary and revelatory as it is vast." —Rewire

A feminist historian and an adoptive parent, Laura Briggs gives an account of transracial and transnational adoption from the point of view of the mothers and communities that lose their children.

"In Reproductive Justice, Adoption, and Foster Care the authors situate the colonial legacies of family separation, what it means to center the right parent, and Reproductive Justice and transnational feminist frameworks in conversation with one another in order to elucidate a more nuanced and comprehensive approach to recognizing the significance of contemporary examples of family separation"--

"In this important work, Jeanne Flavin looks beyond abortion to document how the law and the criminal justice system police women's rights to conceive, to be pregnant, and to rear their children, as well as how the state seeks to establish what a "good woman" and "fit mother" should look like. Calling for broad-based measures that strengthen women's economic position, choice-making, autonomy, sexual freedom, and health care, Our Bodies, Our Crimes is a battle cry for all women in their fight to be fully recognized as human beings"--