Transcript!

PDF transcript. Also available via our Buzzsprout page.

Shownotes
(because citations are political)

This is the fifth of our 4 episode miniseries on religion and adoption, which, as you may have surmised, actually turned out to have five episodes because, well, there were just too many horrors to be neatly contained in an outline.

In this episode, we revisit the miniseries, offer an overview of what we hope you learned, and played some truly silly games to lighten the vibe.

As always these episodes offer a content warning: adoption and the constellation of issues that surrounds it—appropriately or not, things like abortion, abandonment, child abuse & neglect, infertility, histories of religio-racist child removal—is hard for lots of folks. Really hard. So if these frank, data-driven episodes aren’t for you where you’re at? No worries. We have so many other things to listen to.

In this episode, we reviewed:

• what adoption is and why we care, harkening back to primary sources

• adoption and religious freedom, because as you learned earlier, religious freedom isn’t really super clear in adoption. Parents, and especially adoptive parents, are centered in most western and American adoption systems, rendering the bio family’s religion irrelevant most of the time and certainly not considering the religion of the adoptee

• adoption and ICWA, where we talked about Native rights, the ways adoption has been used to de-kin Native folks, and how grateful we were to be joined by Dr. Courtney Lewis

• reproductive freedom and adoption, reminding y’all that we said adoption is not a solution for abortion, even if white Christian supremacists try to tell you otherwise; and we reminded you, dearest nerds, that adoption is not a solution for infertility, either.
  

  In this episode, we also played a game of Megan’s invention: the Sooper Dooper Baby Scooper, in which your talented and oh-so-professional hosts raced the clock to name adoptees, fictional and not.

Homework

Watch Face/Off? A movie Ilyse thinks is definitely, ultimately about the seizing of a child for redistribution to a nice, white Christian family.

And check out our piece for The Revealer on adoption!

Religion Is Not Done With You

Our book is available everywhere! And if you know anything about contemporary book publishing, those preorders really, really matter. We love a local indie store, but you can grab a copy to be delivered on November 5 everywhere and anywhere books are sold.

If you want to have us visit your local bookstore or campus, please reach out to us and Caitlin Meyer, one piece of the rockstar publicity team at Beacon Press.