Renee Gelin Says Adoption Is More Lucrative than Family Preservation

There’s no money to be made in family preservation

Renee Gelin and the baby she surrendered to an adoptive family

For a recent article I wrote about manipulative adoption industry language (“The ‘Loving Option’ Is a Lie”), I interviewed five women: two adoptees, two birth (or first) mothers, and one adoptive mother. This five-part Adoption Series will comprise segments of our interview transcripts that didn’t appear in the story.

This second interview in the series is with first mother Renee Gelin, founder of the nonprofit family preservation organization Saving Our Sisters (SOS).

KT: What were the circumstances when you — Do you prefer the language “placed your child,” “relinquished your child,” or something else?

RENEE GELIN (RG): Surrendered. I describe it as the perfect storm. A business that went bad, and I’d moved across the country, so my family was all back in the Midwest while I’m down here in Florida with little support. I was $130k in debt, and the insurance company was denying my claims for prenatal care. Throw a C-section on top of that. I called the doctor’s office, the hospital, and the anesthesiologist and said, “Give me your cash price.” They came up with $15k, but they might as well have said $100k. I didn’t have it.

It just kept coming. I didn’t know how I was going to pay for the delivery, because I was already dropping $200 in cash a week on my doctor visits. I was working 10 hours a day. I was driving an hour to and from work every day. That’s 12 hours a day. Who’s going to watch a newborn for that long?

How did I mentally freak out, thinking to give my kid to strangers? It’s just mind-boggling today.

There were no safety nets for me to go to. I didn’t know how the “after” was going to be. It was so, so stressful, and I was a mess. I cannot explain that crisis to people. I can’t even explain it to myself today. How did I mentally freak out, thinking to give my kid to strangers? It’s just mind-boggling.

I really, honestly reached for the wrong help. I had no idea who I was tangling with. Nobody at the adoption agency pumped the brakes and said, “Do you really need to do this?” Or, “Step back and think about it long-term: you’re not always going to be in this position.” Or, “Let’s talk about your son. He doesn’t want stuff. He wants you.” No one said, “This is permanent. Your life is going to change forever and be something totally different.” Nobody talked about all of the stuff that comes with losing a child.

I just needed a couple of months. I had a place to live. I had a car, a job. I was already a successful parent. Somebody [at the adoption agency] should have just taken a look at those things alone and been like, This doesn’t make sense.

But nobody said, “You know what? You’re going to be on maternity leave, anyway. Take your kid home and just see how it goes.” They didn’t say that because if I would have done it, I would have bonded, and he never would have left.

Nobody talked about all of the stuff that comes with losing a child.

I just needed a couple of months.

They don’t want that. They want you to sign at that hour mark, and I did. They were there 72 hours after he was born. That’s the earliest I could sign.

The adoption agency is not there to stop the adoption. These people are not there to help you. These people are there to keep the lights on and collect a paycheck.

KT: What would you say to someone who thinks, as many people do, “I want to / might adopt someday”?

RG: People don’t come to the decision to surrender their kid lightly. I would say every mom deserves a chance, first. We don’t support mothers in this country. But there’s no money in family preservation. That’s what it’s about.

The adoption agency is not there to help you.

We have wait lists in our country three years deep for subsidized housing. How do you help a mom who’s due in a few months when you tell her to go get on a three-year wait list?

We need federal maternity leave. At Saving Our Sisters, I had a mom in Arkansas who, because her state doesn’t require businesses to offer maternity leave, gave up her kid because she was going to lose seniority and lose her insurance for the kids she was already parenting. I can’t compete with her losing all those benefits. I couldn’t cover her for a year. It’s a serious issue we have. It’s really bad right now.

When people hear the word “adoption,” I want the first thing to pop into their head to be, What happened to that mother that she felt she had to give her baby to strangers? That’s what we should be looking at, not, Oh my gosh, we saved that baby, or The mother must clearly have been unfit.

Many of us just didn’t have the social support. Surrendering a child isn’t a first choice, and SOS’s numbers support this. In 14 years, we’ve had only eight moms go through with adoption. If I can do that — if we, as a small nonprofit organization, can do that — why isn’t everybody else? It’s the right thing to do.

KT: Eight out of about how many, total, over the fourteen years decided to go forward with adoption ?

RG: For an idea, last year we had 96 intakes. And this year we’re having a record year. We’re at 82 intakes already. I literally can’t keep up. [Note: this conversation took place on Aug. 23, 2024.]

KT: You said in a Canvas Rebel interview that you were “grossly misinformed and misled about adoption.” How?

RG: It’s the propaganda. It’s glossing over the trauma. You know, I say this a lot: We don’t separate puppies and kittens from their moms too early because it creates anxiety. It creates issues. Yet, we are doing it to the most cognizant of mammals.

We don’t separate puppies and kittens from their moms too early because it creates issues. Yet, we are doing it to the most cognizant of mammals.

It’s not educating me about the trauma my son was going to suffer, which was the thing that really sent me over the edge. It’s the many times I heard from the hospital, “We’re giving this wonderful, just amazing, amazing gift…” and my face is this big because I’ve been crying for the last 24 hours.

It’s the glossing-over of the fact that these people I’m giving this “amazing gift” to [in an open adoption] could turn around and discard us, take my kid and cut us off.

KT: An adoption website that does mention post-surrender grief calls post-adoption depression a myth (on page 7 under “Common Adoption Myths”): At first, your feelings about the adoption of your child may be painful. However, grieving is … a good sign of emotional health. However, I read elsewhere that for around half of the surveyed mothers who’d surrendered their children, the grief never got better — and even worsened over time. Has that been true for you?

RG: Oh, yeah, 100. Like, I created a national nonprofit organization.

There’s a new study coming out by Dr. Lynn Zubov, a retired professor at Winston Salem. The numbers she had in the survey examining the death rate of first mothers were astounding. Thirteen hundred people took the survey, she said, and of 245 first mothers who were reported deceased, nine of them died by suicide. That means the death rate is 3.59% by suicide for first mothers, which makes them roughly 511 times more likely to die of suicide than women who did not surrender children to adoption.

Graphic created by Dr. Lynn Zubov and posted on the Facebook page Preliminary Research into Adoption Reunions

KT: When it comes to deception in the industry, are propaganda and the withholding of information the extent of what you see?

RG: They deceive. They’re extremely unethical, in my opinion. The stories out there… For example, this immigrant mother who was separated from her family gave birth to twins. Someone told her, hey, you have to go and get some help. She goes to this crisis pregnancy center. She doesn’t speak English. She’s 17. Thirty minutes after she had twins, they showed up in the hospital saying she has to sign a form if she wants support. She doesn’t know what they’re there for. They have her sign this paper, and she’s like, Where are my babies? And the nurse says, Well, you signed adoption papers.

In a study by the Donaldson Institute exposing the informed consent part of adoption, most of the mothers reported that they did not understand what they were getting into. They did not understand what an open adoption meant, or any of the process, really, or what their rights were. As we talk to moms on the day-to-day at SOS, that’s exactly what we’re finding.

We’re not taking care of our mothers. We’re not taking care of our children. We’ve lost our way on child welfare, here. The Baby Scoop Era happened globally, and you’ve got Australia, Canada, Ireland, and Scotland giving governmental public apologies about, and acknowledging, that.

But we didn’t do it here. Instead, we turned adoption into a business. No other country does adoption like the United States. I tell people all the time, Take those rose-colored glasses off. Get your magnifying glass out, and let’s take a look at what’s really going on here. Nobody is watching these people. There is zero federal oversight. Everything is done by individual state laws, and they’re all over the place. There’s no recourse.

We have to look at the goal behind this. First of all, take the money out, OK? No money should be exchanging hands for these kids. All of these people who can write a check are demanding the supply, and you’ve got vulnerable, vulnerable people on the other end.

KT: Do you think people who want to adopt because they desperately want to be parents would re-think how they go about incorporating children into their lives with more information about how the industry operates?

RG: The adoption industry has no incentive to educate. It’s better for that entity to be in complete control of the situation, and in order to do that, you keep the two sides separate. It’s exactly what they do.

And the thing is — this is just my personal opinion — the people who have that burning desire for kids, it literally turns into a mental-health purchase. They are so driven — I want I want I want — that they lose empathy, and they lose compassion about it.

And when a home study takes place, there’s no way to identify that those issues exist. How do you make sure someone has fully grieved their infertility or their inability to reproduce? You can’t. There’s nothing you could do.

KT: Is part of the reason for not changing adoption policy — putting the resources and safeties into place that would make it easier for parents to keep their kids — that it would take too much time and work?

RG: I’m doing it. SOS does it. On average, a mom today only needs about $3500 to keep her child. Back then, I needed less than that. My rent was $1600. I just needed food and to get through a couple months of maternity because I was going to go back to work.

We have to do what SOS does, which is take these cases individually and do exactly what adoption agencies do today. I do the exact same thing an adoption agency does: I take all the information, and I listen to the good, the bad, and the ugly. I just don’t use it against them.

Agencies use it against them, but I say, “Look, let’s eliminate this problem. If I were to pay two months of your rent, would that help? Yeah? OK. Well, do you have a car payment? Yeah. Insurance? OK. Phone bill?” I’ve bought AAA for moms. They’re single moms — they need to have that. It’s $99 a year. It’s simple things like that to put safety nets in place for them so that they’re not stranded on the side of the road with their kid. It’s just basic common sense.

My biggest success story — I love her dearly — is Crystal. She’s in North Carolina. She was living in her car, newly divorced, and had twin boys who were living with their dad since she got divorced. And she was like, “I don’t know what to do.” This is not even a year after losing my son, so I didn’t have any money. SOS wasn’t SOS. I was just a keyboard warrior on the Internet, like, I’ve got to tell every mom ever, ‘You don’t ever want to do this.’

I do the exact same thing an adoption agency does: I take all the information, and I listen to the good, the bad, and the ugly. I just don’t use it against the expectant mothers.

So, I connected with her, and over time I was like, “Do you have issues?” “No.” “You don’t have any alcohol issues, no drugs?” “No.” “Your mental health — ?” “No.” So, I said, “What the hell are you doing? Get a job! Go to work. Just get it done.”

Which is why it’s so crazy that I ended up in this scenario, because it’s not me. People can’t even fathom that I checked out. I was panicked. I just didn’t have anybody to reach out to.

Anyway, she keeps her daughter. She gets a job. She ends up going back to school and gets her MBA, and she lands a contracting gig at Microsoft making six figures. I went back to her, then, and I asked her, “What did I do? Tell me what I — How did I help you?” She said, “You just told me I could do it.”

KT: It seems you can let someone adopt your child up until the child is emancipated or a legal adult, which means there’s no rush when it comes to surrendering. You can legally think about it for as long as you want before signing papers. How important is it to have not just the bills paid for a month or so, but to simply have that time to be with the baby?

RG: Here’s the thing. Oxytocin is real. It’s the love hormone, but oxytocin can also be detrimental. If you’re in that panic mode, it freaks you out and goes the other way. But if you’re in a secure environment, and oxytocin is there to help you with that bonding, and you’re attuned to that, you’re not in freak-out mode, you’re not dissociated.

Depression is a symptom of pregnancy, and that is overlooked. I was severely depressed. I would go to work and present to be fine, but the second I got home when I was pregnant, I was a wreck. I cried myself to sleep every night. I was doing a shit job of parenting my oldest. It was a horrible, horrible time.

And I couldn’t make sense of it. I didn’t know enough to get help. I was isolating myself. It was terrible. Anybody who would have walked in my hospital room that last 24 hours of me being there, someone who had no incentive to separate me from my kid, wouldn’t have known that I — My sister said, “I could not get you to listen to me. I didn’t know what to say to you.”

But all somebody should have said, especially a nurse, is, “You shouldn’t be doing this right now. Take your baby home. Do you have someplace to go? Let me hook you up with somebody.”

That’s what SOS does. We provide a mentor. That’s what our Sisters on the Ground network is.

Let them connect with you. Call them for anything you need. “You need a ride? You need some groceries? We’ll hook you up. We’ll do what we need to do, and if, after some time, you say you can’t do it, listen — those people will take a three-week old infant just like they’ll take a new one. They’ll take a three-month-old just like they’ll take a new one, too, by the way.”

But people don’t think like that, because it’s panic mode — and that’s the wrong time to be making those decisions. When a mom is signing that relinquishment form or that consent form or that surrender form — because they have three different terms in different states — they’re so dissociated.

The only way I could go through with it myself was to dissociate. It’s very hard to describe…I was there, but if I try to remember actually signing my name on the lines, I can’t. I remember the sun was shining in my eyes and I was bawling my eyes out through the whole thing. And I know who was there. But I don’t remember actually signing those documents.

KT: Say someone agrees that the industry itself is unethical, but wonders, “What about the kids who do unquestionably need a home?” What’s the solution?

RG: Say there’s an absolute need. Say the mother has abuse issues. Drugs. Alcohol. Whatever. How many moms have you heard of who, when they got pregnant and had their children, changed their lives? It gives them purpose, right? We need to give that chance. She needs and deserves time to right the ship. We need to allow that to happen instead of just writing her off. Let her try.

A mother needs and deserves time to right the ship. We need to allow that to happen instead of just writing her off. Let her try.

So, put that child with the immediate or extended family. If that can’t happen, then in a guardianship with the focus of reunification. If that can’t happen, then you look into kinship adoption, with immediate or extended family, to keep that kid within the family. And then, only as a last and absolute final resort, when every other option has been exhausted, do you bring in strangers to do adoption.

I say this all the time to the question “How do we fix adoption?” People are like, “Oh, we just make sure it’s ethical,” but you know what? Family preservation is adoption reform. That’s what adoption reform means. You make sure that that situation is absolutely necessary, that my son really needed to be separated from me.

My son didn’t need to be separated from me.

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*This interview originally appeared in the Medium publication Fourth Wave