“That picture perfect life”: “Dear Birth Mother” Letters as Sites of Power and Persuasion

ABSTRACT: When pregnant people consider adoption, they typically rely on the brokerage of adoption agencies or private attorneys to identify prospective adoptive parents, and the “Dear Birth Mother” letter is routinely deployed, purportedly as a tool to “match” relinquishing and adoptive parents. We contend that “Dear Birth Mother” letters function as a tool that constructs and reinforces unequal power relations between adoption brokers, prospective adoptive parents, and expectant parents considering adoption. For this paper, we use two sources of data: in-depth interviews with sixty mothers who relinquished children for adoption between 2010 and 2020, and content analysis of one hundred “Dear Birth Mother” letters that were publicly available online in the last five years. Our analysis puts these letters directly into conversation with birth mothers’ experiences of reading them, not just as part of their search for suitable adoptive parents, but as part of the broader process of assessing their own ability to parent. We find that these letters are not just about forging individual connections but framing adoption as an immediate response to many of the individual and social crises that an expectant parent is likely to be facing when reading them (e.g., lack of financial resources, housing, social support, a co-parent). In response to these vulnerabilities, these letters work to uphold a heteronormative, middle-class family structure as the presumptive ideal. “Dear Birth Mother” letters do not just serve to forge real or pseudo-relationships between writer and reader, but also to market adoption to those who are not yet committed to the process—often under the guise of empowering an expectant parent or deploying child-centric language, but with little consideration of the power inequities, vulnerabilities, or obligations that are incurred. Our findings make visible the paradox at the heart of adoption “matching,” a process purportedly intended to empower expectant mothers, but which ultimately works to reaffirm the power inequities that facilitate the transfer of children.