Mother Jones illustration; Macmillan; Liz Corman Photography

Cassie was a 22-year-old college student working a part-time job when she found out she was pregnant. It was too late for an abortion, and parenting seemed off the table: She felt too poor, too unsupported by her family.

When she went to an adoption agency, Cassie couldn’t stop weeping. But the staffers were warm, praising her for making the best decision for her child. They gave her a worksheet with two columns: things she could provide for her baby, and things adoptive parents could provide. They noted that adoptive parents could provide a home, a marriage, and financial stability. The agency sent her home with a stack of profiles of prospective adoptive parents, and one couple stood out to Cassie: a journalist and a fashion designer with a cute dog and a beautiful home. They agreed to an open adoption, in which Cassie would stay in touch with the family. Soon after giving birth, Cassie rolled her son in a bassinet down a hospital hallway to his adoptive parents.

It seemed like a successful adoption: a win-win for a baby who needed a home and parents who wanted a baby. But take a closer look at Cassie’s story, as sociologist Gretchen Sisson does in her forthcoming book, Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, and you see fissures in the narrative. Looking back on her pregnancy eight years later, Cassie sees that her support system—the adoption agency, her family—presented adoption, and not parenting, as the only viable option. She suspects that a little financial support would have significantly changed her decision. At the hospital, Cassie had second thoughts about adoption, but she felt she didn’t have time to consider those feelings. In a hormonal haze soon after delivering, she signed the paperwork terminating her parental rights. “If I could go back, I just wish I would’ve waited a couple days, because I wouldn’t have made the same choice,” Cassie told Sisson.

Cassie spiraled into a deep depression after the birth, her body aching for her son. The promise of an open adoption was fruitless; with the exception of one visit when her son was a toddler, she never saw him again. “It’s always depicted as a choice, right? It’s a choice you make,” Cassie told Sisson. “Yeah, it was my choice to go to the agency; it was my choice to choose adoption—but, like, it really wasn’t. It felt like my only option.”

Sisson, who researches abortion and adoption at the University of California-San Francisco, interviewed more than 100 American birth mothers who relinquished their infants for adoption. (The mothers’ names, including Cassie’s, were changed.) Sisson’s interest in adoption started in graduate school, when she was interning at a center for pregnant and parenting teens and volunteering on a hotline for people who wanted an abortion. Her experiences didn’t square with the cultural zeitgeist glorifying adoption—think The Blind Side, or Sex and the City, or, perhaps most notably, Juno, in which the titular character bikes off singing after handing her baby to her adoptive mother.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have long praised adoption, too, as a rare common ground that has taken on particular salience in the........

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