Adopting Privilege: A Memoir of Reinventing My Adoptee Narrative
By Abigail K. Hasberry
Adopting Privilege reflects on transracial adoption through her lived experience as a Black adoptee raised in a white family and as a birth mother. The book explores identity, belonging, and the complexities of navigating adoption narratives often centered on adoptive families.

Adoption Unfiltered: Revelations from Adoptees, Birth Parents, Adoptive Parents, and Allies
BySara Easterly, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, & Lori Holden
Interviews with dozens of adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, social workers, therapists, and other allies, all sharing candidly about the challenges in adoption while finding common ground.

American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption.
By Gabrielle Glaser
The shocking truth about postwar adoption in America, told through the bittersweet story of one teenager, the son she was forced to relinquish, and their search to find each other.

Before and After: The Incredible Real-Life Stories of Orphans Who Survived the Tennessee Children's Home Society
By Judy Christie & Lisa Wingate
From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market adoption operation that placed more than 5,000 children, many of whom were not orphans but children taken from poor families, single mothers, or mothers falsely told their babies had died.

Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System: The Case for Abolition
By Alan J. Dettlaff
Dettlaff calls for abolishing the American child welfare system, arguing that its harm to Black families is not an unintended consequence but the foreseeable result of policies rooted in a system that emerged after slavery.

Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA
By Richard Hill
Richard Hill's true and intensely personal story of how he pieced together the long-kept secret of his own origins. This highly suspenseful book is a page-turning saga of personal detective work that will appeal to anyone who loves a good mystery, but this isn't fiction. Richard is a Michigan adoptee and the book features many familiar Michigan locations. 

Goodbye Again
By Candace Cahill
The first time to adoption and the second not long after reuniting with him. In this heart-wrenching and heart-warming memoir, Candace Cahill offers an intimate view of child relinquishment and child loss, the definition of motherhood, and how two things can be true at one time.

Hole In My Heart: Memoir and Report From The Fault Lines of Adoption
By Lorraine Dusky
Dusky shares her story of relinquishment, reunion, and advocacy, tracing her journey from losing a child to adoption to becoming a voice for opening sealed birth records. The book explores the lasting effects of loss, identity, guilt, and separation.

In Their Voices: Black Americans on Transracial Adoption
By Rhonda M. Roorda
Drawing on research and the experiences of Black Americans, adoptees, and professionals, the author examines the realities of transracial adoption and challenges the idea that race can be ignored in adoptive families. The book explores racial identity, belonging, and the importance of maintaining connections to Black communities while offering guidance for families raising children of color.

I Would Meet You Anywhere: A Memoir
By Susan Kiyo Ito
An acclaimed 2023 biographical account that chronicles the author's search for her birth mother. The book intimately explores the complexities of transracial and closed adoptions, racial identity, and intergenerational family trauma, alongside the historical backdrop of Japanese American incarceration during World War II.

Journey Of The Adopted Self: A Quest For Wholeness
By Betty Jean Lifton
The book explores the inner world of the adopted person and traces the adopted person's lifelong struggle to form an authentic sense of self. The author shows how both the symbolic and the literal search for roots becomes a crucial part of the journey toward wholeness.

Lions Roaring Far From Home: An Anthology by Ethiopian Adoptees
By Aselefech Evans, Kassaye Berhanu-MacDonald & Maureen McCauley (Editor)
Lions Roaring Far From Home: An Anthology by Ethiopian Adoptees includes the essays and poems of 33 writers, ages 8 to over 50, raised in six countries (the US, Canada, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, and Australia). It is the first ever anthology by Ethiopian adoptees.

Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience
By Betty Jean Lifton PhD
A landmark work in the adoption rights movement, first published in 1979, challenging sealed birth record policies and shaping public understanding of adoption’s lifelong impact on adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive families. This expanded edition continues the conversation with updated material on adoption, reproductive technologies, and reform.

Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story
By Sarah Myer
A poignant, award-winning graphic memoir about a Korean-American teen who turns to fandom and art-making to survive racing bullying.

Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood
By Gretchen Sisson
Relinquished reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for those for whom abortion is inaccessible, or for whom parenthood is untenable. The stories of relinquishing mothers are stories about our country's refusal to care for families at the most basic level, and to instead embrace an individual, private solution to a large-scale, social problem.

The Adoption Paradox: Putting Adoption in Perspective
By Jean Kelly Widner
A discussion of modern practices, interviews over 100 members in the adoptee constellation who tell their personal stories to illustrate the complexity of adoption and includes research that shines a light on the modern adoption industry.

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade
By Ann Fessler
A critically acclaimed 2006 nonfiction that explores the hidden history of 1.5 million unwed American women forced by societal pressure to surrender their children for adoption between 1945 and 1973 (the "baby scoop era" prior to Roe v. Wade)

Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World
By Dorothy Roberts
Torn Apart challenges the idea that child welfare protects children, arguing instead that it functions as a “family policing system” that disproportionately surveils and separates Black families through its ties to law enforcement and the prison system, and calls for the abolition of the child welfare system.

Unspoken: The Silent Truth Behind My Lifelong Trauma as a Forced Adoptee
By Liz Harvie with Eve Hatton.
A heart-wrenching memoir recounts the author’s experience of forced adoption in England, where she was separated from her birth mother within a system that coerced thousands of unmarried mothers into relinquishing their children, and explores the lifelong impact of that separation, later reunion, and subsequent advocacy. 

What White Parents Should Know about Transracial Adoption: An Adoptee's Perspective on Its History, Nuances, and Practices
By Melissa Guida-Richards &Paula Guida
Written by a transracial adoptee, the book explores identity, culture, and offers practical tools for white parents of transracially and internationally adopted children, challenging assumptions about “good intentions” and examining how privilege, bias, and white saviorism shape adoptees’ lived experiences.

When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology – An Emotion-Filled Collection for Teens Exploring Growing Up Adopted
By Shannon Gibney, Nicole Chung, Mariama J. Lockington, Meredith Ireland, Mark Oshiro, Stefany Valentine, Eric Smith, Kelley Baker, MeMe Collier, Susan Harness, Lisa Nopachai, Matthew Salesses, Sun Yung Shin, Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom & Jenny Heijun Wills.

Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption
By Rebecca Wellington
Examines adoption as a deeply embedded social system shaped by law, race, and gender, and argues that it reflects how the United States values mothers and children. Drawing on her experience as an adoptee, mother, and historian, she traces adoption’s history alongside reproductive policy, secrecy, and systemic inequality.

You Don't Know How Lucky You Are
By Rudy Owens
A Michigan adoptee recounts his lifelong odyssey navigating the secretive world of American adoption to highlight the public health and personal impacts of the institution on millions of Americans.

You Don't Look Adopted
By Anne Heffron
Knowing almost nothing about the first weeks of her life, adoptee Anne Heffron’s intimate memoir of how she left behind nearly everything she owned and returned to the city of her birth in search of answers about identity, belonging, and who she really was.

Long-Term Mental Health Effects of Mother–Child Separation Due to Adoption. By Lynn Roche Zubov, Ph.D., a first mother in reunion. Dr. Lynn Roche Zubov’s research from Winston-Salem State University (often called the PEAR study) highlights significant adoptee and birth parent trauma. It found that adult adoptees are roughly 35x more likely to attempt suicide than non-adopted peers, while first/birth mothers are 37.7x more likely to attempt suicide.  

The Baby Scoop Era Research InitiativeResearch and Inquiry Into Adoption Practice 1945-1972 The Baby Scoop Era was a period from the 1940s through the early 1970s when social stigma, religious institutions, and adoption practices pressured or coerced hundreds of thousands of unmarried mothers to relinquish their children for adoption.

Sexual Abuse in Intercountry Adoption | Intercountry Adoptee Voices Perspective Compiled & Edited by Long Lynelle, Nov 2024This ICAV Perspective paper brings together accounts from adoptee survivors of sexual abuse within adoptive families, many of whom describe being ignored or dismissed when they tried to report harm. It examines how adoption can compound trauma through separation from family, culture, and identity, and raises concerns about the lack of independent oversight, lifelong follow-up, and protections for adopted children. It calls for systemic change and greater accountability within adoption systems.

Adoptees On
A gathering of incredible adopted people willing to share their intimately personal stories with you about the impact adoption has had on our lives. Listen in and you will discover that you are not alone on this journey with Haley Radke.

Adoption Pop
Where a podcast journalist, a filmmaker, and a cultural critic burst pop culture’s favorite adoption tropes, and dive into movies, TV, and reality shows, from prestige dramas to the classics, to ask what these stories are really saying, and not saying, about adoption. And we get real about representation: how the world sees us, and how we see ourselves.with Haley Radke, Kristal Parke and Sullivan Summer.

Adoption: The Making of Me
An oral history of adoption. Sarah Reinhardt and Louise Browne, two adult adoptees discuss all things adoption from the adoptee perspective and interview other adopted people with a focus on advocating for change in the adoption industry.

The Adoption Files (Spotify)
The Adoption Files provides a space for adoptees and allies to discuss barriers to identity access, the challenges adoptees face, and the laws that restrict our rights. They also examine harmful adoption narratives and the ways adoption mythology shapes the lives of adoptees, mothers, and families, with Ande Stanley.

The Janchi Show
A podcast about Asian Adoptees featuring Nathan Nowack, Patrick Armstrong and K.J. Roelke. AKA the ‘Janchi Boys’ interview other adult adoptees, eat/drink Korean cuisine (mostly snacks), and have a big ol' party to celebrate the parts of their identities that make them unique and bring them together!

FRONTLINE: Baby Brokers
Season 2026 Episode 7 | 54m 23s
CC | 06/23/2026
Have lax laws left the for-profit adoption industry ripe for misconduct? FRONTLINE and Retro Report investigate how so-called baby brokers have targeted pregnant women and families looking to adopt, and an epicenter of the problem in Utah.

FRONTLINE: South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning
1hr 24min
CC | 09/20/2024
FRONTLINE and The Associated Press examine allegations of fraud and abuse in South Korea’s historic foreign adoption boom. The documentary investigates cases of falsified records and identities among the adoptions of 200,000 children to the U.S. and other countries over decades.