Bryan Schwartzman:
From my home studio, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman, and our guest today is Minna Scherlinder Morse. We'll be talking about Minna's Evolve essay, Questioning Easy Narratives: Exploring Adoption. So along with her husband, Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb, Minna is the adoptive parent of two teenagers. And this essay challenges the assumption that adoption is a win-win for all. And it attempts to use a Jewish framework to delve into the truly complicated set of ethical and practical issues that are raised by adoption in various forms. Minna makes a compelling case that adoption is something that should concern everyone, everyone who cares about an equitable society and the wellbeing of all families. And just so you know, November is also National Adoption Month, and we're getting this episode released just under the wire.

Bryan Schwartzman:
As a reminder, all Evolve essays can be found at evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. Reading Minna's essay will give you a richer listening experience. You'll also find on our website, groundbreaking essays on race, environmental justice, gender, Israel, Palestine, and more. So check out evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Now, what you've been waiting for, time for our guest. Minna Scherlinder Morse is a freelance editor and project manager who has devoted professional and volunteer energy to educating fellow Jews and others about racism, Jewish diversity, and the reason why we're here today, the complexity of adoption. She serves on the Jews of Color and Allies Advisory Committee of Reconstructing Judaism and facilitate an interdenominational support group sponsored by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association. And that's for clergy and spouses involved in transracial adoption. And we also talk about this, she is currently pursuing a graduate certificate in Jewish ethics and social justice at the Jewish Theological Seminary with a focus on adoption issues. Minna Scherlinder Morse, great to see you. Welcome to the show. Great to have you on the podcast.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
Thank you. Great to be here.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So a lot to talk about. This is National Adoption Month, and there've been some high profile pieces in The New Yorker and The Atlantic calling attention to this issue. You've written in the midst of really delving into ethical issues surrounding adoption. So I'm wondering, as an adoptive parent of two children, what was it in your personal experience or just personal evolution that really started getting you thinking about the ethical issues surrounding adoption and maybe questioning some of the assumptions you had going into it?

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
Well, I think like many perspective parents looking at adoption, I didn't think very deeply at the time, to be perfectly honest. It was the narrative of adoption being a win-win of just another way of forming a family and of us feeling from an ethical perspective, in a way, not glued to biology. The idea that there were children to care for kind of drove us towards adoption. I mean, I'm not going to say... Initially, we did go through a fertility, kind of like, "Okay, we're done. Let's look at another option." And in that process, and after that process of becoming a parent through adoption, through watching engagement with social workers, through, of course, a desire of my daughter's, my elder child's birth mom. We didn't know anything, going in. Adoption happened very quickly for us.
Minna Scherlinder Morse:
And so through knowing her and hearing over the years, more of her story, and also because we had adopted transracially, kind of realizing that though I was raised in a progressive household in a community, I mentioned to you when we spoke previously that I was raised by secular Jews in ethical culture, not in a Jewish community. And so it was an integrated, it's a humanist community that was founded by a former rabbi [crosstalk 00:05:24].

Bryan Schwartzman:
In Baltimore, was it?

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
This was in Baltimore.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Right.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
So I mean, when people ask me, "What's an unusual thing about you?" I say I taught Jada Pinkett Smith Sunday school.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Oh wow.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
Because her grandmother was the matriarch of the community, so I grew up, in that respect, at least, on my weekends, in an integrated community and thought that this was something that I could handle, right? And then I'm raising a child of color and I'm looking around at how many kids of color are going to be at our school, how many Black kids, specifically, are going to be at our school. And facing the kinds of questions that we got and realizing that racism and diversity looked different from within than from without, I turned to communities that were forming online that were led by adult adoptees of color and learning more about what their experiences had been as transracial adoptees.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
So starting with that racial lens of what is it like for a kid who is not white to be raised, for many people in utter whiteness, but then also getting more of a sense of some of the ethical pitfalls of adoption generally, and more about the history of adoption, which is really rather problematic. And just like with racism in this country, the narratives that were born from that history kind of still are in us today, even though we don't realize that we're living them out.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Lots of ways to go. I mean, I guess first off, just for basic definition of terms, you mentioned an open adoption. Folks that haven't got through the process might not understand open adoption versus closed adoption. Can you explain the difference?

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
Sure. So the history in our country of adoption is total secrecy, and there was the idea that to protect the birth mother's privacy and to protect everyone involved and to make it seem as though you had an as-if biological family back in the day, records were closed. And in fact, only recently, are adoptee activists getting birth records open state by state so that they have access to their original birth records.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
So, I mean, there's a history of the evolution from closed options to open that is actually kind of complicated, but openness means that there is at least a recognition of the importance of birth family, birth heritage to a child and to their identity formation, and some effort to provide that information to the kid. But open adoption, what I would consider open adoption is actually when you're able, and sometimes we're not for various reasons, but when you're able to have an ongoing relationship with the birth family. So some people just send letters, and that's sort of a little open, some people see each other once or more a year, and some people are in regular contact and see each other much more frequently.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So you wrote in your Evolve essay about crossing racial and cultural lines and how that can be really enriching for the culture of the adopters but very problematic, potentially, for the adopted child. And wondering if you could say more about your experience there, potentially, and also what kind of things have you learned from that process?

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
So, as I said, I've learned a great deal from adult adoptees because they're the ones who have lived this experience from whatever age through adulthood. I think that in some of our congregations, for instance, a lot of the diversity is among our children, right? There are adoptive families and there looks like a lot of diversity, but it is white parents with children of color from various places. It feels enriching for us. It is enriching. I mean, I think adopting transracially ultimately thrust me, I think we all need to be thrust. And this was just the impetus that thrust me into learning and better... learning from people of color and specifically, at least at first, transracial adoptees, what racism really looks like in this country, not just on the surface, not just explicit, but the microaggressions that happen every day, the kind of insidious behavior that comes from narratives that we've absorbed over the years from our history about what X people are like, what Black people are like, what Asian people are like.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
So that was enriching for me. And I'm glad that my children have their birth families. And I'm glad I've been able to provide racial mirrors in their lives. But I don't know that I've done either enough. I don't know that most adoptees have the same opportunities. I don't know. And the identity issues that many adoptees face, even not adoptees of color, I mean, adoptees generally are facing identity issues as they come of age, just trying to grapple with who they are and what the broken tie is from their past. But for adoptees of color, they're trying to navigate a racist society with cultural guides who are sort of not necessarily clued in.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
And when we spoke earlier, you mentioned Colin Kaepernick's series documentary, or it's not a documentary series, dramatization series of his childhood, Colin in Black and White.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Right.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
I mean, I know he adores his adoptive parents, and I guess they've come to grips with how clueless they were, because kid gloves are off. He paints a very unflattering picture, and a somewhat sympathetic picture, of his very loving parents who have been conditioned the way all of us have and worse because they were living in a very insular environment.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So from what I understand, perhaps in addition to challenging identity issues that it could present for adoptees, the adoption as a practice, as an institution, I mean the main critiques are that it's taken or moved kids from poor households, often from households of color, to wealthier households, to whiter households and has been historically driven by the needs of or the desires of parents as opposed to the needs needs of children.

Bryan Schwartzman:
But also along the same lines, the number of adoptions in this country has declined dramatically from even two decades ago. I've just looked at the overall numbers, and it's way down, it's much less common as a practice. So it seems like on some level, society has, or states have started to accept the criticisms that you've made in your essay. So I guess I want to ask by what's the work that needs to be done in this area?

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
On the international front, I think that the questions about corruption, I mean, there is some sort of feeding the need, feeding the desire that goes on when there's not a lot of oversight so that first families are misguided about what's going to happen with their kids, and then suddenly they're placed out from an orphanage where they thought they were putting them for safekeeping for a while, because they were struggling, or straight out kidnapping.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
That's not all that happens. There are kids in orphanages who need to be deinstitutionalized and maybe taken care of locally, and, yes, I think worst case scenario, adopted overseas out of country. But that's all happened on a policy level. I think the domestic adoption, I don't know enough to know how drastically domestic infant adoption has decreased. I know there's a large pool of kids in the foster system who are older, who need loving families, that they'd be better off in family than in group homes, et cetera, but people want to adopt babies.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
So yeah, I don't know the numbers are that clear that the criticism has been accepted and so adoptions are going down. I think there's complicated factors that lead to that. And right now with the restrictions on abortion in places like Texas, Texas has always been a serious wild west on adoption. And the pregnancy crisis centers, right, where they are trying to convince someone not to get an abortion, often have ties to adoption agencies or facilitators. And I can't even begin to enumerate all of the issues that aren't regulated in this country that affect children negatively. I want to say people like me, who are kind of just trying to form a family and generally think of themselves as ethical, have a different set of personal choice points to make.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
But I think that many people do look to adoption. I don't think that adoption is wrong. I mean, I think that I've got a real loving family. I think that sometimes there's a limitation of choice for struggling expectant parents. Sometimes adoption is exactly what's the best possible scenario. And I would say, hopefully, if it's an open adoption, then it's actually less damaging. But in the adoption/adoptee world, adoption reform advocacy world, there's a slogan or a saying that adoption is too often a permanent solution to a temporary problem. And I think an expectant mother or struggling expectant parent facing an ill-timed pregnancy shouldn't just have permanent dissolution of her ties to her child as the best option.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Talking about permanent dissolution, that raises an interesting point. You had said, actually, when we spoke before the interview that the American model really derives from almost an ancient Roman approach to adoption and how it's very different from the way a similar practice might be described in the Talmud and Jewish sources. So are you able to talk about the difference and why it matters?

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
Yeah, sure. Yeah, so what interested me is that in Jewish tradition, there is something much more akin to guardianship than legal adoption. The Roman system was... And that was about caring for a needy child, right? And from what I can tell, it didn't necessarily mean that the guardian who was assigned by the court would need to take the child in and raise the child, but that was sometimes needed and so really exalted in the Talmud as like the biggest mitzvah one could do and all to the good, right? Needy children need to be taken care of. But at least in the Middle Ages, it's very clear in many communities that the widowed mother of a fatherless child was still very engaged in the rearing of her child, and so was extended family. So the guardian would take care of those things that a father would take care of, making sure that the child was educated and making sure that the finances were handled and things like that.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
So it was a sort of spectrum of gap-filling that could also include raising a child, but the biological heritage was always honored. So the guardian could be honored like a father, but it wouldn't be erased that the father was thus and such, if that makes sense. In the Roman model, it is the need for an heir that drove adoption. It was legal. Biological ties were legally severed. And the American model is some kind of awkward combination of these two impulses of helping a needy child, or a perceived needy child, and forming a family and a method of family formation.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
So I wouldn't say that we're a just like direct, complete descendant of the Roman model, but the outcome is, I think, that the desire for family formation drives the process to a fault, that ultimately the perspective adoptive parents are the clients of the agency or the lawyer. And so the expectant parent who's considering adoption doesn't necessarily have their legal needs covered, their interests covered to the same extent. And the way that they're encouraged to relinquish, wittingly or unwittingly, kind of makes it seem as though this is the greatest gift that they could give to their child.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I mean, if I understood it correctly, though, you in your case, and in cases of open adoption, don't totally sever ties. I mean, are you able to tell us about a time you were really glad that you didn't... that either you or your child was glad there was a birth family in the picture in some sense?

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
Yeah. I don't think there's a time that hasn't been the case. I mean, so legally, it's severed. Legally, the institution of adoption legally terminates the rights of the biological parents. But the idea behind open adoption is to keep that as family anyway, to whatever extent. So okay, when my daughter started asking where babies come from, we were able to physically say that, "You know, this person is your tummy mommy," or whatever language we used at the time. And that was incredibly useful. It made her feel less different from her friends in school, more connected to her birth mom.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
Yeah, I mean, all along, I think that there's a continuity of identity that it's complex to navigate, but it's much clearer to the kids, I think. I mean, we all have complicated families these days with divorce and remarriage and blended families. And I think the open adoption model is just a different version of that. When we marry, we get extra family, whether we want them or not. We all have a crazy aunt. So I adore my children's birth moms, and we navigate relationship like everybody navigates relationship in family.

Bryan Schwartzman:
At what age do you first get the question, like, "Mommy, why do I look different from you?" And how do you answer that? And would you answer it differently today, I wonder?

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
No. I mean, there's the consistent... For people who are getting good advice from adoption professionals, the good adoption professionals are advising everyone, have long been advising everyone to talk about adoption from the get-go. And people do it in very different ways and have very different narratives about, "You were meant for me," which is a narrative I really don't think is appropriate to suggest that there needed to be a rupture in the family for you to be where you needed to be, in your original family. But we talk about adoption like growing in someone else's womb for a very long time. And we have birth stories that we share from even when they're babies, so we get used to sharing it. And right now I feel like I'm normalizing exactly the same thing I'm critiquing, but there are ways that we all tell stories about family to create bonds.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
I want them to be developmentally appropriate and true stories, and sensitive to these differences. So once my daughter asked me, kind of, "Why don't we match?" I don't remember at what age, and she knew her birth mom at that point, but genetics doesn't make a whole lot of sense to children. So I explained that, "You look like your birth mom, and I wish that I looked like you. I wish we could all be the same color." But what I wanted to make sure I didn't say or suggest by not saying explicitly, "I wished I looked like you," was, "I wish she looked like me," which wasn't true, but which she in our society naturally would've sort of assumed.

Bryan Schwartzman:
If you're enjoying this interview, please hit the subscribe button and be among the first to know when a new episode appears. And if you're a new listener, welcome. Check out our back catalog for lots of other groundbreaking conversations. Please take a moment to give us a five-star rating or leave a review. Positive ratings really help others find out about the show. Okay, now back to the interview with Minna Scherlinder Morse.

Bryan Schwartzman:
From what I understand, you've started this program at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and you're really attempting to delve into adoption from a Jewish ethical perspective. So can you tell us about this project, maybe what you're hoping to find, what you found, where you still need to go?

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
Right. Thanks. So I've been trying to find a framework for doing this for years, and this happened to pop up during COVID, where I had remote access to classes at JTS and learned folks to sort of learn from. And I ended up being able to take a what turned out to be, and I think I knew, a really relevant class in bioethics first semester, and came in knowing that the traditional model of guardianship was very different from our model. What I didn't know that I would find is just how deeply entrenched the win-win narrative was among the folks in the conservative movement forging halakhah. So I looked at that, I looked at the conservative movements, grappling with much newer... I think of modern adoption as a relatively new thing, it's 150 years old. But surrogacy and gamete donation were issues that bioethicists went, "What do we do?"

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
And we're looking at not just the sort of logistical ritual legal ramifications of who's the father, who's the mother, but also at who's affected, who's harmed in this process, who might be harmed in this process. Is there exploitation possible? Is there physical harm possible? And in many cases, not all, in many cases would say, "These are serious issues. You should consider adoption first." And so my big red flag is that there are ethical issues in adoption too. And I think first and foremost is that no is looking at, as I said in this article in Evolve, what harm might have been done to the folks who relinquished this child. Like how did this child become available for adoption? That's something we should know. And the truth is we think we know, we assume that there are ethical practices in play and that the birth parent had agency and that this was a choice that they made for whatever reason and that in some cases that they're an angel and this was the most loving thing that they could do for their child. And I think we are all brainwashed a little bit.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
And in some cases, the birth mothers are, I don't want to say brainwashed in that case, but I think that birth mothers are led to buy into a helpful narrative that they're giving their kids a better life. But the truth is with adoption, they are not necessarily getting a better life. They are getting a different life, and they are absolutely most often getting a more economically-advantaged life. But if they were able to stay in their own biological family, they would not have the sort of hole of "Why would someone relinquish me?" that adoptees grapple with. They would not have the hole of "Who am I, where do I come from?" that adoptees have. And that can sometimes lead to serious issues for the adoptees. I mean, adoptees are individuals with different constitutions and different ways of growing in different environments that they're raised in, but it is never not there, I think.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So given where you are so far, what's sort of the overall message you would offer to perspective adoptive parents? What would you like them to consider?

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
So at the very least, I want them to think very critically and do more research about who is helping them with this process and to ask really, really, really probing questions about how they are counseling the struggling expectant parents who come to them, thinking about placing for adoption. Is adoption presumed when someone comes to them for advice? What kind of options counseling are they offering? And in the process of adoption, what kind of legal representation does the birth parent have that's real, where they're actually the client? What kinds of post-adoption counseling does everyone get? There's all sorts of questions and all sorts of resources people can go to, to find those critical questions.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
But I also think that we need to think critically just from a bird's eye view. I mean, in the article, I talked about, I'm trying to claim from orthodoxy these terms that I found very useful. And we can just say before the fact and after the fact, but the lechatchila when approaching ritual questions, like trying to do it perfectly beforehand versus what do you do when something gets screwed up after, bedieved. I find that useful. I think bedieved, we all need to think much more critically about what actually is in the best interest of the child that is placed. We need to think about racial issues. We need to think about openness with birth family. We need to look at the research that says that these things are really important to children's development as people and so they grow up whole.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
But lechatchila, I think we need to look at how to avoid family separation as often as possible in the first place. And I don't know all the answers to that, but I think that that's a question that we need to really, really address as a society. I know, for instance, as Jewish communities, we step up for refugee families. Like individuals, we rally around and we collect things. I know that there are efforts to rally around foster parents in our communities to make sure that they are best able to support the children that are placed in their care.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
But what if there was a mechanism for rallying around families who were on the brink, where it really was an ill-timed pregnancy or where it was just X resources that would make the difference between choosing to parent and facing what seems like the only choice, but actually isn't often the only choice of placing for adoption? Because also in open adoption, there are no guarantees for the birth parent. And I mean, there are contracts in some states that are practically, what is it? Dejure versus de facto?

Bryan Schwartzman:
Right.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
They're legally binding, but birth parents often will not have the resources to fight that in court. And so adoptive parents can intentionally pull a bait and switch, or they can unintentionally or whatever out of fear or discomfort or not knowing exactly how to handle a situation, close stuff down. And it's as if that open adoption agreement never existed. So I'd rather there be more choices for expectant parents in that situation.

Bryan Schwartzman:
You hinted at it a little bit, but I'm wondering, is there a broader message or agenda for the Jewish community, the Jewish establishment on adoption? I mean, you pointed out in an earlier conversation that certainly certain Jewish individuals with a lot of connections in the community were responsible or played a big part in what some call the Baby Scoop Era, and really popularizing adoption, particularly with pressuring unwed mothers to give up their babies. So is there any reckoning that has to happen? Should Jewish institutions play a role in maybe keeping birth families together?

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
So I will say that you're speaking of the Louise Wise Services, that is the perpetrator of abuses that were not uncommon in the era. So I think though they went further in some regards with the multiples research that is examined in the documentary Three Identical Strangers, there's gnarly things that they shouldn't have done. But they were part of a movement of well-heeled, well-meaning, well-positioned women at the turn of the century who were trying to help children and whose agencies evolved with the times to trying to help teens who got pregnant in mass numbers after World War II and whose families, mostly white, this was a white phenomena, and whose families wanted to protect them, and then whose babies were stripped from them. So that's the Baby Scoop Era.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
And sure, it feels spooky that there was a major Jewish institution involved in that. I don't think that they were, except in that research, which is problematic, and which I think that the institution that has the power to do so should give the records, to make those records available to the children, to the now adult children who were involved in that research. But that's like a little micro thing. On a global level, I just think as Jews who are trying to make the world a just place and who don't want to be complicit in injustice in our personal lives, there's attention that we need to pay to how we form our families. And also in forming our families, I mean, I don't think adoption is a bad thing. It's a tricky thing, but it's also a tricky thing that adoptive parents find out that it's tricky in myriad ways and need to, and do very often, just adapt so that we're parenting our kids as well as we need and thinking about what they will need.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
I know many, many people who, for instance, adopted internationally thinking that they could avoid the whole birth mother issue, and then came to realize it was like that was a hole that needed filling. That didn't help. It helped them briefly feel like they were the sole mommy, but it didn't really help in the raising of their children. I'm not saying that's the motivation for all people who adopted internationally at all, but we just sort of learned the things we didn't know.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Another short interruption, if you'd like to support these groundbreaking conversations of Evolve on the podcast, on the website, in our web conversations, or the curriculum that we're producing, you can engage in citizen philanthropy and support us. Every gift matters. There's a donation link right in the show notes. So thank you for listening. Thank you for all your support. All right, now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Bryan Schwartzman:
There's so much here, so much to discuss. I'm certainly eager to see when you do publish that academic article and where your research and storytelling goes. I think I wanted to close by asking, I'll admit that before I started researching this, I was unaware there was such a thing as National Adoption Month. I think we find out all the time there's a day or a month for something we didn't know about, but sort of just wondering how you feel about that as you've talked about adoption as something that should be celebrated, investigated, critiqued, sort of all at once. How do you feel that there is this attempt to publicize and presumably encourage it?

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
Yeah, I would stop short of celebrated and say embraced. I mean, adoptees and adoptive families need to be fully embraced by our communities, just for the health of the adoptees and the integrity of those families. But it is, I think, overly celebrated in that I think National Adoption Month was started or Adoption Awareness Month was started as a way to encourage people to adopt from the foster system. And then it became something that was really pushing people towards adoption. And it was with this sort of orphan-saving mindset. And we didn't go into this, but I think that that orphan-saving mindset is dangerous.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
And maybe my biggest question is what about the [Hebrew 00:38:49]? The [Hebrew 00:38:49] is the orphan, what about the widow, the widowed mother? The equivalent of the widowed mother in our society is the expectant mom facing this challenge of like, "What do I do?" And widow and orphan go together pretty much all the time in our texts. And that might be my big question is let's focus on today's equivalent of what the orphan is, which is a very complicated term, vulnerable children, but let's not forget they're vulnerable first families, they're vulnerable families.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Well, Minna Scherlinder Morse, thank you. Thank you so much for writing this essay and sharing some of your personal experiences. And I just thank you for sharing your perspective and discussing with us.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
Well, thank you for inviting me here. It's been a great conversation.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Shabbat Shalom, happy Thanksgiving and Hanukkah.

Minna Scherlinder Morse:
Yeah, Thanksgivingkah or whatever.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Minna Scherlinder Morse. So what did you think of today's episode? I want to hear from you. Evolve is about curating meaningful conversations, and that includes you. Send me your questions, comments, feedback. You can reach me at bschwartzman@reconstructingjudaism.org. We'll be back next month with a brand new episode. Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Wachs. Our theme song, Ilu Finu is by Rabbi Miriam Margles. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman. And I will see you next time.