adoption

A study released yesterday of prospective adoptive parents found a huge preference for girls. What do we make of this?

Welcome to "Rave On," a new Page Turner series that asks feminist writers, artists, musicians, activists, leaders, and scholars to talk about a book that completely rocked their world. Our series kicks off with writer Jennifer Baumgardner, who raves about 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. Read on for more!

This week's featured mom blog, Hijas Americanas, is written by another mom whose family is crafted by adoption. It's also a blog that didn't start out as a mom blog, but as Rosie Molinary's life opened up for her son to enter into it, her blog morphed as well.

When people talk about Madonna as a symbol of female empowerment, I have to ask, "Empowering to whom?" Certainly not to the black and brown people populating her Sex book, her videos, or her film Truth or Dare. It is through this lens of Madonna's messy racial and sexual politics that I viewed her adoption of a child from Malawi three years ago, and her recent, thus-far-unsuccessful effort to adopt a second child there.