An incredibly emotional and moving collection of oral histories from women who were forced to surrender their children in the 1950s and 1960s before abortion and birth control were more widely accessible - and I do mean forced, by the adoption system, by their families, and by societal pressures.

It's a really haunting read, especially right now when the overturning of Roe v. Wade will not only force hundreds of thousands of people to give birth and surrender their children to an adoption/foster care system that has somehow only become more broken in the years since, but also threatens peoples' rights to birth control, all in a nation where a minority of people are campaigning for a return to the absolute lack of sexual education these women received.

I would have liked some of the shorter oral histories each chapter begins with to have been better contextualized, historically, at some points, and I definitely think Fessler would have benefitted from either establishing her scope as white middle-class women or exploring more intersectional identities. But it's still a haunting and traumatizing read, and a warning about the for-profit adoption system that many will ignore.