IRB-Approved Research · UNLV-2025-430
How the adoption system conditions its own, a qualitative research study examining the experiences of adopted women who relinquished children.
The grooming was largely complete before she ever walked through the door.
Dr. Abigail Hasberry
The Research
Birth mother grooming is a systemic, cumulative process through which expectant mothers are conditioned toward relinquishment in the absence of genuine informed consent.
This research focuses on a uniquely invisible population: women who were adopted and later relinquished their own children, encountering the adoption system twice: once as its subject, and once as its participant.
This is the only population for whom the identity of "birth mother" was rehearsed before the pregnancy. Their story is not incidental to U.S. adoption history. It is its culmination.
It operates through three interlocking elements that converge, reinforce one another, and together produce an environment in which relinquishment is experienced not as a choice, but as an inevitability.
From the Study · Birth Mother Grooming Framework
The Framework
The Birth Mother Grooming Framework identifies three mechanisms that operate together to eliminate genuine choice from the relinquishment process.
The imposed identity of "birth mother" precedes informed consent, legal relinquishment, or autonomous decision-making. The stories told about their own birth mother install a template for who a "good woman" is, years before pregnancy. By the time they are pregnant, the identity is not new. It has been rehearsed since childhood.
The systemic management of stories, language, and information available to the expectant person before, during, and after relinquishment. The adoptee carries the narrative that will be used to groom them; they are not only subject to narrative control from the outside, they may actively reproduce it.
The targeted activation of pre-existing vulnerabilities to produce a relinquishment that lacks the conditions for genuine informed consent. Attachment disruption, identity diffusion, unresolved grief, and hunger for worthiness are adoption-created wounds. These are the specific vulnerabilities the adoption system is positioned to exploit.
Research Findings
Data collection is complete. Themes have been identified. The manuscript is in progress. Findings will be published here when this research has completed peer review.
Complete
IRB Approval Granted (UNLV-2025-430)
Complete
Participant Recruitment and Data Collection
Complete
Qualitative Analysis and Theme Identification
In Progress
Manuscript Writing
Upcoming
Peer Review and Publication
Upcoming
Findings Published Here
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Study Methodology
A qualitative multiple case study building on prior quantitative survey research. Nineteen-question recorded Zoom interviews, individual sessions, and written reflection prompts, hand-coded by the researcher.
This research was designed by an adoptee and birth mother who has navigated this system from the inside, and who refused to stop asking honest questions.
Why It Matters
A signature is not consent. Genuine informed consent requires all options to be visible, alternatives actively supported, and the decision made free from identity pressure, narrative constraint, and exploited vulnerability. This research defines a new standard.
Practitioners must assess FOG status, not just age, as the primary vulnerability indicator. An adult adoptee in the FOG is as vulnerable as a minor. The adoptee's origin story must be treated as a clinical target, not background information.
Adoption agencies serving both expectant mothers and prospective adoptive parents operate in structural conflict of interest. This research provides the evidentiary foundation for mandatory independent legal counsel and post-placement support standards.
Ph.D. · LMFT (TX, MI) · LCMFT (MD) · BCC
Dr. Hasberry is a licensed marriage and family therapist in three states, a board certified coach, and the author of Adopting Privilege: A Memoir of Reinventing My Adoptee Narrative. She is also an adoptee and a birth mother.
That combination is not incidental to this research. It is the research. Dr. Hasberry does not study this population from the outside; she has navigated the adoption system from the inside, twice, and has spent her clinical career sitting with those who have done the same.
She serves on the boards of Adoption Knowledge Affiliates and Adoption Mosaic, and is the creator and host of Adoption Narrative Shift, an 11-episode documentary series currently in development.
Dr. Hasberry's Platform
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