Adoption Marketing, Part I: How Relinquishment Is Sold to Pregnant Women ?
These are some high level thoughts based on what I’ve found in my research on private adoption; marketing is *not* the primary focus of my work.
This will be extremely long.
There are many others (adoptees, birth/first parents, researchers) who have expertise here, and I’ll be sharing links as I can and invite others to chime in. Again, this isn’t my primary area of research so I have plenty to learn here, too, and hope this can be a conversation.
When I interview women who have relinquished, we spend a lot of time talking about where they were in their lives when they found out they were pregnant. And most of them were in a pretty vulnerable place.
They had little or unreliable partner or family support, low or no income of their own, not a ton of stability. Some are made even more vulnerable by circumstances like domestic violence, depression, homelessness, but that’s a minority.
Some of these women want to have an abortion, so they search for clinics. Google has a policy that “if you want to run ads using keywords related to getting an abortion, you… need to be certified as an advertiser that… provides abortions.”
https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/9274988#101
This policy was developed in 2019 because anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers were specifically using deceptive advertising. They still do! They just have to be more creative about the keywords they buy, as you’ll see.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/business/media/google-abortion-ads.html
This policy works well if a person is very explicitly searching for abortion clinics, which for the moment we will assume she is — we’ll return to this later. (Side note: I’d love to hear from abortion providers who’ve bought Google ads how their experience with this has been!)
If all goes well, the woman who wants an abortion gets to the abortion clinic, which brings me to this email that I was forwarded years ago.
This advertising agency — which, yes, had just finished a campaign with the largest adoption agency in the country — was specifically targeting abortion patients with geofenced adoption ads. Unsurprisingly, everyone thought this was bullshit.
“Flynn has targeted 140 abortion clinics — all for Bethany Christian Services, the largest adoption agency in the U.S. He also tried targeting methadone clinics and… RealOptions, a Northern California crisis pregnancy-center network.”
https://www.thecut.com/2016/05/pro-life-ads-target-women-at-abortion-clinics.html
The ad agency was based in Boston, and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey put a stop to that pretty quickly. (Thanks, Maura! Everyone, she’s running for governor, go throw her some money so MA doesn’t elect some moderate Republican again.)
https://www.wwlp.com/news/agreement-bars-ad-firm-from-targeting-women-entering-clinics/
But: this was one ad agency. Plenty of other ad agencies still do this, and are using geofencing of abortion clinics to target pregnant people seeking abortion with anti-abortion and pro-adoption advertising as much as possible.
https://www.chooselifemarketing.com/all-about-geofencing/
As my @ANSIRH colleagues Lauren Ralph, @cartwrightalice @UshmaU have repeatedly found, decisional certainty among abortion patients is high. “Selling” adoption to people seeking abortion is a diminishment of their choice.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7984762/
But back to those pregnant women who are feeling vulnerable and uncertain and not explicitly searching for abortion — probably because they don’t want to have an abortion.
Maybe they’re searching for adoption-centric terms.
Kelsey (@KVVyayouknowme, fromanothamotha on IG) shows where basic search terms might lead someone to unlicensed adoption facilitators. I’m including a screenshot here, but check out her IG post & feed, where she looks at this in more detail:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CZKnh0tJDIt/
But what about less adoption-specific searches?
“I’m pregnant and need help”
“teen pregnant help”
“pregnant no income”
Top ad results (depending on location) are adoption agencies or crisis pregnancy centers (which partner w/ adoption agencies), almost never parenting support.
And adoption agencies don’t get a lot of organic traffic! Here’s one mid-size agency’s paid v. organic traffic. This agency’s paid search terms include “help for single mothers without income.” (Um, yes, I picked the graph that was the most egregious paid v. organic discrepancy.)
But agency marketing is just one level on which this outreach occurs. There an additional industry built around teaching prospective adoptive parents to market *themselves* to expectant mothers.
.@jessicamharr_ & I are working on a paper about how potential APs frame their potential parenthood in “Dear Birthmother” letters more theoretically, but here I’m talking about the logistics of that: the photography, the copywriting, the SEO optimization.
Potential APs learn Google ad words,
https://chosenparents.com/adoption-advertising/adoption-advertising-do-it-yourself-adwords-campaign/
and Facebook ads,
https://adoption.com/use-facebook-when-trying-to-adopt/
and how to boost those Facebook ads.
https://www.americaadopts.com/how-our-adoption-outreach-plan-got-500-facebook-likes/
They can hire any number of agencies specifically to help them manage their marketing and outreach:
This agency’s typical clients are investing $1500 per month in Google ads to target expectant women. When I ask birth mothers how much money they would have need to feel they could parent their child, the answer is most typically <$1000. Total.
https://myadoptionadvisor.com/online-advertising/
This service suggests that prospective APs consider openness: “If your client can honestly offer this kind of relationship to a birth mother, it will increase their odds of finding a birth mother.” No suggestion of what openness means in this context.
https://www.adoptionadvertising.org/
This service helps prospective APs create photo albums that agencies can distribute (or that can be used as a PDF on a website). Includes a copywriter, a shot list for a photographer, and — for a upgrade — feedback on your profile from a birth mother.
https://kindredand.co/profile-books/
As I’ve said before — no one relinquishes their infant for adoption because of one advertisement. But in this age, it’s easy for one moment of vulnerability to lead to a Google search or a social media click that sets off a bombardment of advertising.
These ads are designed to tell women that adoption is a beautiful, loving, uncomplicated choice, and to showcase prospective APs as deeply worthy, desirable, and capable parents. I have spoken with women who have connected with agencies because of online advertising.
And once connected with agencies, they are often quickly on a path toward relinquishments. And it’s not always LEGAL. 33 states have regulations limiting who can advertise, what the advertisements can or can’t say, or prohibiting advertising altogether.
https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubpdfs/advertising.pdf
But enforcement is tricky. And I’m in California — where they are supposed to be prohibited — and I see them all the time.
I leave you on this massive thread with some satire from @JuniaDragon, the hope that other will add additional comments/links/resources, and the goal of adding a Part 2 on marketing to prospective APs soon!