SYF WEBINAR: Centering Parents Who Have Relinquished a Child: Mental Health, Healing, and Lived Experience
SYF WEBINAR: Centering Parents Who Have Relinquished a Child: Mental Health, Healing, and Lived Experience
Strengthening Your Family Webinar
Centering Parents Who Have Relinquished a Child: Mental Health, Healing, and Lived Experience
Thursday, July 16, 2026 | 1:00PM – 2:30PM EST
Use promo code RELINQUISHED for free registration at checkout.
CE registration is $15 at checkout.
Registration Deadline is July 16, 2026
Extended Access Available July 16 – August 15, 2026
In conjunction with our adoption advocacy partner, The Jockey Being Family Foundation, C.A.S.E offers 600 FREE registrations to each Strengthening Your Family (SYF) Webinar with 10 webinars offered each year. These webinars focus on a variety of relevant topics for adoptive, foster and kinship parents as well as the professionals who serve them.
Center for Adoption Support and Education (C.A.S.E.), Provider #1972, is approved to offer social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Regulatory boards are the final authority on courses accepted for continuing education credit. ACE provider approval period: 3/3/2026 – 3/3/2029. Social workers completing this course receive 1.5 general continuing education credits.
Center for Adoption Support and Education (C.A.S.E.) has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 7463. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. Center for Adoption Support and Education (C.A.S.E.) is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs.
Key Themes & Topics Covered
- The intersection of adoptee identity and relinquishing motherhood
- What “birth mother grooming” is and how it is rooted in the traditional adoption narrative
- The role of power, privilege, and persuasion in relinquishment decisions
- How adoptees who relinquish children uniquely interpret loss, agency, and identity
- Systemic patterns to include how adoption narratives and practices reinforce generational cycles
- Reframing “choice” in adoption: what is informed consent
This powerful and narrative-shifting presentation centers the often-silenced perspective of the relinquishing mother through the lens of adoptees who later relinquished a child to adoption themselves. Drawing from Dr. Abigail Hasberry’s lived experience, professional work in adoption advocacy, and emerging research on birth mother grooming — this session exposes the systemic, emotional, and psychological dynamics that shape relinquishment decisions.
Highlighting the nuances of both open and closed adoption, this interactive webinar will challenge attendees to move beyond dominant adoption narratives and instead confront the layered realities of coercion, conditioning, and perceived lack of choice that many relinquishing mothers experience and its long-term impact. By bridging personal story with research and practice, this talk offers a rare understanding of how adoption systems perpetuate cycles of trauma and how these cycles affect the adoption constellation in reunion and in both open and closed adoptions.
Download Learning Objectives & Timed AgendaMeet the Presenters
Click photo to read bio.
For questions, concerns, or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact
Lauren Lynch at lynch@adoptionsupport.org
