What Ethical Adoption Actually Looks Like: What You Should Know About the Business of Family-Making with Marjie Alonso

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For the 238th episode of Private Parts Unknown, host Courtney Kocak welcomes adoptive mother and writer Marjie Alonso.

In this interview, Marjie unpacks what ethical adoption actually looks like—and why the familiar “better life” narrative so often obscures power imbalances, secrecy, and profound loss. Drawing from her experience adopting two sons from Paraguay and later taking them back to meet their birth mothers, she explains the concept of the primal wound, how adoption can impact adoptees (and everyone involved) across a lifetime, and why infertility or loss is not, on its own, a reason to adopt. We dig into the hidden economics of adoption, the business of family-making, and how a system built around demand can slide into coercion and trafficking.

Marjie also speaks candidly about reckoning with her own choices, what she wishes she had understood earlier, and why flipping the script—from “adults who want children” to “children who need families”—is essential to imagining a more ethical future for adoption.

For more from today's guest, Marjie Alonso:

• Subscribe to Marjie Substack piecesofstring.substack.com
• Follow Marjie on Bluesky bsky.app/profile/marjie.bsky.social

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