PhD student and adoptee Shannon Quist discusses the consequences of the push for adoption as an answer to unwanted pregnancies now that access to abortion is systematically being taken away in the U.S. This message is for people who have never wondered what happens when we succeed in replacing abortion with adoption. As an adoptee, Quist can tell that story. By revisiting Biblical myth, recent American histories, and even some of her own experiences, Quist draws you into a new perspective on the stories you think you know from the news. She clarifies how harmful it is to conflate adoption and abortion as two sides of the same issue and breaks down what we really seem to be fighting about: sexual behavior mores, women’s bodies, the number of white babies in the nation, and labor production. Shannon Quist is a Ph.D. student at Texas Woman’s University in Denton where she currently serves as the Digital Lab Coordinator for the Language, Culture, & Gender Studies department. She’s the author of the novel Rose’s Locket, and the poetry collection Mirrors Made of Ink. Her publications have appeared in the Austin American-Statesman, Severance Magazine, and the Texas Institute for Child & Family Wellbeing’s annual newsletter Connecting the Dots, among others. Her M.A. thesis focused on adoptee-written narratives and resulted in a narrative theory she calls Phantom Worlds which examines the function of character-constructed fantasies in narrative. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx