I used to be a football fan and spent Sundays cussing out refs and memorizing tight ends. But when I moved to Alaska, I reclaimed my Sundays from the manufactured machismo and mansplaining. I stopped being a spectator. This year, however, I paid attention to the Super Bowl after being alerted to a specific advertisement. And now that the confetti has been swept up, the trophy hoisted and the rest of the world has moved on, I’m still reeling from that 60-second ghost.
I am grateful to announce that the ad didn’t air during the mainstream program. Instead, the spot, titled “The Girl in the Middle,” aired during the Turning Point USA “alternative” halftime show. It depicted a young woman caught between two loud, competing narratives — parenting and abortion — and it framed adoption as the forgotten third option: a courageous act of love.
To me, as a mother who was manipulated into relinquishing her son, this “third option” isn’t a bridge — it’s a trap draped in the language of bravery. It is dangerous, expensive propaganda.
The ad presents adoption as a shiny alternative to abortion, but let’s get the definitions straight: Abortion is a health care decision regarding whether to continue or end a pregnancy; adoption is an alternative to parenting. By conflating the two, the industry isn’t supporting women. It’s fueling a supply-and-demand model that treats infants as commodities and birth mothers as vessels.
The math alone is a moral failure. As I watched the ad’s glossy interpretation of “the choice,” I couldn’t help but calculate how much that propaganda cost. While the exact price tag for a spot on a Turning Point USA broadcast is opaque, we know a main stage 60-second ad this year cost $16 million ― even a fraction of that budget is an indictment.
If the goal was truly to help “the girl in the middle,” that money could have funded the very resources that turn a forced hand back into a real choice. In her book ”Relinquished,” researcher Gretchen Sisson reveals a staggering truth: Most women who “chose” adoption would not have done so if they had as little as $5,000 in support. By that metric, the money spent on this single minute of airtime could have provided the critical difference for thousands of struggling mothers. It could have provided rent and child care for hundreds of families. Instead, those funds were funneled into a recruitment film for an industry where private adoption fees range from $30,000 to $65,000, and where infants are treated as the inventory that keeps the machine running.
I’ve lived the “primal wound” this ad glosses over. I know what it’s like to have your motherhood dismantled before it can even take root. I know the weight of empty arms and the phantom limb of child loss that never quite heals.
There is no mention of this lifelong trauma in the ad. There is no mention of the identity struggles many adoptees face, or the staggering power imbalance between wealthy hopeful parents and a woman in crisis. Even the woman in the ad never says a word — she is a silent prop in her own life, staring at a positive test while others decide her value. And where is the father? He is erased entirely: A convenient omission that makes the mother seem more “savable” and the child more “available.”
What scares me most is that this ad feels like the opening bell for the Baby Scoop Era 2.0. From the 1940s through the early ’70s, the original Baby Scoop Era relied on raw, heavy-handed shame to separate unmarried mothers from their infants. Today, the tactics have evolved, but the goal — ensuring a steady supply of “available” infants for a lucrative marketplace — remains identical. In place of the windowless maternity homes of the past, we have million-dollar digital recruitment films; in place of “sin,” they sell “bravery.”
But the “bravery” they market is just a modern synonym for erasure. We are sliding into a predatory time where grief is marketed as a price we should be “proud” to pay, gaslighting a new generation of pregnant women into believing that their own disappearance is the greatest gift they can give their children.
Twenty years after I stood in that “middle” space, my son and I finally met in person. It was the only time we would ever stand face-to-face. He died just three years later at the age of 23. My story didn’t end with the “win-win” reunion promised by adoption advocates. It ended in the permanent silence of a grave.
In the wake of that silence, I am left to answer the question people often ask: Do I think adoption is ever “right”?
My answer is that adoption should be a safety net, not a marketplace. It should be a solemn service for children who have no other options, not a multi-million-dollar recruitment drive targeting vulnerable women. To be clear, there are many adoptees who live full, rich lives, and are deeply thankful for the families they were placed in. Their happiness is real, and it is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit — but we must stop using those success stories to sanitize a predatory industry. Presenting adoption as a moral victory is problematic, at best, when that victory is built on a foundation of preventable loss.
To avoid “Baby Scoop 2.0,” we must stop treating mothers as temporary vessels and start treating family preservation as a heroic choice. We should spend those millions on the mothers and children themselves, rather than on the polished lies that tell them to disappear.
Furthermore, by presenting an anti-choice push as a “courageous” alternative, these organizations ignore the reality that for many, abortion is a responsible and necessary health care decision. If women could access safe and affordable abortion — something that is less and less available in this country — the “supply” for this marketplace would dry up. A woman’s decision that she doesn’t want a family, at that moment or ever, should be a perfectly good and legally defended choice. It should not be shamed into a lifetime of “heroic” relinquishment, and ads like this that try to window-dress anti-abortion pushes must be called out for what they are: high-budget attempts to further vilify abortion.
It’s time we stopped cheering for the erasure of mothers and started fighting for the resources that allow them to exist.
Candace Cahill is an author, artist and advocate based in Denali, Alaska, whose work explores the intersection of identity, policy, and the lived experience of relinquishment and adoption. The author of “Goodbye Again: A Memoir,” Candace draws on her background in social work and her personal history as a first mother to champion adoption reform and ethical narrative. You can find out more about her work at candacecahill.com.
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