Project Good Podcast

Host Annmarie Hylton introduces the Project Good Podcast’s November focus on “adoption truths,” framing adoption as involving love, loss, identity, and belonging. She interviews Jean Kelly Widner—adoptee, researcher, advocate, and author of The Adoption Paradox—after citing 2024 foster care adoption data and noting uneven access to original birth records across states. Widner shares her closed-era adoption story (born in 1965, relinquished via a Salvation Army hospital, adopted in Washington) and describes beginning her birth-family search after a 2020 DNA match and obtaining her original birth certificate. The conversation critiques sealed/altered birth certificates, highlights adoption’s links to poverty-driven neglect in foster care, discusses the for-profit private infant adoption marketplace and coercion risks, and offers guidance for adoptive parents. Widner urges policymakers to open original birth certificates and address the socioeconomic conditions driving family separation.

00:00 Welcome to Project Good
02:36 Meet Jean Kelly Widner
04:08 What Family Means
06:53 Jean’s Adoption Story
17:49 Why Origins Matter
24:47 A State Sanctioned Lie
29:13 Foster Care vs Private Adoption
34:10 Neglect Poverty and Preservation
41:43 Parent Support Systems
44:29 Why America Adopts More
51:12 Open Adoption Realities
56:41 Advice For Adoptive Parents
01:07:01 Adoptee Identity And Legacy
01:11:43 Policy Fixes And True North

Jean Kelly Widner is an award-winning author, researcher, and passionate advocate for truth in adoption narratives. Her background in professional writing empowers her to tell complex stories with clarity and compassion. Jean writes with the goal of giving voice to those often left out of the adoption conversation—birth parents, adoptees, and families shaped by the system. The Adoption Paradox is the result of years of personal interviews, research, and emotional courage.

The Adoption Paradox challenges the romanticized narrative of adoption. Jean explores the deep emotional and psychological impacts adoption has on all parties involved. Drawing from real-life stories, expert interviews, and in-depth research, this book invites readers to examine adoption through a new lens—one of nuance, trauma-awareness, and healing.