November 6 & 7, 2026

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Who Holds the Pen: Raising Our Voices and Rewriting the Adoption Narrative
A Keynote by Dr. Abby Hasberry, LMFT, LCMFT, BCC

Before you could speak, a story about your life was already being written. But who held the pen? 

In this keynote, Dr. Hasberry examines how the adoption narrative has been authored from the outside and handed to us before we have language to question it, but instead we all lived inside as if it were simply fact. Drawing on her IRB-approved research on birth mother grooming and grounded in the lived experience of adoptees, mothers of relinquished children, and adoptive parents, she explores the infrastructure of the traditional adoption story and names the work already underway to rewrite it. 

This is not a story about change coming. It is a story about the change that is already here and the work of researchers, writers, teachers, advocates, and storytellers across the constellation who are refusing the narrative they were handed and picking up the pen for themselves. Dr. Hasberry charts five lanes of this movement and asks the essential question: What becomes possible when the people adoption was always about finally get to author their own stories? 

Raising Our Voices 

Both an intellectual framework and an invitation. Come ready to recognize yourself in the work being done and to claim the authorship that was always yours.