Adoption Politics: Families, Identities, and Power

“Families are where we live our economic and social relations, and in families formed by law the fiction that families are ‘private,’ constituted in opposition to ‘public,’ is laid bare as the fairy tale that it is,” writes the historian Laura Briggs in her study of transracial and transnational adoption (24). The books reviewed in this essay analyze the many ways that the “fairy tale” of altruism and rescue has masked the politics of transracial and transnational adoption for more than a century. Karen Dubinsky, the author of Babies without Borders, echoes Briggs: adoption “exposes the painful stories that biological families can more easily keep hidden” (129). Karen Balcom’s The Traffic in Babies recounts the history of child trafficking between Canada and the United States, although her definition of adoption as the “construction of one family, paired with the de-construction . . . of another” extends far beyond the specific cases she examines (11). Just as these works explore the unequal socioeconomic and political terrains on which adoption takes place, Eleana Kim’s Adopted Territory, an ethnography of adoption from South Korea, analyzes those inequalities as “increasingly stratified forms of reproduction” and describes the ways that adult Korean adoptees, struggling to make sense of having been born of “pathologized reproduction,” have forged a transnational movement and articulated new identities and concepts of kinship (87–8).

Balcom’s book is a good place to begin exploring the contradictions of transracial and transnational adoption. She examines the “No Man’s Land” of adoptions across the U.S.-Canadian border, where lax oversight allowed a black market to flourish from 1930 to the early 1970s, and profiles the reformers dedicated to professionalizing social work and regulating adoption to stem child trafficking. Her fine-grained history of adoptions from Canada to the United States is closely aligned with the goals and methods of women’s history, as she documents the impact of women reformers on adoption protocols and the profession of social work more generally. She begins in the mid-twentieth century, when the Ideal Maternity Home in Nova Scotia was conducting a “brisk business . . . placing the infant children of unwed Canadian mothers in unsupervised and uninvestigated adoptive homes in the United States” (3). Private maternity homes exploited inconsistencies among national and state-level Canadian and U.S. regulations and cultivated the demand in the United States for babies, especially the “scarce, highly desired, healthy white infant” (194). They also profited from the culture of shame that compelled unmarried pregnant women to relinquish their babies to closed adoptions. Those women, however, are not the protagonists of Balcom’s story. She highlights instead the agency of such social work reformers as Maud Morlock of the U.S. Children’s Bureau and Charlotte Whitton of Canada’s Welfare Council.

In the 1940s, Whitton exposed the lax standards of child welfare services in the Canadian province of Alberta, which sent hundreds of babies to adoptions in the United States with little screening of the homes receiving them. Although state-level social workers in the United States knew of these practices, federal officials on both sides of the border were reluctant to create the legislative procedures needed to correct them. The Alberta system also relegated older children to work placements but provided...