Babies without Borders: Adoption and Migration across the Americas by Karen Dubinsky (review)

Karen Dubinsky has burst the bubble of the Hague Convention. The Convention aimed to establish adoption practice norms, distinguish between legal and illegal intercountry adoptions, and enforce sanctioned practices. On the one hand, it brought in a global legal framework to regulate adoption practice for the purpose of preventing the abduction or sale of, or traffic in, children. On the other hand, as Dubinsky outlines in her carefully researched book, it has created new dilemmas.

First, Dubinsky questions “the level of certainty about the easy separation—not to say prosecution—of the licit and the illicit in the global circulation of [children]” (p. 123). Second, she shows that the Hague Convention fails to address the vast inequalities that make intercountry adoptions possible and mark them with fundamental contradictions. Even more problematically, the Hague Convention may produce what Dubinsky terms “the privileged innocence of one party” (p.123) that perpetuates asymmetrical relations between sending and receiving countries.

From her extensive research on historical and contemporary transracial and transnational adoptions, Dubinsky proposes the existence of three sets of symbolic children. “The National Baby” emerged between 1961 and 1962 out of Operation Peter Pan. During that time, over 14,000 Cuban children arrived in Miami through a clandestine scheme, organized by the Catholic Church and the CIA, to escape the rumoured fate of being taken away by Castro’s Revolutionary Government. The “Hybrid Baby” resulted from the adoption, by white parents, of black babies in Montreal during the 1950s and 1970s, and of aboriginal children, most notably in Western provinces, since the 1960s. Dubinsky describes the “Missing Baby” as coming out of the wave of transnational adoptions of Guatemalan babies in the 1990s, at the end of the civil war in that country. By revealing the social and political contexts in which each case occurred, Dubinsky challenges the assumption that kidnapping and rescuing are fully distinct categories. She concludes that both concepts are too selective and partial to capture the murky spaces and partialities associated with transracial and transnational adoptions.

Babies without Borders contains many fascinating stories told by a consummate historian and an adoptive parent. The book provides an instructive analysis that pieces together themes of family, childhood, imperialism, war, and racism. Dubinsky asks thought-provoking questions and provides insights that should play an important part in forthcoming debates on transnational adoptions. Her case studies show that empirical, legal, and ethical certainties can be elusive despite well-intentioned attempts to arrive at these certainties. Dubinsky advises honest recognition of murky spaces and acceptance of the tough work that comes with it. In her view, this tough work includes helping children to understand the connections between their adoptions and larger conditions.

Despite its many strengths and contributions, the book has notable gaps. One of these concerns the connections among the selected sets of adoptions. For example, controversies around domestic adoptions and the current wave of transnational adoptions cannot be treated as separate from each other, and historical connections could have been addressed. Furthermore, although the three terms—the National Baby, the Hybrid Baby, and the Missing Baby—provide handy descriptors, they are also somewhat misleading and may inadvertently limit readers’ appreciation of the empirical and analytical connections among them. In my view, the nationalistic imagination of the lost children/injured nation also applies to criticisms from aboriginal and black communities and offers a potent theme in Guatemalan popular perceptions of transnational adoptions.

Reflecting on a trip to a Latin American culture camp with her son, the author notes the primacy of market relations that organized the event, in contrast to community bonds forged between white adoptive parents and black leaders. That being true, the hegemony of cultural identity discourse is also particular to our present and has yet to be taken fully to task. Somewhat relatedly, Dubinsky explains only briefly the changes in black communities’ perceptions of adoptions by white parents in the 1970s by referring to the influence of Black Power and black nationalism...