Foreign Adoptions and the Evolution of Irish Adoption Policy, 1945-52

In recent years it has become increasingly common for childless couples from the U.S. and Western Europe to look overseas--to Eastern Europe and Asia--to adopt the "unwanted" children that are no longer so readily available for adoption at home. In Ireland at the turn of the twenty-first century the fact that Irish couples are enthusiastic participants in this "trade" has been juxtaposed with the stark and unpalatable reality that, as late as the 1960s, thousands of healthy Irish children were sent to the United States for adoption because they were illegitimate and thus "unwanted" at home. Until the 1952 Adoption Act provided for the legal transfer of parental rights from biological to adoptive parents, the only alternative to an institutional existence or an insecure boarding-out arrangement for these unwanted children was adoption by foreign, primarily American, families. From the early 1940s to the mid-1960s thousands of Irish children were sent abroad under an informal (and probably illegal and unconstitutional) adoption scheme. This article examines the story of Ireland's overseas adoption scheme, and the evolution of Ireland's adoption policy in the 1940s and 1950s, and is part of a twentieth-century Irish social history that has for the most part been neglected by historians.