Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption by Laura Briggs (review)

Adoption narratives in mass media and public conversation tend to focus on children and people that decide to adopt. The first are portrayed as helpless, vulnerable, and, as stressed by Signe Howell, “socially naked” and alone in the world. The latter are generous beings craving to give a home to a needy child, who often have to deal with absurd bureaucracies and policies that unreasonably hinder or delay the processes.

A similar view is shared by some scholars who have written extensively on the subject, among whom Elizabeth Bartholet is one of the most prominent examples. Bartholet has argued in different works that United States and other countries’ laws impede or prevent adoption, despite the large number of children in need of a family who are “languishing” in orphanages in poor countries or in foster care and the large number of people longing to adopt. In her book Nobody’s Children, published in 1999, Bart-holet makes a case for adoption as preferable to foster care inside the United States, arguing that dysfunctional mothers or foster families are not and cannot be “true parents.”

Laura Briggs shares with Bartholet her condition of adoptive mother, but in her most recent book she takes an opposing position. Not coincidentally its title is Somebody’s Children. By shifting the focus on mothers and families who “give up” their children or otherwise lose them to adoption, and who are usually absent in adoption narratives and debates, Briggs reveals how poverty, racism, and economic inequalities have shaped transracial and transnational adoption in the United States during the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. Briggs acknowledges that adoption can sometimes be the best outcome of a bad situation, but she openly states that “strange adoption is a national and international system whereby the children of impoverished or otherwise disenfranchised mothers are transferred to middle-class, wealthy mothers (and fathers)” (p. 4).

The book’s three sections explore the recent history of adoption in the United States. The first section deals with adoption within the United States during the second half of the last century, and the increasing state intervention in the life of African American, Native, and welfare-receiving mothers (and families), which has resulted in large numbers of children being removed from their homes and placed in foster care, and then into adoption. The second section looks at transnational adoption, from the birth of the solidarity-and-rescue ideology related to adoption to the commodification of the adoption industry, which is driven by the need to find enough children abroad for its vigorous demand inside the United States. Finally, the third section deals with what the author calls “the emerging fights over the politics of adoption.” It traces the change in gay and lesbian adoption from a time where lesbian mothers regularly lost their children after divorce to the current tensions between the most conservative ideologies and the neoliberal discovery of gay and lesbian couples as a (cheap) solution for children who are difficult to place in adoption (older children, sibling groups, and those that in adoption jargon are labeled as “special needs”). The book closes with an epilogue about how children of deported immigrants—often from Latin America—end up in foster care and adoption placements.

By juxtaposing an impressive selection of facts and statistics with personal stories, Briggs puts together an incisively critical account of adoption politics and its intersections with gender, race, power, and human rights. By focusing on mothers who “don’t count,” the book provides most interesting reading not only for those interested in adoption, but also for those whose interests range from the contradictory effects of neoliberalism, new forms of governance, and the relations between “First” and “Third” Worlds to race, gender, motherhood and human rights.