The Littlest Immigrants: Cross-Border Adoption in the Americas, Policy, and Women's History

By the mid-1990s, as intercountry adoptions from Eastern Europe, former Soviet countries, and Central and South America began to peak, several adoption issues surfaced simultaneously in the United States. Three types of adoption cases were widely covered in national and international media: the circulation of vivid stories of U.S.–born children addicted to crack, the rights of biological mothers and fathers to reclaim their already adopted child, and the accusations aimed at Americans of stealing Central and South American children as part of international adoption rings.

As hysteria around allegedly illegal international adoptions mounted, the United States introduced legislation that promoted the color-blind placement of children in domestic adoption situations in order to reduce the waiting times of children of color. Under the new guidelines, the waiting period could not be prolonged for a child of color if white parents were available to adopt. Similarly, parents were ostensibly no longer permitted to specify racial, ethnic, or physiognomic characteristics if they wanted to be considered seriously as adoptive parents. In this article, I demonstrate the relationships between these high-profile adoption cases that shaped the cultural imagination about domestic and international adoption. These media depictions at once promoted transnational rather than domestic adoption and urged the public to consider the need for increased regulation of intercountry adoption. The depictions marked poor women of color as unfit mothers and depicted their children as infants in need of rescue. The reports of corrupt child placement practices prompted policymakers and the public to call for more stringent regulations of domestic and intercountry adoptions.

"Cries of Addiction": The Media Hype Surrounding

"Crack Babies" of the 1980s¹

U.S. birth parents fell under the media spotlight during the late twentieth century. The legitimacy of birth mothers as "good" mothers was called into question during the 1980s when the media heralded the beginning of what reporters believed to be an epidemic. Circulation of lurid images of underweight babies shaking and crying, ostensibly because of withdrawal from addiction to crack cocaine, saturated the media in the 1980s and early 1990s.² As the public outrage grew, these children were increasingly placed in foster care, increasing the number of children awaiting placement. At the same time, prospective foster and adoptive parents were influenced by these images either to step in as "suitable" parents or to turn to other countries to adopt children who were not victims of this epidemic.

These children, known as "crack babies," were held up a symbols of the failing war on drugs and fight against poverty. Born to mostly poor African American women in inner cities nationwide, these children—it was believed—were living proof that crack was having a devastating effect on inner-city neighborhoods and now seemed to be affecting the next generation of city dwellers. Among growing popular tensions about the emergence of an underclass of poor, urban, African Americans, the media latched on to crack babies as the physical reproductions of urban poverty.³ Pregnant women who tested positive for illicit drugs would have their children removed from their care and placed in either medical or foster care until such time as the woman's maternal fitness could be determined by the courts. Additionally, many women relinquished their parental rights voluntarily. These children then entered the fostering and adoption system, increasing the number of children of color waiting for adoptive placements or return to their biological families.

Sensationalistic reporting of this so-called epidemic promised children with a lifetime of medical needs. Social workers and doctors warned that these pathetic infants would never be able to read, bond with caregivers, finish school, or behave normally in spite of early intervention.⁴ Others warned that the affliction would render so many African American youth incapable of knowing right from wrong that they would form a "bio-underclass."⁵ Such melodramatic condemnations affected the cultural imagination surrounding adoption and coincided with the shift to foreign-born children who appeared less likely to have been touched by such ailments as drug addiction.⁶ The twin developments of an increase in...