Project MUSE®: Adoption & Culture - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/786
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Adoption & Culture.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USNo. 1 (2007) through current issueLatest Articles: Adoption & CultureTWOProject MUSE®Adoption & Culture2574-25231944-4990Latest articles in Adoption & Culture. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction: Natal Mothers In Adoption—A Human Rights Issue
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980165
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SOCIAL JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS are central to feminism within the overall project of identifying and challenging sites of oppression with respect to gender, race, class, and sexuality. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action was adopted during the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 and set out an agenda for women’s empowerment. The Platform for Action ratified at this conference was considered at the time to be the “most comprehensive expression of States’ commitments to the human rights of women” (United Nations Women’s 14). Although this conference built on work done at previous conferences, it is mostly known for the significant achievement of explicitly articulating the idea that “women’s rights
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/786/image/coversmallIntroduction: Natal Mothers In Adoption—A Human Rights Issue2026-01-17text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Natal Mothers In Adoption—A Human Rights Issue2026-01-172026TWOProject MUSE®353672026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-17Maternal Relinquishment: Reforms, Rights, And Other Myths
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980166
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[P]ermanence comes at a significant cost, namely the complete and irrevocable severance of all ties with the natural family.Within the United Kingdom and Ireland, various so-called legal fictions have long underpinned the concept of maternal relinquishment within adoption law and policy, often framing it as a largely consensual, altruistic, or heroic act. And yet, many of the key sociolegal processes enabling infant adoptions traditionally rely upon transactional devices and terminologies that call to mind contract-based exchanges and “mutually beneficial” transfers of parental rights. The stark findings of several recent reports, investigations, and inquiries1 within these jurisdictions, aimed at achieving
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/786/image/coversmallMaternal Relinquishment: Reforms, Rights, And Other Myths2026-01-17text/htmlen-USMaternal Relinquishment: Reforms, Rights, And Other Myths2026-01-172026TWOProject MUSE®1528722026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-17Mothers and Moral Injury
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980167
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IN ADOPTION SYSTEMS, stakeholders in sending and receiving countries are becoming increasingly aware of the harmful consequences of unethical adoption practices. Consequences for mothers1 in adoption practice, however, remain rather underexplored. Although recent studies aim to deconstruct prevailing narratives on mothers (Kim 2–3) or analyze their interests through the lens of reproductive justice (Andrews) or reveal severe circumstances and negative effects for mothers, for instance from a human rights perspective (O’Rourke 435–59), the mother’s interests generally remain obscured in policies, practices, and research. In this essay, we aim to illuminate the perspective of unmarried Indian teenaged mothers who
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/786/image/coversmallMothers and Moral Injury2026-01-17text/htmlen-USMothers and Moral Injury2026-01-172026TWOProject MUSE®733692026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-17“That picture perfect life”: “Dear Birth Mother” Letters as Sites of Power and Persuasion
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980168
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The “Dear Birth Mother” letter is a tool routinely deployed to purportedly “match” relinquishing and prospective adoptive parents pursuing private domestic adoption in the United States. When pregnant people in the US consider adoption, they typically rely on the brokerage of adoption agencies or private attorneys to identify prospective adoptive parents. The internet also plays a prominent role in the marketing of adoption, making it easier than ever for pregnant people considering adoption to access information about prospective parents via online profiles and publicly accessible “Dear Birth Mother” letters (Howard 27–29). These letters have become common in the practice of private domestic adoption in the US for
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/786/image/coversmall“That picture perfect life”: “Dear Birth Mother” Letters as Sites of Power and Persuasion2026-01-17text/htmlen-US“That picture perfect life”: “Dear Birth Mother” Letters as Sites of Power and Persuasion2026-01-172026TWOProject MUSE®1021682026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-17Birthmothers Don’t Exist: Scripting and Disrupting the “One Real” Mother in Adoption
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980169
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DURING HIS FINAL WEEKS in hospice my son named me his next of kin. This gave me the authority to make medical decisions for him once he became unable to do so. At the same time, he made a will that appointed me as executor. In this capacity, I was awarded legal powers with respect to his final arrangements and estate. His decisions might have seemed unusual to some, since my son and I had been separated by adoption from his birth until our reunion seven years earlier. During his illness I met many of his friends, and later, at his funeral, several people referred to me as his birthmother. This struck me as odd, and new, since I had never thought of myself as a birthmother—I had always thought of myself as my son’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/786/image/coversmallBirthmothers Don’t Exist: Scripting and Disrupting the “One Real” Mother in Adoption2026-01-17text/htmlen-USBirthmothers Don’t Exist: Scripting and Disrupting the “One Real” Mother in Adoption2026-01-172026TWOProject MUSE®1290372026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-17Experiences of Natal Mothers In Open Adoption
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980170
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ADOPTION AS A FORM of child procurement and transfer was not widely practiced until the post-World War II decades when adoption culture as we know it today emerged and “flourished as never before” (Strong-Boag 220). Adoption culture might be described as the “production, normalization, and invisibilization of the consumption and exchange of a set of shared meanings that surround the transfer of infants and children by adoption from one social location to another within western societies” (Andrews, “Motherhood” 4). The culture of adoption has changed over time. During the twentieth century, several developments in adoption practice emerged, including coerced/forced surrender for unmarried mothers1 (Solinger)
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/786/image/coversmallExperiences of Natal Mothers In Open Adoption2026-01-17text/htmlen-USExperiences of Natal Mothers In Open Adoption2026-01-172026TWOProject MUSE®1121372026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-17Now Is the Time: An Interview with Adoptee and Podcaster Haley Radke
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980171
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You’re developing a limited-series podcast about mothers who have placed children. Why an investigative series now?I’ve wanted to do this for a very long time and just haven’t had the capacity. Now is the time. I feel we’re at a tipping point where more adoptee stories are getting out there. I see non-adopted people willing to engage thoughtfully with adoptee-created content online.1Podcasting is my skillset. I love podcasts, and investigative shows are some of my favorites. Those are the shows that make such an impact, that go viral. So I think what I can bring to the world through a podcast will hopefully shift perceptions away from the narrative that adoption is a win-win-win for babies, birth parents, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/786/image/coversmallNow Is the Time: An Interview with Adoptee and Podcaster Haley Radke2026-01-17text/htmlen-USNow Is the Time: An Interview with Adoptee and Podcaster Haley Radke2026-01-172026TWOProject MUSE®387952026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-17Haphazard Families: Romanticism, Nation, and the Prehistory of Modern Adoption by Eric C. Walker (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980172
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As Eric C. Walker explains in his Preface, this book addresses two audiences that seldom coincide: adoption specialists who may not be familiar with the British Romantic period or its literature, and literary scholars who study Romanticism but don’t know the adoption field. Because “Romanticists and adoption scholars have much to learn from one another” (vii), the book endeavors to make each group’s concerns and key terms legible to the other. But the book accomplishes more than an exchange of knowledges: at the intersection of these fields it discovers a new genealogy for the modern subject by showing how central to Romantic conceptions of personhood—conceptions that remain influential today—were children who were
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/786/image/coversmallHaphazard Families: Romanticism, Nation, and the Prehistory of Modern Adoption by Eric C. Walker (review)2026-01-17text/htmlen-USHaphazard Families: Romanticism, Nation, and the Prehistory of Modern Adoption by Eric C. Walker (review)2026-01-172026TWOProject MUSE®181122026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-17Contributors’ Notes
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980173
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Valerie J. Andrews is an adoption reform activist. Her publications include White Unwed Mother: The Adoption Mandate in Postwar Canada (Demeter, 2018); “Modern Domestic Adoption: Choice or Reproductive Exploitation,” “Unwed Mother: Sex, Stigma, and Spoiled Identity,” “Motherhood Denied: Canada’s Maternity Homes,” among others. Her dissertation is entitled Adoption: From Reproductive Exploitation to Reproductive Justice (York U, 2024). Andrews is the Executive Director of Origins Canada, a federal nonprofit organization supporting those separated by adoption. In 2018 Origins Canada obtained a Senate Inquiry to study the human rights abuses against unmarried mothers in the postwar era that resulted in the Senate
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/786/image/coversmallContributors’ Notes2026-01-17text/htmlen-USContributors’ Notes2026-01-172026TWOProject MUSE®73822026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-17