The Traffic in Babies: Cross-Border Adoption and Baby-Selling between the United States and Canada (review)

Karen Balcom’s magnificent study of Canada-US adoption adds a valuable new dimension to the growing literature on the history of adoption and child welfare. Through extensive research in US and Canadian archives and a careful analysis of adoption scandals in Nova Scotia, Alberta, and Quebec, Balcom shows how a transnational network of mostly female child welfare professionals used the unregulated cross-border traffic in babies to further a ‘sound adoption practice’ and domestic child welfare reforms. The regulation of cross-border adoptions, Balcom makes clear, was a professionalizing and state-building project.

Between 1930 and 1972, thousands of Canadian infants were adopted into US families. In the early years, most adoptees were ‘white’ babies of unwed mothers, and Balcom writes with sensitivity about their crossing racial, religious, and national boundaries as Canadian babies became Americans, Catholics became Jews. The book’s main focus, however, is the social workers who saw the cross-border traffic in babies as a serious child welfare problem. Horrified by the informality, speed, and crass commercialism of many cross-border adoptions, Canada’s Charlotte Whitton and the female staff of the US. Children’s Bureau, a federal government agency, collaborated to stop black market adoptions, standardize adoption procedures across jurisdictions, and institute professional practices, such as home investigation and matching the child’s religious and racial background to that of the adoptive family. Although this transnational network of female reformers never achieved their goal of formal international cooperation, their emphasis on professional adoption procedures and attempts to involve federal agencies, such as the passport office, set lasting precedents.

Balcom divides Canada-US adoption into two chronological periods. Prior to 1950, adoption rules varied widely across states and provinces, and disreputable agencies such as Nova Scotia’s Ideal Maternity Home (IMH) turned a tidy profit by encouraging desperate single mothers to relinquish their babies and quickly placing them in uninspected American homes. Whitton and the Children’s Bureau staff shared information and strategy, and indirectly pressured state and provincial officials to shut down the IMH. Their personal connections were less helpful in the fight against Alberta’s babies-for-export scandal, however, because welfare authorities in that province objected to outside intervention. Informal collaboration could only go so far, Balcom tells us; decentralized state authority and the federalist structure of both countries posed a real barrier to formal agreements and international cooperation on adoption.

The second half of the book focuses on the period after 1950, when formal adoption regulations were stronger but the transnational female networks were weaker. Two chapters focus on Quebec, where the stigma of illegitimacy contributed to a flourishing baby trade. Montreal’s black market adoption rings became front-page news in the mid 1950s, but the fight against baby-selling was led by police and prosecutors, not child welfare professionals. Shady cross-border adoptions were now a matter of immigration law and the criminal code, and the social work goal of providing services for unwed mothers was marginalized. The last chapters examine the period of international adoption protocols, including the 1993 Hague Convention on inter-country adoption. The widening view of the adoptable child, the decline of matching, and the growing number of adoptions across racial as well as national boundaries have been discussed by other scholars, but Balcom’s careful attention to the administrative and jurisdictional aspects of these placements provides a fresh perspective on the Sixties Scoop and the literature on trans-racial adoptions.

The Traffic in Babies is an important addition to recent histories of adoption and child welfare and a valuable transnational exploration of what US historian Robyn Muncy called the ‘female dominion’ in North American reform. Balcom’s meticulously researched, multilayered analysis of the interworkings of private and public child welfare agencies, state/provincial and federal departments, and two national governments is both nuanced and sobering. Neither a sanguine...