The Paradoxical Rationalization of Modern Adoption

This article explores the campaign, during the first half of the twentieth century, to reform adoption law and rationalize adoption practice in the United States through a trinity of professional management, scientific validation, and expanded public bureaucracy. Making adoption modern entailed establishing a new paradigm, kinship by design, and then distancing that paradigm from modes of family formation that relied on commerce, sentiment, intuition, accident, or simply common sense. Advocates of this new paradigm were social welfare, human science, and public policy professionals located in the U.S. Children's Bureau, the Child Welfare League of America, and elsewhere. They faced stubborn resistance from the public and succeeded only partially in subjecting adoption to new forms of practical authority, such as agency regulation and legal standardization. Yet their moral vision of family-making--an operation so systematic and saturated in knowledge that risks would be minimized and outcomes improved--helped to move childhood and kinship into the public sphere, pry a significant measure of power away from parents, and transfer decisions previously considered beyond the legitimate reach of state power to representatives of government and allied helping professions. Kinship by design also popularized child adoption and increased its cultural visibility.