Adoption and the Circulation of Children

Calumet - Intercultural Law and Humanities Review, 2019

The essay focuses on a different perspective of the child in the assessment of her/his best interests regarding the practice of international adoption. Specifically, it will be argued that the child who is the object of adoption should be understood in terms of his/her 'relational being,' rather than as an a priori reified entity. This perspective allows for a 'lateral gaze' on the interplay between the cultural characteristics of children and the intercultural meaning of intercountry adoption. The most important implication of such an approach is the relativization of 'blood ties' as the natural source of the parental relationship and responsibilities. The argument is further developed through a retrospective analysis of the cultural-religious sources of Western imagery concerning the idea of the "natural family" and its allegedly genetic roots. Jesus's self-definition as a 'Son of man' serves as a fulcrum for an unorthodox journey through the Western cultural and legal tradition, which unexpectedly ends up subverting its inclination to ontologize the 'blood family.' At the same time, this 'unfamiliar' reconstruction gives rise to a new post-colonial, antiracist and non-ethnocentric configuration containing the seeds of a universal responsibility of adult human beings for all the children living on the Earth regardless of their genetic descent or geographical location. All this subverts, in a sense, the hierarchical relations between 'blood parentage' and 'adoptive parentage' paving a possible new path toward their future developments. Even so, the essay strives to leverage the same cultural-religious origins of the Western tradition and the (allegedly) secularized values/principals underpinning the international and national legal features of adoption and its intercountry projections while exploring more nuanced and fruitful alternatives.

Oxford Bibliographies, Childhood Studies. General Editor Heather Montgomery, 2013

The movement of abandoned, neglected or surplus children from one family or group to another that has a perceived shortage is a phenomenon widely documented from many different historical periods and cultures. What is relatively new is the way children now cross international borders. Surplus children might be created by, for instance, a culture that does not permit unmarried women to bring up their “illegitimate” babies, as with the movement in the 1950s of children from Catholic Quebec in Canada to Jewish couples in the United States. The Korean War in the early 1950s gave rise to a generation of Korean American babies, many thousands of whom were placed for adoption overseas. A similar process followed the Vietnam War in the 1970s. China’s one-child policy has produced a “surplus” of girls, many thousands of whom have been adopted by North American, European, and Australian families. International adoption is controversial, because underlying the humanitarian motivation to give disadvantaged children a better life there are issues of international politics, commercialization, and commoditization. Adoption can be a profitable business, and there is an underworld of kidnapping and child trafficking. As adoptees reach adulthood there is also reflection on the psychological challenge of growing up in a new culture, often with an unknown personal history. Similar issues are often faced by transracial adoptees, and a section on transracial adoption has therefore been included. Internationally recognized and local legal frameworks, in particular The Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (1993), represent attempts to mitigate the worst excesses of unregulated international adoptions and to ensure that the interests of the children concerned remain paramount. Such frameworks are, however, predicated on a Western notion of the individual and of the nuclear family. They do not sit well with cultural practices in which child rearing is often shared, temporary, flexible, and pragmatic. Whether due to poverty, indigenous kinship norms, or attempts to maximize a child’s opportunities, in many parts of Africa, South America, and Asia, children are frequently reared for some or all of their childhood by people other than their biological parents. When these practices are mistaken for abandonment, or when an informal foster situation is translated into permanent adoption, there is an often painful clash of cultures. Anthropological accounts have therefore been included that enable social policy research to be seen within a broader cultural context.

Social Anthropology, Volume 19, Issue 2, pp. 226-228

Social Text, 2003

Sierra Song E, Marty, and I sat with our noses pressed against the glass straining to see the land as it intermittently appeared and vanished through the clouds. Almost in a whisper she confided "I think that place right down there may be where my birth parents live, Mommy. I think maybe they might be looking up and wishing that their little girl could fly down to them for a visit. Someday, maybe I will look for them. I'm sending them a wish now. It is that I hope they have enough to eat and they are happy. I hope they are not missing me too much. I wish I could tell them that I will come back to China again and again. I hope they catch my wish, Mommy and Daddy-don't you?"-Jane Brown In the early 1990s, the adoption of children across national borders began to accelerate at an astonishing rate. Although transnational adoption originated more than fifty years ago in the aftermath of World War II and the Korean War, the current wave of adoption is unprecedented in magnitude and visibility. Immigrant orphan visas issued by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services nearly tripled between 1991 and 2001: from 7,093 to 19,237. In the United States alone, more than 139,000 children have been adopted internationally in the last ten years. Over 50,000 of these children were born in China or Russia. What are the implications of this massive movement of children, almost entirely from poor nations, to the more affluent West? The essays in this issue explore transnational adoption from multiple perspectives, encompassing both "sending" and "receiving" countries: birth parents who relinquish children, adoptive parents and adopted children, and adult adoptees. All of the essays view adoption as situated in the midst of larger social and cultural transformations and, inevitably, in the space of familial intimacy and the public sphere. In its transnational mode, adoption enters into and informs the complex politics of forging new, even fluid, kinds of kinship and affiliation on a global stage. These politics start from, rather than end on, the critical insight that identity is a social construction (see Taussig 1993). Questions of belonging, race, culture, and subjectivity loom large in the discourses of transnational adoption. In an earlier era, adoption across borders was assumed to be straightforward: A child traveled to a new

Ballard, R. L.; Goodno, N. H.; Cochran, Jr., R. F.; Milbrandt, J. A. (eds.) (2014). The Intercountry Adoption Debate: Dialogues Across Disciplines., 2015

In a multidisciplinary volume such as this, perhaps the wisest strategy for this chapter --focusing on anthropology’s contribution to the study of transnational adoption– is to begin by clarifying anthropologists’ particular approach to the adoption process. Our goal is not to duplicate the recent overviews available in specialized publications (see, for example, Howell 2009, Ouellette e Belleau 2001, (Terrell & Modell 1994) but rather to present some of the basic reflections of the field’s vast body of research on fosterage and adoption to a wide audience of readers. A first introductory point of note deals with the tradition of comparative studies in anthropology. The comparative approach underlines the contextual specificity of different understandings involved in the adoption process. It is because of their observation of child-raising practices among such varied groups as the Kanak of New Caledonia (Leblic 2007), the Kotokoli of West Africa (E. Goody 1982), the inuits of Northern Canada (Saladin-d’Anglure 1988), the Sullk’ata of the Andean highlands (Van Vleet 2008) or native peoples of Hawai’i (Modell 1998), that anthropologists, early on, coined the expression "circulation of children" to describe a child's transfer between different families --thus producing a category that, while englobing what Occidentals call "adoption", was broad enough to include the practices of non-Western societies (Lallemand 1993). The discipline has been nurtured by the confrontation with distant peoples and "exotic" communities where researchers have found worldviews that run into collision with their own. In the process, the researcher's own cultural norms are put into perspective, provoking at times a radical rethinking of naturalized categories. In the field of adoption and other sorts of child transfer, the recognition that a good part of the world's population does not find it strange or exceptional that children be raised by adults other than their biological parents raises fundamental issues concerning the definition of family, childhood, child development, parental roles, parenting ways and so on. A second important characteristic of anthropological studies in the field of adoption elaborates on the framing of people's "understandings" through a certain vision of culture. Coherent with contemporary perspectives, "culture" is not seen as some sort of millenary monolithic force weighing down on people's choices according to the territory in which they live. Saturated with power and containing conflicting narratives, its manifestations are ubiquitous, hybrid and changing, constantly updated in function of the influences at play (Geertz 2000). Perhaps more important, culture has ceased to be the privilege of exotic peoples. As Western societies have fallen under the lens of analysis, many concepts and practices seen heretofore as obvious –natural or universal– have been revealed as the product of historically-specific cultural values.

Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 2019

Existing over many centuries, adoption has been challenged in recent years by evidence about practices that do not respond to the principles, ethics and laws under which it should be enacted. Written from a multidisciplinary and international perspective, this article outlines the place of adoption in the child protection system, as well as its core elements of permanence and stability. Recent demographic changes in adoption throughout the world are first examined. The negative consequences of children's exposure to early adversities and the postadoption developmental trajectory of adopted people are also summarized. The focus of the argument is that adoption provides a legitimate model for the alternative care of children if undertaken within a rights and ethics framework that emphasizes children's best interests, as set out in international conventions and national laws. Implications for adoption policy and practice are presented.

Policy Press, 2021

List of figures and tables 2019, at a 'pre-COVID-19' time when physical meetings were still possible, and we are obliged and grateful for all comments and input that were received at this seminar. We have received assistance from research assistant Florian Wingens with editing and organising throughout the process, as well as from research assistant Vanessa T. Seeligmann in the final editing rounds. Research coordinator Daniel Nygård has ensured that this will be an Open Access publication.

2015

Acronyms ACPF African Child Policy Forum ACRWC African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child ART Antiretroviral Therapy CBC Community Based Care CRC Convention on the Rights of the Child FHI Family Health International GOE Government of Ethiopia HAPCO Federal HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Office HIV/AIDS Human Immunodeficiency Virus / Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome IC Institutional Care ICA Inter-country Adoption MOLSA Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs MOWA Ministry of Women's Affairs MTCT Mother to Child Transmission NGO Non-Government Organization OVC Orphans and Vulnerable Children RFC Revised Family Code of 2000 UNCRC United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child

The International Journal of Children's Rights, 2009

The point of departure of the present article is the child's right to preservation of her/his ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic background in adoption, as stipulated in the CRC and the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. The article seeks to analyse the various meanings attributed to preservation of the child's background in in- and intercountry adoption and in different national contexts. The main focus is on the seldom-studied perspective of one of the major sending countries in intercountry adoption: India. Five representatives of two non-governmental adoption agencies and one governmental agency in addition to six Indian adoptive parents have been interviewed about their views on the significance of the child's background in adoption. In our analysis, we show that preservation of a child's background is perceived to be in conflict with other interests of the child, such as gaining a position in her/his adoptive family equal to that of a biological child and being loved unconditionally. In contrast to the general portrayal of Indian adoption applicants as being selective regarding the child's religious background and skin colour, agency representatives as well as adoptive parents endeavoured to distinguish themselves from this portrayal by emphasizing the irrelevance of the child's background.