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Saving International Adoption

Author: Mark Montgomery

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press

Published: 2018-01-30

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0826521746

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2018 International adoption is in a state of virtual collapse, rates having fallen by more than half since 2004 and continuing to fall. Yet around the world millions of orphaned and vulnerable children need permanent homes, and thousands of American and European families are eager to take them in. Many government officials, international bureaucrats, and social commentators claim these adoptions are not "in the best interests" of the child. They claim that adoption deprives children of their "birth culture," threatens their racial identities, and even encourages widespread child trafficking. Celebrity adopters are publicly excoriated for stealing children from their birth families. This book argues that opposition to adoption ostensibly based on the well-being of the child is often a smokescreen for protecting national pride. Concerns about the harm done by transracial adoption are largely inconsistent with empirical evidence. As for trafficking, opponents of international adoption want to shut it down because it is too much like a market for children. But this book offers a radical challenge to this view—that is, what if instead of trying to suppress market forces in international adoption, we embraced them so they could be properly regulated? What if the international system functioned more like open adoption in the United States, where birth and adoptive parents can meet and privately negotiate the exchange of parental rights? This arrangement, the authors argue, could eliminate the abuses that currently haunt international adoption. The authors challenge the prevailing wisdom with their economic analyses and provocative analogies from other policy realms. Based on their own family's experience with the adoption process, they also write frankly about how that process feels for parents and children.

Babies Without Borders

Author: Karen Dubinsky

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2010-06-28

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 0814720919

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While international adoptions have risen in the public eye and recent scholarship has covered transnational adoption from Asia to the U.S., adoptions between North America and Latin America have been overshadowed and, in some cases, forgotten. In this nuanced study of adoption, Karen Dubinsky expands the historical record while she considers the political symbolism of children caught up in adoption and migration controversies in Canada, the United States, Cuba, and Guatemala. Babies without Borders tells the interrelated stories of Cuban children caught in Operation Peter Pan, adopted Black and Native American children who became icons in the Sixties, and Guatemalan children whose “disappearance” today in transnational adoption networks echoes their fate during the country’s brutal civil war. Drawing from archival research as well as from her critical observations as an adoptive parent, Dubinsky moves debates around transnational adoption beyond the current dichotomy—the good of “humanitarian rescue,” against the evil of “imperialist kidnap.” Integrating the personal with the scholarly, Babies without Borders exposes what happens when children bear the weight of adult political conflicts.

To Save the Children of Korea

Author: Arissa H Oh

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2015-06-17

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0804795339

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“The important . . . largely unknown story of American adoption of Korean children since the Korean War . . . with remarkably extensive research and great verve.” —Charles K. Armstrong, Columbia University Arissa Oh argues that international adoption began in the aftermath of the Korean War. First established as an emergency measure through which to evacuate mixed-race “GI babies,” it became a mechanism through which the Korean government exported its unwanted children: the poor, the disabled, or those lacking Korean fathers. Focusing on the legal, social, and political systems at work, To Save the Children of Korea shows how the growth of Korean adoption from the 1950s to the 1980s occurred within the context of the neocolonial US-Korea relationship, and was facilitated by crucial congruencies in American and Korean racial thought, government policies, and nationalisms. Korean adoption served as a kind of template as international adoption began, in the late 1960s, to expand to new sending and receiving countries. Ultimately, Oh demonstrates that although Korea was not the first place that Americans adopted from internationally, it was the place where organized, systematic international adoption was born. “Absolutely fascinating.” —Giulia Miller, Times Higher Education “ Gracefully written. . . . Oh shows us how domestic politics and desires are intertwined with geopolitical relationships and aims.” —Naoko Shibusawa, Brown University “Poignant, wide-ranging analysis and research.” —Kevin Y. Kim, Canadian Journal of History “Illuminates how the spheres of ‘public’ and ‘private,’ ‘domestic’ and ‘political’ are deeply imbricated and complicate American ideologies about family, nation, and race.” —Kira A. Donnell, Adoption & Culture

Adoption Beyond Borders

Author: Rebecca J. Compton

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-02-15

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0190247819

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International adoptions have decreased dramatically in the last decade, despite robust evidence of the tremendous benefits that early placement in adoptive families can confer upon children who are not able to remain with birth families. Adoption Beyond Borders integrates evidence from a range of disciplines in the social and biological sciences-- including psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, sociology, anthropology, and social work -- to provide a ringing endorsement of international adoption as a viable child welfare option. The author interweaves narrative accounts of her own adoption journey, which involved visiting a Kazakhstani orphanage daily for nearly a year, to illustrate the complexities and implications of the research evidence. Topics include: the effects of institutionalization on children's developing brains, cognitive abilities, and socio-emotional functioning; the challenges of navigating issues of identity when adopting across national, cultural, and racial lines; the strong emotional bonds that form even without genetic relatedness; and the methods in which adoptive families can address the special needs of children who experienced early neglect and deprivation, thereby providing a supportive environment in which those children can flourish. Striving to attain a balanced, evidence-based perspective on controversial issues, Adoption Beyond Borders argues that international adoption must be maintained and supported as a vital means of promoting international child welfare.

The Best Possible Immigrants

Author: Rachel Rains Winslow

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2017-05-02

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0812249100

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Rachel Rains Winslow examines how the adoption of foreign children transformed from a marginal activity in response to episodic crises in the 1940s to an enduring American institution by the 1970s. She provides the first historical examination of the people, policies, and systems that made the United States an enduring "adoption nation."

The Child Catchers

Author: Kathryn Joyce

Publisher: Public Affairs

Published: 2013-04-23

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1586489429

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Adoption has long been enmeshed in the politics of abortion. But as award-winning journalist Joyce makes clear, adoption has lately become entangled in the conservative Christian agenda.

One Heart at a Time

Author: Delilah

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2018-10-16

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1948122154

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“You’re listening to Delilah.” Delilah, the most listened-to woman on American radio, has distinguished herself as the “Queen of Sappy Love Songs” and America’s ultimate romance guru. But Delilah’s life off-air is all the more extraordinary—a life full of trials, forgiveness, faith, and adventure. In One Heart at a Time, Delilah’s heartfelt account of her own story reveals what shaped the voice that 9 million listeners know and love. Today, Delilah is the founder of an NGO called Point Hope, the owner of a 55-acre working farm, and an inductee of the National Radio Hall of Fame. But to achieve this, she often had to pave her own way. Disowned by her father, divorced, and fired from a dozen jobs over the years, Delilah pushed forward through family addiction and devastating loss, through glass ceilings and red tape. Her consistent goal to help those in need took her everywhere from the streets of Philadelphia to refugee camps in Ghana. Along the way, Delilah was blessed by thirteen children—ten of them adopted. Though many of them contend with special needs and the forever effects of a broken foster care system, her children have been able to transform their own remarkable lessons into guiding lights for other kids in need. Just as Delilah has done. One Heart at a Time exposes the real woman behind the microphone. In her easy-going style and characteristic, beloved voice, Delilah tells her deeply moving life story as the series of miracles it is.