ADOPTION

ADOPTION, the process of legally transferring parental rights and obligations from a child's biological parent or parents to one or more adults, is an age-old practice. The Code of Hammurabi in ancient Babylonia provided for such a transfer. Adoption was also practiced in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. These adoptions focused on the needs of adults with regard to issues such as inheritance and religion. In 1851, Massachusetts passed the first modern adoption law, signaling a profound change in the meaning of adoption—the needs of the child, not the adult, would be paramount.

The Road to Legalized Adoption

Before 1851, legal adoption in the United States was extremely rare. English common law, on which American laws were based, did not recognize adoption because it jeopardized the inheritance rights of blood relatives. However, informal adoption (raising a child as one's own without any legal tie) was not uncommon. Beginning in the colonial era, dependent children were cared for in the homes of relatives, neighbors, or strangers, with the relationship often being formalized through indenture. Although indenture represented an economic relationship—providing for a child's basic needs in return for his or her labor—these arrangements could also be of a more familial nature. Childless couples often took these children, who were abandoned or orphaned, or whose parents were, for some reason, unable to care for them, sometimes using their wills to provide for their future. In addition, state legislatures occasionally passed private bills that changed a child's name and implicitly acknowledged its adoption.

By the mid-nineteenth century, a number of social and cultural transformations had occurred that set the stage for the passage of the Massachusetts Adoption Act of 1851. As the United States became more industrialized with the accompanying growth in cities and immigration, the number of orphaned, homeless, or neglected children rapidly grew as a result of the dislocations and uncertainties caused by these dramatic changes. Orphanages were opened to care for these children, but by midcentury some reformers began to argue that children needed the natural environment of a family, a setting that, not incidentally, was less expensive. In addition, affectionate child nurture and the belief in childhood innocence became more important, especially among the middle class, as homes lost many of their productive functions and became private havens presided over by a loving wife and mother.

Efforts to find homes for children intensified over the last half of the nineteenth century, with New York City reformer Charles Loring Brace leading the way. In 1853, Brace founded the New York Children's Aid Society, which "placed-out" poor and homeless urban youths into rural homes. In 1854, Brace loaded up 138 children and sent them west to Pennsylvania by train. In the ensuing decades, dozens of similar societies were created, and by 1930, "orphan trains" had relocated as many as 200,000 children to western states. Relatively few of these children were legally adopted, since the majority had at least one living parent or were older than adopters preferred.

Nevertheless, the placing-out movement contributed to the development of adoption laws and the growing acceptance of adoption. As more people took in unrelated children and raised them as their own, the need for a standardized legal means to formalize and protect that relationship grew. Meanwhile, courts had begun in the early nineteenth century to consider "the best interests of the child" when making decisions about custody. Under this doctrine, affection and nurturance could be viewed as equally significant as paternal rights or blood ties. Together, these changes led the Massachusetts legislature to pass the 1851 adoption act. The statute made the adoption procedure clear. The measure required the written consent of the biological parents or of a child's guardian if its parents were dead, severed all legal bonds between the biological parents and the child, created legal ties between the adoptive parents and the child as if it had been born to them, and required the judge to determine that the adoptive parents were "fit and proper" before issuing the adoption decree. By the end of the nineteenth century, most states had passed adoption statutes that, like the Massachusetts law, focused on the welfare of the child.

Social Workers, Stricter Adoption Laws, and Issues of Background

During the Progressive Era, some reformers began to focus specifically on adoption and to develop placement standards that emphasized investigation to ensure that a child's biological family was not unnecessarily broken up. The policy of keeping birth families together, which was widely accepted by 1910, coupled with social workers' efforts to encourage unwed mothers to keep their children, meant that relatively few children were available for adoption. Some of the few who were available were placed through private adoption agencies, which were first opened during this period. Unlike social welfare professionals, these volunteer-staffed agencies did not insist that un-married mothers keep their infants.

Meanwhile, adoption was gradually gaining acceptance. From 1907 to 1911, the Delineator, a popular women's magazine, ran a child-rescue campaign that urged its largely white and middle-class readers to adopt a dependent child as part of their patriotic duty. Since Americans understood all women to be essentially maternal, the magazine even encouraged single women to adopt. The campaign led to the adoption of at least two thousand children. It also contributed to the acceptance of adoption by downplaying the significance of a child's heredity—a primary fear of many prospective adopters—and emphasizing the power of a nurturing, Christian environment to overcome any genetic taint.

Heredity was a controversial issue in adoption, as were questions of race, ethnicity, and religion. Very few child welfare agencies existed to serve the needs of African American children, and blacks continued the tradition of informally adopting needy children in their communities. Concerns about race mixing also meant that any child whose race was not crystal clear would not be placed. The focus on racial matching, however, could conflict with efforts to preserve a dependent child's natal religion. In 1904, whites in Arizona kidnapped forty Irish orphans that Catholic nuns had placed with Mexican Catholic families and placed them in white families. The courts allowed the white families to keep the children over the vigorous objections of the Catholic Church.

In the 1920s, social workers continued to work for stricter adoption laws that stressed investigation and professional oversight. One goal was to revise state adoption statutes along the lines of the Children's Code of Minnesota, passed in 1917. Although the 1851 Massachusetts Adoption Act required a judge to determine an adoptive home's suitability, those investigations were notoriously superficial. By contrast, the Children's Code required a thorough investigation into the adoptive home by a state agency before the adoption could be approved, as well as a six-month probationary period before the adoption could be finalized. The code also closed adoption records to public inspection. By the end of the 1930s, most states had passed new adoption laws or updated old ones, and many contained the principles of the Children's Code. Nevertheless, almost half of all adoption placements were still made without the initial oversight of social welfare professionals. In these independent or private agency adoptions, lawyers, physicians, and volunteers placed children largely based on their intuition.

Adoption as the "Perfect Solution"

The 1940s saw significant changes in social workers' views toward illegitimacy and an explosion in the number of adoptions. Social welfare professionals began to argue that unwed mothers did not make the best parents and that their children would forever suffer from the stigma of illegitimacy. Psychological theory buttressed this position, suggesting that unwed mothers were neurotic young women whose pregnancies signaled a more deep-seated problem; by placing her child for adoption, the woman would gain a second chance to solve her problem and live a normal life. This view was especially appealing given that the war had seen a dramatic rise in the number of illegitimate births, including those to white, middle-class teens.

At the same time as the supply of adoptable infants increased, so did the demand. Already by the 1930s, concerns about a dependent child's heredity had lessened and the number of adoptions had grown. During the war and the postwar period, the number of legal adoptions swelled, as childless couples scrambled for a child with whom they could take their place in the postwar baby boom. In the mid-1930s, estimates put the number of adoptions at about 17,000 annually. By 1945, estimates had it at 50,000 a year; by 1965, the number had increased to 142,000. Adoption had became the "perfect solution" for all three parties to it.

Problems with the "Perfect Solution"

Although the numbers of adoptable children had increased, the supply could in no way meet the growing demand. In response, social workers in the late 1940s began to redefine the concept of "adoptability" to include minority, older, disabled, and foreign-born children. Most significantly, professionals began to focus for the first time on the needs of African American children. When efforts to find African American homes fell short, social workers in the 1960s began to place black children in white homes for adoption. By the early 1970s, approximately fifteen thousand transracial adoptions had occurred. In 1972, however, the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) issued a statement that rejected transracial adoptions as a form of cultural genocide. In the wake of this pronouncement, many states required same-race placements. In the 1980s, the issue resurfaced because of the large percentage of black children in foster care who needed permanent homes. In the 1990s, a number of white foster parents filed antidiscrimination suits in order to adopt African American children. Despite the NABSW's continued resistance, Congress passed the Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994, which prohibited agencies from delaying or denying the adoption of a child in order to find racially matched parents. Any agency that did so risked the loss of federal aid.

The postwar shortage of white, American-born children also led to an interest in intercountry adoption. Orphaned and abandoned children from Germany and Japan were adopted in the years immediately after World War II. The adoption of Asian children increased dramatically after the Korean War; between 1966 and 1976, Americans adopted 32,000 foreign-born, primarily Korean, children. In 2000, Americans adopted more than 18,000 foreign children, over half from Russia and China. Girls comprised the overwhelming majority of Chinese adoptees, because Chinese families prize male children, whose value has increased since China began its one-family-one-child policy to curb population growth. In 2001, foreign-born children made up about 20 percent of all American adoptions. To combat the confusion and corruption that often marred these adoptions, such as exorbitant last-minute fees and failure to disclose a child's health problems, the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoptions was written in 1993. This multinational treaty, which the United States ratified in 2000, establishes, among other things, accreditation standards for agencies; it remains to be seen if nations will abide by the treaty.

The shortage of white infants intensified in the early 1970s. Feminism and the cultural acceptance of premarital sex created a climate in which unmarried mothers no longer felt compelled to place their children. The legalization of abortion in 1973 also seems to have reduced the number of available children. The result was a rapid decline in the number of unrelated adoptions in the early 1970s, from almost ninety thousand in 1970 to fewer than fifty thousand in 1975. And for many of the mothers who still wished to place their children, a new attitude prevailed. These women now often took a role in choosing their child's parents, sometimes maintaining ongoing contact after placement. Although the trend at the start of the twenty-first century was clearly toward more openness, there was considerable opposition to these "open adoptions," with a concern that children would be confused as to who their "real parents" are.

Meanwhile, birth mothers and adoptees who had been part of the "perfect solution" began to critique the secrecy surrounding adoption. Although laws had closed records from the public, birth parents and adopted persons often had access to their case histories before World War II, since many children had been placed at an age when they could remember their biological families. With more unwed mothers giving up their children after the war, agencies sealed case files to protect all parties from the stigma of illegitimacy. In 1971, an adoptee, Florence Fisher, founded the Adoptees' Liberty Movement Association with the goal of unsealing records once an adoptee reached the age of eighteen. The adoption rights movement also included birth parents, primarily mothers, some of whom founded Concerned United Birthparents in 1976. Unsealing adoption records has proved to be an extremely contentious issue; as a compromise, many states have established state adoption registries and passed "search and consent" laws that assign a confidential intermediary to locate the birth parents to ensure that they desire contact.

More recently, adoptions by gays and lesbians became a hotly contested issue. Although by the end of the twentieth century a number of states routinely accepted gay parents, restrictive legislation still existed. In 2001, a federal judge upheld Florida's 1977 law that automatically disqualified gays and lesbians. Gay activists, in addition to contesting such laws, also challenged legislation that prevented homosexual couples from adopting together.

ADOPTION

The Road to Legalized Adoption

Social Workers, Stricter Adoption Laws, and Issues of Background

Adoption as the "Perfect Solution"

Problems with the "Perfect Solution"

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