Category: Journalism/Research
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The Adoption Paradox: Putting Adoption in Perspective
by Jean Kelly Widner
Adoption impacts countless families worldwide, yet the voices of those directly involved—especially adoptees, the central focus of the process—are rarely highlighted. In The Adoption Paradox, nearly one hundred individuals are interviewed, from domestic, international, and transracial adoptions, as well as foster care, along with adoptive…
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The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood
by Kristen Martin
The orphan story has been mythologized: Step one: While a child is still too young to form distinct memories of them, their parents die in an untimely fashion. Step two: Orphan acquires caretakers who amplify the world’s cruelty. Step three: Orphan escapes and goes on…
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What They Never Told Us: True Stories of Family Secrets and Hidden Identities Revealed
by Gail Lukasik
What They Never Told Us tells the stories of ordinary people who made extraordinary, life-changing discoveries about their parentage and/or race and ethnicity that fractured their identities. The book asks the big questions: Who are we? And what is family? Blending social history and personal narratives,…
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The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States
by Kit W. Myers
The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents–a narrative that is especially pervasive with transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Kit W. Myers comparatively…
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The Price of Children: Stolen Lives in a Land Without Choice
by Maria Laurino
A powerful church. An acquiescent government. In The Price of Children, investigative journalist Maria Laurino details the shocking story of mothers and children deceived and exploited as directed by the highest levels of the Vatican. Between 1950 and 1970, the Vatican and the American Catholic Church…
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Genetic Stigma in Law and Literature: Orphanhood, Adoption, and the Right to Reunion
by Alice Diver
This book critically analyses the way in which traditional sociocultural and legal biases might be perpetuated against those with unknown – or unknowable – genetic ancestries. It looks to law and works of literature across differing eras and genres focussing upon such concepts as inherited…
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Adoption Memoirs: Inside Stories
by Marianne Novy
Adoption Memoirs tells inside stories of adoption that popular media miss. Marianne Novy shows how adoption memoirs and films recount not only happy moments, but also the lasting pain of relinquishing a child, the racism and trauma that adoptees such as Jackie Kay and Jane Jeong…
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Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants
by SunAh M. Laybourn
Since the early 1950s, over 125,000 Korean children have been adopted in the United States, primarily by white families. Korean adoptees figure in twenty-five percent of US transnational adoptions and are the largest group of transracial adoptees currently in adulthood. Despite being legally adopted, Korean…
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Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption
by Rebecca Wellington
Nearly every person in the United States is affected by adoption. Adoption practices are woven into the fabric of American society and reflect how our nation values human beings, particularly mothers. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed…
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Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood
by Gretchen Sisson
Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the abortion debate, but little attention has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish infants for private adoption. Relinquished reveals adoption to be a…
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In Reunion: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Communication of Family
by Sara Docan-Morgan
“Do you know your real parents?” is a question many adoptees are asked. In In Reunion, Sara Docan-Morgan probes the basic notions of family, adoption, and parenthood by exploring initial meetings and ongoing relationships that transnational Korean adoptees have had with their birth parents and other…
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Adoption Unfiltered: Revelations from Adoptees, Birth Parents, Adoptive Parents, and Allies
by Sara Easterly, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, and Lori Holden
Adoption Unfiltered authors Sara Easterly (adoptee), Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard (birth parent), and Lori Holden (adoptive parent) interview dozens of adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, social workers, therapists, and other allies–all sharing candidly about the challenges in adoption. While finding common ground in the sometimes-contentious…
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Adoption Fantasies: The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood
by Kimberly D. McKee
In Adoption Fantasies, Kimberly D. McKee explores the ways adopted Asian women and girls are situated at a nexus of objectifications—as adoptees and as Asian American women—and how they negotiate competing expectations based on sensationalist and fictional portrayals of adoption found in US popular culture. McKee…
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Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal: Migrating Toward Wholeness
by Liz DeBetta
We live in a world where conversations about trauma are becoming commonplace and adopted people are using their voices to educate the general public about the effects of maternal separation and genealogical bewilderment. But for many adult adoptees the act of speaking truth to power…
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We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America
by Roxanna Asgarian
The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children–and a searing indictment of the American foster care system. On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and multiple children at the…
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Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family
by Erika Hayasaki
An incredible, deeply reported story of identical twins Isabella and Hà, born in Viêt Nam and raised on opposite sides of the world, each knowing little about the other’s existence until they were reunited as teenagers, against all odds. It was 1998 in Nha Trang,…
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Growing in the Dark: Adoption Secrecy and Its Consequences
by Janine M. Baer
Generations of adults who were adopted as children have been kept in the dark about their original identities. The law sealing birth records forever, even to the adopted person, passed in 1935 in California, sweeping adoption´s emotional complexities under the rug and making it possible to…
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Ripped at the Root: An Adoption Story
by Mary Cardaras
“With searing detail and lean, crisp prose, in Ripped at the Root Mary Cardaras tells the story of Dena Polites, a woman born to a young unwed Greek couple who was adopted by married Greek Americans in Ohio. Polites’s tale serves as a focal point…
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A Timeline of the Injustice of Adoption Law
by Darryl Nelson
A Timeline of the Injustice of Adoption Law traces Australian laws affecting thousands, back to the US theories of eugenics, then back to Britain. It highlights the various notions of ‘the best interests of the child’ in law, over time, and shows how the poor…
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Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice
by Claire McGettrick, Katherine O’Donnell, Maeve O’Rourke, James M. Smith, and Mari Steed
Between 1922 and 1996, over 10,000 girls and women were imprisoned in Magdalene Laundries, including those considered ‘promiscuous’, a burden to their families or the state, those who had been sexually abused or raised in the care of the Church and State, and unmarried mothers.…
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What White Parents Should Know about Transracial Adoption: An Adoptee’s Perspective on Its History, Nuances, and Practices
by Melissa Guida-Richards
If you’re the white parent of a transracially or internationally adopted child, you may have been told that if you try your best and work your hardest, good intentions and a whole lot of love will be enough to give your child the security, attachment,…
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American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption
by Gabrielle Glaser
During the Baby Boom in 1960s America, women were encouraged to stay home and raise large families, but sex and childbirth were taboo subjects. Premarital sex was common, but birth control was hard to get and abortion was illegal. In 1961, sixteen-year-old Margaret Erle fell…
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Adoption’s Hidden History: Steps to Sealing the Records (Vol. 2)
by Mary S. Payne
An estimated six million Americans are adopted. The development of laws and regulations facilitating this process has been shrouded in mystery. “Adoption’s Hidden History” is for anyone who has ever been touched by adoption. From Myra Clark Gaines’ nineteenth century court fight for recognition as…
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Adoption’s Hidden History: From Native American Tribes to Locked Lives (Vol. 1)
by Mary S. Payne
Adoptions are finalized daily across America. Like the root system of a giant oak, tentacles of its history are submerged in years of human experience. Native Americans adopted children and adults into their tribes before pilgrims settled in the New World. Early-day adoption advocates took…
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Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo?
by Gonda Van Steen
This book presents a committed quest to unravel and document the postwar adoption networks that placed more than 3,000 Greek children in the United States, in a movement accelerated by the aftermath of the Greek Civil War and by the new conditions of the global…
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Finding Fernanda: Two Mothers, One Child, and a Cross-Border Search for Truth
by Erin Siegal
The dramatic story of how an American housewife discovered that the Guatemalan child she was about to adopt had been stolen from her birth mother. Over the last decade, nearly 200,000 children have been adopted into the United States, 25,000 of whom came from Guatemala. Finding…
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The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion, and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism
Edited by Modhumita Roy and Mary Thompson
The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism uniquely brings together three sites of reproduction and reproductive politics to demonstrate their entanglement in creating or restricting options for family-making. The original essays in this collection—which draw from a wide range of disciplinary and…
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Korean Adoptees and Transnational Adoption: Embodiment and Emotion
by Jessica Walton
This book investigates the experiences of South Koreans adopted into Western families and the complexity of what it means to ‘feel identity’ beyond what is written in official adoption files. Korean Adoptees and Transnational Adoption is based on ethnographic fieldwork in South Korea and interviews…
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Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States
by Kimberly D. McKee
Since the Korean War began, Western families have adopted more than 200,000 Korean children. Two thirds of these adoptees found homes in the United States. The majority joined white families and in the process forged a new kind of transnational and transracial kinship. Kimberly D.…
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Origin Narratives: The Stories We Tell Children About Immigration and International Adoption
by Macarena García-González
The first of its kind, this volume unpacks the cultural construction of transnational adoption and migration by examining a sample of recent children’s books that address the subject. Of all European countries, Spain is the nation where immigration and transnational adoption have increased most steeply…