What is adoption, really?
On Human Adoption begins where most adoption narratives end: not with the social idea of rescue, but with what follows. Using New Zealand as a case study, a country whose adoption legislation both mirrors and illuminates the intent of adoption law across the English-speaking world, Dr Barbara Sumner examines adoption as a legal and ideological construct that erases biological identity in the service of the state. Drawing on a doctoral thesis, years of Official Information Act requests, court documents, and testimony from adopted people, mothers, and legal experts, this book unravels a system that, whatever its form in law, shares a common purpose: the permanent legal transfer of human beings and the reconstruction of their identity.
From the maternity homes of 1960s New Zealand to the entrenched resistance of multiple government entities, from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to the unanswered question of whether biological identity is a human right, this book follows the paper trail that adoption leaves, and the people it leaves behind.
Unflinching and rigorously researched, On Human Adoption asks why society continues to cast adoption as a social good and what that costs us in terms of equality, truth, and law.
Adoptee Author: Barbara Sumner
Publication Year: 2026
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