Author : Estye Fenton
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 183 pages
File Size : 38,97 MB
Release : 2019-06-28
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 0813599687
Estye Fenton studies parents in the United States who adopted internationally in the past decade. She investigates the experiences of a cohort of adoptive mothers who were forced to negotiate their desire to be parents in the context of a growing societal awareness of international adoption as a flawed reproductive marketplace.
Author : Mark Montgomery
Publisher : Vanderbilt University Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 27,33 MB
Release : 2018-01-30
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 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.
Author : Estye Fenton
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 183 pages
File Size : 47,80 MB
Release : 2019-06-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0813599709
Since 2004, the number of international adoptions in the United States has declined by more than seventy percent. In The End of International Adoption? Estye Fenton studies parents in the United States who adopted internationally in the past decade during this shift. She investigates the experiences of a cohort of adoptive mothers who were forced to negotiate their desire to be parents in the context of a growing societal awareness of international adoption as a flawed reproductive marketplace. Many parents, activists, and scholars have questioned whether the inequality inherent in international adoption renders the entire system suspect. In the face of such concerns, international adoption has not only become more difficult, but also more politically and ethically fraught. The mothers interviewed for this book found themselves navigating contemporary American family life in an unexpected way, caught between the double-bind of work-family life and a new paradigm of thinking about the method—international adoption—that they used to create those families.
Author : Estye Fenton
Publisher :
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 48,42 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Adoptive parents
ISBN :
Over the past fifteen years, international adoption in the United States has entered a new era. The number of international adoptions in the U.S. has dropped significantly since its peak in 2004, against the backdrop of allegations of fraud and corruption in a number of "sending nations." While international adoption has always functioned as a demand-driven reproductive market, shifts in diplomatic relations and public opinion have reshaped the supply of children available for international adoption. This project explores the ways that the most recent cohort of international adoptive mothers has negotiated the massive political and bureaucratic changes to international adoption. I conducted 43 open-ended ethnographic interviews with mothers (and a few fathers) who adopted children internationally since 2004. Overall, the mothers I interviewed came to see themselves as consumers within a complex reproductive marketplace. As they came face-to-face with the commercial aspects of international adoption as an institution as well as with allegations and evidence of fraud in their own adoption processes, these mothers were forced to reconsider a straightforward vision of international adoption as a benevolent way to "grow" their families by "saving" children from abroad. At the same time, these mothers navigated the intersection of race and ability/disability in their decision-making surrounding adoption, suggesting an opening to think about shifts in our cultural understanding of altruism, carework, race, kinship, and what makes a "healthy" baby in the new economy.
Author : Rachel Rains Winslow
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 11,76 MB
Release : 2017-05-02
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 0812249100
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."
Author : Rebecca Jean Compton
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 30,32 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 0190247797
This book provides a ringing endorsement of international adoption based on comprehensive evidence from social and biological sciences paired with the author's first-hand experience visiting a Kazakhstani orphanage for nearly a year. A balanced account of the evidence supports international adoption as a viable means of promoting child welfare.
Author : Kathryn Joyce
Publisher : Public Affairs
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 31,62 MB
Release : 2013-04-23
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 1586489429
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.
Author : Catherine Ceniza Choy
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 46,61 MB
Release : 2013-10-11
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1479891169
In the last fifty years, transnational adoption—specifically, the adoption of Asian children—has exploded in popularity as an alternative path to family making. Despite the cultural acceptance of this practice, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the factors that allowed Asian international adoption to flourish. In Global Families, Catherine Ceniza Choy unearths the little-known historical origins of Asian international adoption in the United States. Beginning with the post-World War II presence of the U.S. military in Asia, she reveals how mixed-race children born of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese women and U.S. servicemen comprised one of the earliest groups of adoptive children. Based on extensive archival research, Global Families moves beyond one-dimensional portrayals of Asian international adoption as either a progressive form of U.S. multiculturalism or as an exploitative form of cultural and economic imperialism. Rather, Choy acknowledges the complexity of the phenomenon, illuminating both its radical possibilities of a world united across national, cultural, and racial divides through family formation and its strong potential for reinforcing the very racial and cultural hierarchies it sought to challenge.
Author : Jessica O'Dwyer
Publisher : Seal Press
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 38,88 MB
Release : 2010-10-19
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 1580053343
The author, who at 32 years old experienced early menopause, chronicles her tireless efforts to adopt a Guatemalan child, including uprooting her life and moving to Antigua in order to navigate the thorny adoption process and finally bring her daughter home. Original.
Author : Mark Montgomery
Publisher : Vanderbilt University Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 25,59 MB
Release : 2018-01-30
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 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.
