Abstract
The history of adoption in the United States which is told today in the public arena and in much scholarship is the history of how white adoptive parents come to adoption—the struggles, the cost, the pain of infertility, the choice of children they make, and the battles they fight in forming their families. This is especially true of transracial and international adoption. The last decade has seen a small explosion in popular writing and academic scholarship on the experiences of white adoptive parents and the challenges they have faced to bring “their” children “home” across racial, ethnic, and cultural lines. It is an important history—one worth telling, and one worth knowing. However, it is not the only one. How this history of family formation is framed is vitally important, for it shapes understandings of adoption history and practices as a whole.
Often, this particular take on adoption history begins and ends with adoptive parents. The children in this particular framing, prior to adoption, are often presented as “nobody’s children,”—they are languishing in domestic foster care, starving in orphanages overseas, they are desperately waiting for someone to claim them. This is the narrative of rescue: in which children, unwanted and unloved, and would-be parents, barren and hopeless, find each other. It fits neatly into a story of salvation where the first-world, the white-world, swoops in and saves the third-world brown child from the brown third-world. It is a neat and tidy narrative, familiar and comfortable to many in the United States.
Other narratives of adoption have received scholarly attention by academics, activists, and members of the “adoption triad”: the history of the (mostly) white “girls” who “went away” to homes for “unwed mothers”; the birthmothers’ rights and adoptee search movements; and the experiences of adoptees, especially those who were transracially or internationally adopted. There is also an entire medical and psychological literature on adoption, focusing almost exclusively on (a clinical population of) adoptees. None of these, however, has as much traction as the rescue narrative.
In Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption, Laura Briggs forcefully offers an alternative history focused on the various political, social, and cultural events that have shaped the processes through which vulnerable populations lose their children to adoption. Briggs argues that the characterization of adoptees as “nobody’s children” (which is the title of a book by legal scholar and adoption proponent Elizabeth Bartholet) is incorrect and, in practice, often politically and financially motivated. How children come to be classified as “nobody’s” so that they can enter the adoption system is, Briggs contends, often a troubling and sometimes violent process.
The book is divided into three parts. In Part I, Briggs examines processes through which African American and Native American children came to be part of the foster care and formal adoption systems. Briggs situates these histories within the larger frameworks of civil rights challenged by racial discrimination (for African Americans) and tribal rights challenged by treaty violations (for Native Americans), arguing that reproductive rights, and the rights of single mothers to their children, were important issues in those struggles. These chapters expand our understandings of important adoption-related events, such as the 1972 statement of the National Association of Black Social Workers, the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act, the war on drugs and “crack babies.” In challenging us to consider alternative interpretations of well-known adoption-related events, Briggs broadens the lens through which to view the movement of children of color into the system.
The second part of the book focuses on international adoption out of Latin American, particularly Guatemala. This section details the complicated history of adoption in the region, including the impact of the wars, poverty, politics, indigenous peoples’ struggles, the attempted genocide, the disappearances, the various regimes, the role of U.S. policy and the Christian Right, and the kidnappings and murders of adults and children. The details are chilling. Through the chapters in this section, Briggs rips the curtain back on international adoption and forces us to consider the violent ways in which children have been made available for U.S. adoption. For those familiar with the rescue narrative in dominant mainstream adoption communities here in the United States, these pages will be hard to stomach and perhaps even dismissed as unbelievable. Briggs urges us, however, not to look away.
Part III of the book, on gays/lesbians and immigrants, is slim in comparison following the density of the first two parts. The two chapters, however, build on the dominant theme which runs throughout the book: that vulnerable people, especially single mothers, lose their children, and people in positions of power profit in multiple ways.
The history Briggs presents is a complicated and messy one, not the neat sentimental narrative of rescue so persuasive in the popular imagination. The book is sure to evoke debate and perhaps even outrage among some. Perhaps with that understanding, Somebody’s Children is brimming—almost drowning—in evidential details meant to support Briggs’ interpretations of events and her particular argument. The first two sections cover such a range of complicated events that each could be the subject of books on their own. The writing is dense, the reading somewhat difficult. It is a hard complicated history and one that is deeply political. Somebody’s Children would be best read by those not only interested in adoption but who also have a knowledge of (or interest in) a range of historical and political events: domestic racial politics involving both African Americans and Native Americans; the various political figures and movements, wars, and uprisings in Latin America; Guatemalan politics; neoliberalism; fascism; and the Christian Right. Sections of this book would fit nicely into African American, Native American, or Latin American history courses. This book is important for adoption scholars, especially historians, and would be appropriate for advanced graduate courses in the family as well.