Home > Terms > English (EN) > adoption

adoption

American parentage is culturally based on shared blood, and, more recently on shared DNA. The basis for “real” parentage has produced ambivalent feelings towards adoption.

While Americans have long adopted, early adoptions were typically within the extended family or were highly guarded secrets with all records sealed. These early adoptions were frequently the result of out-of-wedlock births, which were socially taboo. In recent years, closed adoption has become a hotly contested issue, with advocacy groups like Bastard Nation seeking to end closed records. The search for birth parents and for biological children is a frequent topic of television talk shows. Highly publicized cases in which adopted children have been returned to birth families have led to a mistrust of domestic adoptions for most Americans. Open adoption, in which the birth parents may remain a part of the child’s life, provides a new, highly demanding option, but one limited in numbers.

Moreover, identity politics, combined with an emphasis on blood relationships, have made transracial adoptions very controversial within the US: the National Association of Black Social Workers has publicly condemned such adoptions. This controversy is combined with a rising national out-of-wedlock birth rate, as well as a declining rate of adoption to make the process more difficult. The ability to determine paternity through DNA testing has made the termination of biological parental rights more problematic.

State governments and the social services establishment are less favorable to adoption, even while the American fosterparent system is coming under attack.

These obstacles, combined with the apparent rise in infertility, have forced more middle-class white couples to seek to adopt privately or internationally. Private adoptions are typically handled through lawyers and are quite expensive. Advertisements for healthy white infants, who are in high demand, appear in college newspapers across the county, illustrating the growing demand for these adoptions. Although international adoptions are not new, the search for infants has expanded from Korea (in the 1950s and 1960s) to China, Russia, Yugoslavia, as well as Latin America and other parts of Asia.

Transnational adoption has also sparked the debate on the unequal power relationship between the first-world adopting parents and the third-world adoptees.

The cherished ideal of the nuclear family with two biological children has come under assault as single parents and gay parents turn to adoption as well. Like the blended families resulting from divorce, these new family forms do not correspond with popular views of what a real family is in America. Adoption is becoming one of the important elements in the redefinition of the American family. The “triad” of relationships resulting from adoption—the adoptive parents, the adoptees and the birth parents—represents new forms of American kinship informed both by the longstanding cultural logic of biological relationships that define what constitutes the American family and the reality of new social relationships that produce something different.

0
Collect to Blossary

Member comments

You have to log in to post to discussions.

Terms in the News

Billy Morgan

Sports; Snowboarding

The British snowboarder Billy Morgan has landed the sport’s first ever 1800 quadruple cork. The rider, who represented Great Britain in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, was in Livigno, Italy, when he achieved the man-oeuvre. It involves flipping four times, while body also spins with five complete rotations on a sideways or downward-facing axis. The trick ...

Marzieh Afkham

Broadcasting & receiving; News

Marzieh Afkham, who is the country’s first foreign ministry spokeswoman, will head a mission in east Asia, the state news agency reported. It is not clear to which country she will be posted as her appointment has yet to be announced officially. Afkham will only be the second female ambassador Iran has had. Under the last shah’s rule, Mehrangiz Dolatshahi, a ...

Weekly Packet

Language; Online services; Slang; Internet

Weekly Packet or "Paquete Semanal" as it is known in Cuba is a term used by Cubans to describe the information that is gathered from the internet outside of Cuba and saved onto hard drives to be transported into Cuba itself. Weekly Packets are then sold to Cuban's without internet access, allowing them to obtain information just days - and sometimes hours - after it ...

Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)

Banking; Investment banking

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is an international financial institution established to address the need in Asia for infrastructure development. According to the Asian Development Bank, Asia needs $800 billion each year for roads, ports, power plants or other infrastructure projects before 2020. Originally proposed by China in 2013, a signing ...

Spartan

Online services; Internet

Spartan is the codename given to the new Microsoft Windows 10 browser that will replace Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer. The new browser will be built from the ground up and disregard any code from the IE platform. It has a new rendering engine that is built to be compatible with how the web is written today. The name Spartan is named after the ...

Featured Terms

Naveed
  • 0

    Terms

  • 5

    Blossaries

  • 1

    Followers

Industry/Domain: Materials science Category: Metallurgy

Wrought Steels

Wrought steels are shaped by plastic deformation(mechanical working).View examples of the ornamental wrought iron railings, fences, gates, spiral ...

Contributor

Featured blossaries

Antioxidant Food

Category: Food   1 8 Terms

Futures Terms and Definitions

Category: Business   2 20 Terms