Pound Pup Legacy

The paradoxical rationalization of modern adoption - social and economic aspects of adoption

Ellen Herman

"It's cheaper and easier to buy a baby for $100.00 than to have one of your own." (1) This was the brash slogan of one Chicago baby broker, whose adoption business was revealed during a 1917 investigation of commercial child-caring arrangements known as baby farms. At the same time, the Spence Adoption Nursery in New York (one of the first specialized adoption agencies in the United States) was flooded with so many requests "from the finest families in the country" that it boasted: "Our primary purpose is to place children of unusual promise in homes of uncommon opportunities." (2) In the early decades of the twentieth century, child adoption was an exchange governed by an unstable combination of profitability, benevolence, and upward mobility.

Modernizing child adoption depended on sharp contrasts between commercial, sentimental, and professional ways of making families up. At the dawn of the twentieth-century, baby farms like the one in Chicago provoked sensation, newspapers advertized babies, and indentures and deeds were still used to exchange children. Most states had passed adoption laws in the nineteenth century, following the 1851 Massachusetts statute that defined adoption as a matter of children's welfare and called upon courts to verify that adopters were "of sufficient ability to bring up the child ... and that it is fit and proper that such adoption should take effect." (3) Yet in 1900, no state in the country treated child-placing as a specialized occupation or mandated that adoptive homes be investigated or supervised. By 1950, few states allowed unlicenced placements, and kinship rarely became a legal fact without some form of public inquiry, though investigatory probes ranged from perfunctory to painstaking. Dorothy Hutchinson, a nationally known placement authority on the faculty of Columbia's School of Social Work, put the case for regulatory expertise bluntly in 1947:

Kindliness and benevolence of themselves are insufficient. The panic-stricken unmarried mother, the unprotected child and the thirsty adoptive parents all have a right to security and to the protection of authentic experience and to the best in our scientific knowledge. In the hands of an amateur, adoption practice is a perilous activity whether the amateur be a kindly dilettante or an unprincipled money-changer. (4)

Making adoption modern entailed establishing a new paradigm, kinship by design, and then radically distancing that paradigm from modes of family formation that relied on commerce, sentiment, intuition, accident, or simply common sense. The campaign to rationalize kinship--through a trinity of professional management, scientific validation, and expanded public bureaucracy--is the focus of this article. Its very partial success tells a story about adoption that is also a story about modernity itself. (5)

Adoption is an ancient institution that was, during the twentieth century, reimagined as a transaction that transformed non-relatives ("biological strangers") into kin through systematic "matching" techniques that replaced, rather than supplemented, natal families. In their eagerness to reduce the stigma and increase the authenticity of kinship made socially, many participants in modern adoption held that institution up to the mirror of biogenetic nature, denying what is surely the most obvious thing about adoption: it is a different way to make a family. The matching paradigm stipulated that parents who acquired children born to others should look, feel, and behave as if they had conceived those children themselves. One result was the novel but tight linkage that grew between adoption and infertility over the course of the century. Infertile couples have probably always been disproportionately interested in adoption, but prior to 1940, infertility per se did not elicit much probing or concern during the adoption process. (6) By 1950, adoption was commonly viewed as the quintessential solution for childless heterosexual couples seeking to approximate, emotionally and legally as well as physically, the family they could not produce themselves. It conveniently also offered birth mothers and their babies second chances for normal lives, without the shame of being unwed and illegitimate.

In light of a generation of Kuhnian scholarship revealing cultural and temporal particularism lurking beneath the surface of universalist knowledge claims (8)--including claims to understand development and kinship scientifically--matching today appears as a distinctive social practice, only one of many possible ways to make families up. The "naturalness" of matching still has ardent defenders today, especially with regard to race. Since 1970, however, its axiomatic status has been forcefully challenged by movements demanding open records and open adoptions and by placements that deliberately and visibly violate the paradigm, crossing lines of race, ethnicity, and nation. In an era of reform, it is worth recalling that matching's reenactment of nature directly confronted the central dilemma of modern adoption. It attempted to create kinship without blood in the face of an enduring equivalence between blood and belonging. The results were paradoxical. Matching reinforced the notion that blood was thicker than water, the very ideology that made adoption inferior to the "real thing," a last resort after the normal (and preferred) method of biogenetic reproduction had failed.

If the advocates of matching reinforced the blood bias of American kinship, they also brought dignity and equality to adoption by insisting that governmental and scientific resources be devoted to serving the needs of children who needed parents. By controlling and regularizing the procedures that made families up, they sought to improve adoption's outcome and reputation as well as naturalize its product. Surveying the history of this campaign offers a vantage point not only on adoption, but on the growth of bureaucratic organization, public regulation, scientific professionalism, and other key social processes famously analyzed by Max Weber under the useful rubric of rationalization. (9)

Adoption rationalization certainly illustrates how the most ordinary, intimate, and private corners of social life--from family dynamics to sexual behavior and selfhood itself--have been subjected to constant scrutiny, empirical probing, and novel forms of discipline that "simplified" social relations in the interest of managerial "legibility." (10) Kinship by design appears to be a classic example of modern social engineering, at once arrogant and utopian, striving to bring as much of social life as possible under confident control, sidelining mystery and humility in favor of mastery and prediction. If industrial, intercultural, and international relations could all be rationalized, why not familial relations as well? (11)

The case of child adoption leads to a conclusion less confining, but no less chastened, than Weber's inescapable iron cage. Rationalizers--social welfare, human science, and public policy professionals concerned with adoption--have faced constant resistance from the public and struggled with their own chronic uncertainty about what appropriate adoption standards should be. Was it advisable or dangerous to place newborns and infants? Should adopters' gender preferences be honored or ignored? Should records be sealed or reunions facilitated? On these and many other questions, rationalizers changed their minds.

Rationalization in child adoption has been only partially successful, especially if we measure success practically, as rationalizers did themselves, by counting legislative reforms, calculating the growth of professional authority, and computing the superior outcomes of adoption arranged by experts. If, however, we consider adoption rationalization as a moral ideal, then it appears as part of a more profound social revolution in private life, one that reconfigured the meaning and experience of kinship. Adoption rationalization forcefully moved childhood and kinship into the public sphere, pried a significant measure of power away from parents, and transferred decisions previously considered beyond the legitimate reach of state power to representatives of government and allied helping professions.

Rationalizers helped to inaugurate a new era of confidence in adoption by promising that risks could be known, authenticity insured, and outcomes predicted in advance. The scrupulously designed family, not widely realized in practice before 1945, was symbolically powerful--in popular magazines and newspapers, government pamphlets, on radio, and in professional literature of many kinds--as a benchmark against which all adoptions were measured. One result was that adoption's statistical prevalence and sheer social visibility rose to unprecedented levels during the twentieth century. (12) For ordinary Americans in 1900, entering a court to formalize kinship was still rare. By 1970, the century's numerical high point, approximately 175,000 new adoptive families were legalized each year. (13) The annual figure has dropped to around 125,000 recently, but adoption retains a powerful hold on the public imagination and is a fixture in media and popular culture. (14) Adoption attracts curiosity in part because it is distinctive. But it also stands as a symbol of identity and solidarity, social processes that encompass us all. How do we come to know who we are and where (and with whom) we belong?