Adoption, Identity, and Kinship: The Debate Over Sealed Birth Records

Abstract

Adoption, Identity, and Kinship: The Debate Over Sealed Birth Records. Katarina Wegar. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1997. 169 pp. ISBN 0-300-06759-3. $22.50 cloth. In this book, Katarina Wegar, sociologist, attempts to make explicit the implicit assumptions that have shaped adoption and the debate over sealed records. She argues that adoption policies have been shaped by central assumption of differences, by patriarchal assumptions about the nature of motherhood, and by social workers' attempts to gain authority and professional influence. She also examines the role of search activists in polarizing the debate over sealed records through their emphasis on the biological basis of feelings of kinship and their characterization of the need to search as a genetic and universal biological imperative. Wegar thus makes significant contribution to the debate over sealed records by focusing her analysis on the social context within which the search debate takes place. Wegar observes that the belief that adopted children are different from and somehow inferior to children raised by their biological parents enters the debate through the research assumptions of adoption and policymakers and the self-narratives of search activists and proponents of adoption reform. Wegar makes clear her own experience as an adult adoptee who has identified her birth parents and maintains ongoing contact with her birth mother. She presents, however, balanced and thoughtful analysis of the perspectives that inform the debate over the release of confidential adoption information. To do so, Wegar employs the frame-critical perspective, theoretical approach she uses to examine how adoption itself and members of the adoption triangle are socially and culturally constructed by adoption and search activists as different from the norm. Wegar begins her analysis by reviewing the historical development of adoption as social institution and examines the social conditions giving rise to the search movement. She also discusses legal challenges to the policy of sealed records and the role of this policy in perpetuating social inequality. She then examines the research assumption of experts who emphasize psychopathology in adoption, and she considers the role of the professionalization of social work in the development of American adoption practice. Wegar uses this review to challenge research that pathologizes adoptive families and adoptees and that ignores the impact of stigmatizing social and cultural beliefs about infertility, adoption, and kinship. …