Rev. of Taking Children: A History of American Terror by Laura Briggs

Abstract

Adoption & Culture Vol. 10, Issue 2 (2022) Copyright © 2022 by The Ohio State University Reviews Rev. of Taking Children: A History of American Terror LAURA BRIGGS, U of California P, 2020 240 pp. $24.95 (hardback) ISBN: 9780520343672; and Legitimating Life: Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology SONJA VAN WICHELEN, Rutgers UP, 2019 207+xii pp. $34.95 (paperback) ISBN: 9781978800519 By John McLeod When I first accessed my adoption records six years ago and read through the paperwork with a tremulous eye, I learned a great many things about the earliest days of my life in 1969. Among the surprises that lay in wait was my designation, in one formal document, as “illegitimate.” This was not necessarily news: we had always known I was conceived and born to a single mother. Rather, the surprise was the use of this word in a quasi-official capacity, on a formal document, as an explanatory lever that was already crafting my adoptability in principle and cleaving me from my birthmother. It was a salutary lesson, post-dated forty-five years or so, of the social and discursive constitution of adoption’s validity, which is always needed for its contracting. There may never be in essence an unimpeachable reason for rendering a child adoptable, but the adoption machine both requires and produces reasons, upheld by national and international institutions, in order to legitimate its objectives. Discourses of legitimation often cloak vested interests in the guise of what’s “natural” or “best,” but can never fully conceal the politics they work so hard to hide. “Fine word—legitimate!” spits Edmund acidly in Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606), keenly aware of the confection of his branded baseness. To be sure, the base fiction of my illegitimacy was certainly required to uphold the “humanitarian” placing of me in acceptable new company as the certified son of upwardly-mobile, heterosexual, married white parents. With a paradoxical logic so often definitive of adoption’s design, these very dynamics of legitimation made me a problem to be solved and provided the ready-made solution. The adoption machine both designated me as illegitimate and rescued https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2802-3525 2 ADOPTION & CULTURE 10.2 me from shame by legitimating me via a sanctioned family unit. The plague of custom did its work, readily assisted by the laws and moral precepts of the time. In different ways, and for different reasons, Laura Briggs and Sonja van Wichelen concern themselves with with the legitimation work required to enable both the surrendering of children and the resolving of adoption contracts. Each focuses on the organizations—ranging from governments and judiciaries to adoption agencies to biomedical institutions—that concretize and realize the wider discursive construction , always highly political, of a child’s vulnerability to being taken. Briggs addresses vulnerable racialized and minoritized communities in the US and Latin America whose children have been forcibly removed thanks to the actions of welfare officers, the police and medical professionals, Homeland Security, and more besides, as part of the aggressive manipulation of judicial process at both state and federal levels by politicians and their powerful supporters. Van Wichelen explores the international legal conventions, policies, professions, and agencies that direct and deliver the transcultural adoption of children today usually by white adopters in the Global North. Both are conscious of the indebtedness of contemporary child surrender and adoption contracts to the dismal history of inequality, oppression, and family-breaking in which minoritized and marginalized peoples have severely suffered. For Briggs, in the US today the brutal taking of children from asylum seekers and precarious migrants at the southwest border has deep roots in the nation’s longstanding assault on family relations suffered especially by Native Americans, African Americans, and Latinx peoples. Van Wichelen’s inquiry into contemporary adoption in an international frame repeatedly points to the complicity of contemporary adoption practice in the neocolonial dispensation of the global world system, thinly veiled by a residual investment in a freshly laundered humanitarianism that has yet to be fully shaken off. While very different books for several reasons, when read together Briggs’s and van Wichelen’s work combine to offer a laser-sharp critique...