Selling Transracial Adoption: Families, Markets and the Colour Line, Elizabeth Raleigh

Abstract

This book is grounded in the American adoption system and focuses on the private adoption marketplace, which is part of American child welfare services. This is very different from the British adoption system and it quickly emerges that there are significant concerns about the mingling of loosely regulated business models with decisions being made about children’s futures, their identity, care needs and the need to feel a sense of belonging. The book opens by explaining the distinct dissimilarities between the adoption of children from foster care and the private adoption market in the USA where the adoption takes place via domestic and international adoption placements with a ‘fee for service model’. The author explores and analyses the challenges for social workers and other professionals in managing the tensions between remaining child-focused and putting the baby’s or child’s interests first yet ensuring that enough profit is generated for private adoption agencies to thrive. The tensions for this model of adoption is explored across five chapters with two key aims of the book being: what does privatised adoption teach us about kinship, and what does it teach us about race?