Transnational Adoption

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The first transnational adoptions to the United States or “intercountry” as they were originally called, began in the wake of World War II, but it was not until after the Korean War that international adoption to the United States became institutionalized. Transnational adoption changed ideas around family and kinship as children were not only being adopted cross-nationally but also cross-racially. Because transnational adoption quickly began to transgress the race-matching procedures that guided initial intercountry and domestic adoptions, this new form of family making drew both public attention and research interests. This article primarily focuses on transnational adoption to the United States and the controversies, politics, and outcomes surrounding it. Initial research studies in the 1960s and 1970s in social work and psychology began with a focus largely on children’s psychological and social adjustment into their adoptive families before continuing across disciplines such as law; gender and family studies; cultural studies; and sociology. As research continued, attention reflected disciplinary foci expanding from outcome studies to examinations of the effect of policies, politics (domestic and geopolitical), and race, class, and gender. Given the growth of transnational adoption globally, in 1995 the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-Operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption entered into force with the goal of securing the “best interests of the child” and preventing child trafficking and other abuses. In recent decades, new sending countries have open and closed relatively quickly, though China remains a major sending country to the United States for the past two decades, while longer-standing sending countries such as Korea have changed their policies, resulting in decreased adoptions to the United States. These changes, along with a growing awareness of the inequalities inherent in transnational adoption and increased consideration for first families, raise new research questions around the future of adoption.