Adoption

• 1. Introduction

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  Adoption transfers, permanently and in the eyes of the law, every right and every responsibility of parenthood from one set of people to another. It is not guardianship, not foster care, not a temporary arrangement. It is a formal erasure and rewriting of a child's legal identity, one that societies across history have both embraced and resisted. Why did Rome's emperors so often reach this arrangement while medieval Europe's nobility condemned it? Why did the United States build one of the largest child-migration movements in recorded history, and then pivot to sealing every record of it? And what happens to the people at the center of the exchange: the children who grow up not knowing who they were born to, the mothers who spend years thinking of children they released, and the parents who chose to raise someone else's child as their own? The answers stretch back to Hammurabi's Babylon and forward to courtrooms deciding today who gets to know their own birth certificate.

• 2. Ancient Foundations

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  The Code of Hammurabi sets out, in considerable detail, the rights of adopters and the duties owed by those who were adopted. That document is among the earliest written evidence that human societies felt the practice needed formal rules. The Roman Empire carried the concept further, documenting it extensively in the Codex Justinianus. What distinguished ancient adoption from its modern counterpart was its purpose: the practice served wealthy and aristocratic interests, creating male heirs to manage estates and cementing political alliances between powerful families. Many of Rome's emperors were themselves adopted sons. A specific Roman form called adrogation required the person being adopted to give active consent, distinguishing it from arrangements involving infants or children. Some adoptions were even conducted after the adopter's death, a posthumous legal maneuver to manage inheritance. Infant adoption was rare. Abandoned children were far more likely to be taken into slavery, and the source records that they composed a significant percentage of the Roman Empire's slave supply. Those foundlings occasionally taken in by families occupied a category called alumni: neither fully adopted under Roman law nor entirely free, they were considered property of the father who had originally abandoned them, a legal status that resembles guardianship more than parenthood. In ancient India and China, adoption served a different goal entirely: ensuring that ancestral religious duties were fulfilled. A son was needed in India so that proper funerary rites could be performed. China adopted males specifically to carry out ancestor worship. Both of these traditions stood apart from the Roman logic of extending family lines or consolidating wealth. Among Polynesian cultures, including Hawaii, the practice had its own shape: adopting the children of family members and close friends was common, and in Hawaii the custom carried a specific name, hānai.

• 3. Medieval Retreat and Church Innovation

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  When Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic cultures displaced Roman authority across Europe, adoption lost its institutional standing. The nobility of these successor cultures denounced the practice outright. In medieval society, bloodlines determined succession, and a ruling dynasty without a naturally born heir was simply replaced. English common law eventually banned adoption entirely on the grounds that it contradicted inheritance customs. France's Napoleonic Code, centuries later, treated adoption as such a burden that it required adopters to be over 50 years old, sterile, at least 15 years older than the person being adopted, and to have provided care for at least six years before the arrangement could proceed. Some informal adoptions still occurred, built on ad hoc contracts. A charter from the town of Lucca dated to the year 737 records three adoptees being named heirs to an estate. These agreements tended to emphasize what the adopted person owed the adopter, particularly care in old age, rather than what the adopter gave the child. The Church stepped into the gap left by a retreating aristocracy. As the Roman Empire fell, abandonment levels rose, and foundlings began appearing on church doorsteps. Clergy first responded by drafting rules about how abandoned children could be raised, sold, or exposed. Then came a more transformative development: oblation, the practice of dedicating children to lay life within monasteries. This was the first system in European history that removed the legal, social, and moral disadvantages attached to abandoned children. Europe's orphaned children became, in effect, alumni of the Church, and the Church became their adopter. Oblation was the seed of what would grow into the foundling hospital and the orphanage, institutions that formalized child welfare on an unprecedented scale. Within those institutions, informal placement developed its own logic. Boys could be apprenticed to artisans; girls could be married off. When adopted children died, their bodies were returned to the institution for burial, a detail that reveals how incomplete the transfer of care really was.

• 4. America Builds a New Model

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  Charles Loring Brace, a Protestant minister, walked the streets of New York City in the mid-nineteenth century and saw what he described as legions of homeless children threatening the city's order. He was particularly alarmed by those who were Catholic. His response was a pamphlet titled The Best Method of Disposing of Our Pauper and Vagrant Children, published in 1859, which launched what became known as the Orphan Train movement. Over the life of that program, an estimated 200,000 children were shipped from eastern cities to rural families across the country. Most were not adopted. They were indentured, put to work as farm laborers and household servants. The sheer scale of this displacement prompted a legal backlash. Minnesota's adoption law of 1917 became a landmark: it mandated investigation of all placements and restricted who could access adoption records. The same law introduced a formal standard of care that broke from indenture. President Theodore Roosevelt's First White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, held in 1909, declared that the nuclear family represented what the conference called "the highest and finest product of civilization" and should serve as the primary setting for orphaned children. As late as 1923, only two percent of children without parental care lived in adoptive homes. Less than forty years later, nearly one-third did. That shift was slowed by the popularity of eugenic thinking. Henry H. Goddard, an influential figure in the movement, argued publicly against adopting children of unknown parentage, warning that such children might carry "poor and diseased stock" into a family's bloodline. His argument, built around the danger of genetic unknowns, reflected a broader scientific consensus of the era. The period from 1945 to 1974, known as the baby scoop era, overturned that consensus. Illegitimate births rose sharply after World War II. The scientific community pivoted toward nurture over genetics. Adoption became the common solution for infertile couples, though many of the women who relinquished children during this period were coerced rather than choosing freely. Brace's earlier contribution to this modern system was not only the Orphan Trains. He also introduced the practice of sealing records, originally to stop Orphan Train children from being reclaimed by their original parents. That practice, driven partly by his distrust of Catholic immigrants, was adopted by Progressive-era reformers when writing American law. By 1945, original birth certificates were sealed in all U.S. states except Alaska and Kansas.

• 5. Global Spread and Contemporary Forms

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  England and Wales established their first formal adoption law in 1926, following the American model by several decades. The Netherlands passed its law in 1956. Sweden made adoptees full legal family members in 1959. West Germany waited until 1977. Each country adapted the practice to its own customs, producing a patchwork of rules that remains difficult to navigate when children cross borders. International adoption moved an enormous number of children in the late twentieth century. More than 60,000 Russian children were adopted in the United States from 1992 onward. A similar number of Chinese children were adopted internationally from 1995 to 2005. The Hague Adoption Convention, developed to protect against the corruption and exploitation that sometimes accompanied these movements, came into force on the 1st of May 1995 and had been ratified by 105 countries as of February 2024. Contemporary domestic adoption takes several distinct legal forms. Open adoption allows identifying information to flow between biological and adoptive families and may include actual contact. As of February 2009-24 U.S. states allowed legally enforceable open adoption agreements. Closed adoption, also called confidential or secret adoption, seals all identifying information. Safe haven laws, passed in some U.S. states, permit infants to be left anonymously at hospitals, fire departments, or police stations within a few days of birth, a practice criticized by some adoption advocacy organizations as retrograde. Embryo adoption occupies unusual legal ground: in the United States it is governed by property law rather than the court systems that handle traditional adoption, because the embryo is transferred before pregnancy rather than after birth. Adoption by same-sex couples was legal in 34 countries as of March 2022. American Community Survey data from 2022 showed that male same-sex couples were 18.5% more likely to adopt than female same-sex couples, while female same-sex couples were almost 12% more likely to have biological children. The United States still adopts at rates nearly three times those of comparable Western nations, even as the number of children waiting for adoptive homes held roughly steady between 100,000 and 125,000 during the period 2009 to 2018.

• 6. The Lives of Adoptees

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  Researchers at the University of Minnesota found that adolescent adoptees were twice as likely as non-adopted peers to develop oppositional defiant disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, with a baseline rate of 8% in the general population. Swedish researchers found that both international and domestic adoptees undertook suicide at much higher rates than non-adopted peers, with international adoptees and female international adoptees at the highest risk of any group. Adoptees are, by one measure cited in the source, four times more likely to attempt suicide than the broader population. Identity sits at the center of many of these difficulties. The Child Citizen Act of 2000 grants immediate U.S. citizenship to international adoptees, resolving one question of legal belonging, but does not resolve the inner one. Research on transracial and international adoptees consistently finds tension around racial, ethnic, and national identity. Studies suggest that multicultural and transnational young people tend to identify with their biological parents' culture of origin even when living within a different cultural context, and that school environments often lack the diversity or acknowledgment to help them navigate that tension. Silverstein and Kaplan's research found that adoptees lacking medical, genetic, religious, and historical information were burdened by questions as fundamental as who they are and why they were born. The Colorado Adoption Project found that the cognitive abilities of adoptees reflect those of their adoptive parents in early childhood but shift in adolescence to resemble those of their biological parents, matching the pattern seen in children who were never adopted. Danish and American researchers studying body mass index found correlations between an adoptee's weight class and the biological parents' BMI, with no measurable relationship to the adoptive family's environment. Yet the picture in adulthood is considerably more balanced. Young adult adoptees scored better than adults raised in single-parent or step-family arrangements, and showed more similarities than differences with non-adopted adults on a range of psychosocial measures. Professor Goldfarb's early work in England concluded that some children adjust well socially and emotionally despite early institutional deprivation, a finding that subsequent researchers confirmed: prolonged institutionalization does not inevitably produce emotional problems. Warm adoptive parenting, specifically, has been shown to reduce behavioral problems over time. One study found that warmth measured at 27 months predicted lower externalizing problems at ages 6 and 7.

• 7. Reunion and Records

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  Jean Paton founded Orphan Voyage in 1954, one of the earliest organizations pressing for adoptees to regain access to their own birth records. Florence Fisher founded the Adoptees' Liberty Movement Association in 1971, calling sealed records "an affront to human dignity". Emma May Vilardi created the first mutual-consent registry in 1975, the International Soundex Reunion Registry, so that those separated by adoption could locate one another. That same year, England and Wales opened records on moral grounds. In 1979, representatives of 32 organizations from 33 states, Canada, and Mexico gathered in Washington, D.C. to establish the American Adoption Congress, passing a unanimous resolution calling for open records for all members of the adoption triad at the adoptee's age of majority. The U.K. Office for National Statistics projected that 33% of all adoptees would eventually request copies of their original birth records, a figure that exceeded initial forecasts and is considered an underestimate, since many adoptees of that era obtained records by other means. Research on reunion motivations found four recurring reasons: adoptees want a more complete genealogy, they are curious about the circumstances of their conception and relinquishment, they want information to pass to their own children, and they need medical history. Researchers note, however, that these stated reasons may be incomplete. Interviews found that adoptees who sought reunion expressed a need to actually meet biological relatives, not merely to receive information that a third party could provide. In the largest study on reunion outcomes, involving responses from 1,007 adoptees and relinquishing parents, 90% described the experience as beneficial. The drive to unseal records has produced concrete legal changes. A coalition of New York activists overturned a law that had been in force for 83 years, and in 2019 adult adopted people born in New York gained the right to obtain their original birth certificates. In 2024 Minnesota became the fifteenth U.S. state to guarantee that right. In 2025, Georgia enacted similar legislation, becoming the sixteenth.

• 8. Forced Adoption and Its Aftermath

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  In German-occupied Poland during World War II, an estimated 200,000 Polish children with purportedly Aryan traits were removed from their families and placed with German or Austrian couples. Only 25,000 returned to their families after the war ended. The Stolen Generation of Aboriginal people in Australia, Native Americans in the United States, and First Nations of Canada were subjected to similar state-organized removals, all justified in the language of child welfare while serving the purpose of cultural erasure. In Switzerland, children known as Verdingkinder, or contract children, were taken from poor families under welfare rationales from the 1850s through the middle of the twentieth century. In Spain, under Francisco Franco's dictatorship spanning 1939 to 1975, the newborns of left-wing opponents, unmarried couples, and poor couples were taken from their mothers and given to other families. Mothers were told their babies had died suddenly and that the hospital had arranged the burial. It is believed that up to 300,000 babies were involved. Doctors, nurses, nuns, and priests were allegedly participants. The practice outlived Franco's death in 1975, continuing as an illegal trafficking network until 1987, when Spain introduced a new adoption law. The United States responded to its own history of Indigenous child removal with the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, which gives the tribe and biological family of a Native American child a formal role in adoption decisions, with preference given to placement within the child's own tribe. Nancy Verrier's book The Primal Wound gave language to a reform movement built around family preservation, describing the separation of infant from birth mother as a wound she called "deep and consequential" that may persist through a person's entire life. Origins USA, founded in 1997, emerged from the same movement, pressing actively for the rights of mothers against institutional pressure to relinquish. The New York Foundling Home, one of the country's oldest adoption institutions and a pioneer of sealed records, eventually reversed its founding logic by establishing a principle specifically directed at preventing unnecessary placement of children outside their birth families.