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Adoptive mothers do not linger over the question of genes the way that donor-assisted families do. Without a biological connection, the discovery of who their children are (personality and talents) is greeted as a welcome surprise. This chapter notes that some of the women in the interviews have met the biological mothers (and sometimes fathers), but even then they do not focus on genetic inheritance. Adoptive mothers acknowledge an innate separation between the genetic and the social, believing that their influence is critical to their child's development. However, almost all of the adoptive mothers in this study spoke of ways their children might eventually trace their birth parents, highlighting their acknowledgment of biology's ability to aid in their children's quest for self-knowledge.

Notions of blood ties predominate in Western understandings of kinship, and parenthood is understood to be founded on biogenetic connection. Adoptive kinship is at odds with and indeed challenges these claims. After adoption, the positions of both birth (or original) and adoptive parents are somewhat ambiguous. These workings are even more complicated when adoption is contested, involuntary, or within the context of institutional care, and questions of parental status and entitlement are accentuated. This chapter explores the respective positions of adoptive and birth parents relative to the child as well as to one another in open adoption; it identifies how adopters achieve, delimit, and mediate imagined and physical co-presence between their child and their child’s birth parent, and considers the emergence of virtual co-presence via online social media. Qualitative research with adoptive parents to chart the family practices through which they configure birth parents as kin are also presented.

Some children who are adopted via foster care have contact with their birth families (e.g., birth siblings), yet little research has addressed this. This chapter addresses the experiences of families who adopted their children through foster care, with attention to adoptive parents’ feelings and patterns regarding birth family contact. As this chapter details, many families involved in child welfare adoptions had complex feelings about openness. Some families had significant concerns that mitigated their willingness to pursue contact. Others were opposed to birth parent contact but, to varying degrees, were willing to pursue birth sibling contact. In some cases, contact was initiated but then halted temporarily or permanently because of the perceived risks and drawbacks associated with such contact. Yet amid a lack of contact, families often remained communicatively open with their children, and some did not rule out contact in the future.

This chapter examines the formal and informal barriers that gay men encounter as they seek to build their families through adoption. It considers how broader social and legal inequities, such as state laws regarding gay adoption, influence the path to parenthood of gay men, as well as the ways that gay men negotiate and respond to such inequities. It also explores gay fathers' ideas about and valuing of marriage and the degree to which they view marriage once they become parents. Finally, it discusses the impact of geographic and economic privilege on gay men's ability to resist or circumvent heteronormativity in the adoption process. It shows that gay men are vulnerable to heterosexism and sexism at many stages and levels of the adoption process, from the legal system to adoption agencies and birth parents.

This chapter discusses the policy, practice, and attitudes that can restrict information for adopted people who seek access to adoption agency records. It focuses on the ‘closed’ adoptions of the 1950s–1970s – many of whose subjects are now seeking to trace their origins. The chapter illustrates how confidentiality for an agency and the birth parent(s) becomes a form of secrecy and gatekeeping for the adopted person seeking information. Despite changing attitudes towards adopted adults seeking information, it is argued that there are still ‘powerful beliefs’ that providing information on origins and adoptions may potentially be damaging. The chapter reflects on the ‘feelings of powerlessness’ which can be engendered by the process of adoption and considers the view that the adopted adult remains treated or viewed as a child. This infantilisation of adopted adults is reflected in institutional practices and in the reality that the power to control information about oneself lies elsewhere.

This chapter explores the relationship between birth parents and adopted children in the context of transnational adoption and the return of transnational adoptees in the birth parents' lives. Focusing on the narratives of Ach'im madang participants who look for their parents or who seek a lost sibling on behalf of their parents, it considers how transnational adoption became the rule after the Korean War. It also examines how the older participants were separated from their parents in a few different ways known as “practices of separation,” which are related to what social anthropologists referred to as “child circulation.” Finally, it discusses family ties involving transnational adoptees and their birth parents within the context of Confucius's notion of kinship.

This chapter explores the possible meanings of family meetings that do not lead to sustained relationships and why birth parents decide to meet their children even if their familial configuration is not conducive to the maintenance of such ties. Focusing on Ach'im madang and its emphasis on meetings between transnational adoptees and their birth families, the chapter asks why such meetings are considered the “best” meetings and why people separate after meeting. It argues that helping separated relatives to find one another and to meet properly is an important element of social welfare in South Korea. It also explains how the television program managed the emotions of adopted children to relieve Korean parents' uneasy feelings.

This chapter explores the transnational influences of biomedical discourse in a study of international adoption from Peru. Scrutinizing the processes that deem children legally adoptable and that certify some parents as fit and condemn others as unfit, the chapter shows that international discourses surrounding children's rights are bolstered by globalized discourses about biomedicine as officials utilize normative notions of mental health and malnutrition in order to deem birth parents guilty of neglect or incapacity. Adoptive parents, too, are deeply enmeshed in the biomedical in their previous failed attempts at assisted reproduction and the medical examinations and tests required of them. The discourse of nation is also shaped by biomedicine, as North Americans and Europeans calculate health risks when choosing a country from which to adopt.

This chapter explores the similarities between feelings for the lost and feelings for the dead to show that the televised family meetings in South Korea between transnational adoptees and their birth parents represent a cathartic moment of potential closure for all parties. It considers how the meetings create relatedness, leaving open options of relationships—including the cessation of contact—but never reconstitute families according to the ideal model of biological kinship. It suggests that the convergence between a lost child given up for adoption and a dead child is analogous to the real wish to reintegrate the child in the family. It also discusses three options available to adults who have to deal with unwanted children in large families and children outside of the patriline: infanticide, child abandonment, and child circulation.