Legitimating Life: Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology 9781978800557

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LEGITIM ATING LIFE

Medical Anthropology: Health, Inequality, and Social Justice Series Editor: Lenore Manderson Books in the Medical Anthropology series are concerned with social patterns of and social responses to ill health, disease, and suffering and how social exclusion and social justice shape health and healing outcomes. The series is designed to reflect the diversity of contemporary medical anthropological research and writing and will offer scholars a forum to publish work that showcases the theoretical sophistication, methodological soundness, and ethnographic richness of the field. Books in the series may include studies on the organization and movement of peoples, technologies, and treatments; how inequalities pattern access to these; and how individuals, communities, and states respond to various assaults on well-­being, including from illness, disaster, and violence. Jessica Hardin, Faith and the Pursuit of Health: Cardiometabolic Disorders in Samoa Carina Heckert, Fault Lines of Care: Gender, HIV, and Global Health in Bolivia Alison Heller, Fistula Politics: Birthing Injuries and the Quest for Continence in Niger Joel Christian Reed, Landscapes of Activism: Civil Society and HIV and AIDS Care in Northern Mozambique Beatriz M. Reyes-­Foster, Psychiatric Encounters: Madness and Modernity in Yucatan, Mexico Sonja van Wichelen, Legitimating Life: Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology Lesley Jo Weaver, Sugar and Tension: Diabetes and Gender in Modern India Andrea Whittaker, International Surrogacy as Disruptive Industry in Southeast Asia

LEGITIM ATING LIFE Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology

Son j a va n W ic helen

Rutger s Uni v er sit y P r ess

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Wichelen, Sonja van, author. Title: Legitimating life : adoption in the age of globalization and biotechnology / Sonja van Wichelen. Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2018] | Series: Medical anthropology: health, inequality, and social justice | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018008421 (print) | LCCN 2018012711 (ebook) | ISBN 9781978800533 (E-­pub) | ISBN 9781978800557 (Web PDF) | ISBN 9781978800526 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978800519 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Intercountry adoption. | Human reproductive technology—­Social aspects. Classification: LCC HV875.5 (ebook) | LCC HV875.5 .W53 2018 (print) | DDC 362.734—­dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008421 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2019 by Sonja van Wichelen All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-­1992. www​.rutgersuniversitypress​.org Manufactured in the United States of America

For Marc, Luc, and Nils—­for life in kin

CONTENTS Foreword by Lenore Manderson



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Introduction: Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology

1

The Ethical Market: Between Reproduction and Humanitarianism

20

Double Movements: International Law as Transparency Device

50

Valuing Bodies: Somatic Ethics in the Biomedicalization of Adoption

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4

Grievable Lives: The Adoptee and the Child Migrant

105

5

Economies of Return: Openness, Knowledge, Relations

124



Conclusion: Legitimating Life

154

1 2 3

Acknowledgments 165 Notes 169 Bibliography 181 Index 199

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FOREWORD Lenor e M a n der son

Medical Anthropology: Health, Inequality, and Social Justice is a new series from Rutgers University Press designed to capture the diversity of contemporary medical anthropological research and writing. The beauty of ethnography is its capacity, through storytelling, to make sense of suffering as a social experience and to set it in context. Central to our focus in this series on health and illness, inequality and social justice, therefore, are the ways in which social structures and ideologies shape the likelihood and impact of infections, injuries, bodily ruptures and disease, chronic conditions and disability, treatment and care, social repair, and death. The brief for this series is broad. The books concern health and illness, healing practices and access to care, but the authors illustrate too the importance of context—­of geography, physical condition, service availability, and income. Health and illness are social facts; the circumstances of the maintenance and loss of health are always and everywhere shaped by structural, global, and local relations. Society, culture, economy, and political organization as much as ecology shape the variance of illness, disability, and disadvantage. But as medical anthropologists have long illustrated, the relationships of social context and health status are complex. In addressing these questions, the authors in this series showcase the theoretical sophistication, methodological rigor, and empirical richness of the field while expanding a map of illness and social and institutional life to illustrate the effects of material conditions and social meanings in troubling and surprising ways. The books in the series move across social circumstances, health conditions, and geography and their intersections and interactions to demonstrate how individuals, communities, and states manage assaults on well-­being. The books reflect medical anthropology as a constantly changing field of scholarship, drawing on research in residential and virtual communities, clinics, and laboratories and in emergency care and public health settings—­with service ix

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providers, individual healers, and households; with social bodies, human bodies, and biologies. While medical anthropology once concentrated on systems of healing, particular diseases, and embodied experiences, today the field has expanded to include environmental disaster and war, science, technology and faith, gender-­based violence, and forced migration. Curiosity about the body and its vicissitudes remains a pivot for our work, but our concerns are with the location of bodies in social life and with how social structures, temporal imperatives, and shifting exigencies shape life courses. This dynamic field reflects an ethics of the discipline to address these pressing issues of our time. Globalization has contributed to and adds to the complexity of influences on health outcomes; it (re)produces social and economic relations that institutionalize poverty, unequal conditions of everyday life and work, and environments in which diseases increase or subside. Globalization patterns the movement and relations of peoples, technologies and knowledge, programs and treatments; shapes differences in health experiences and outcomes across space; and informs and amplifies inequalities at individual and country levels. Global forces and local inequalities compound and impact individuals’ physical and mental health, their households and communities. At the same time, as the subtitle of this series indicates, we are concerned with questions of social exclusion and inclusion, social justice and repair, again both globally and in local settings. The books will challenge readers to reflect not only on sickness and suffering, deficit and despair, but also on resistance and restitution—­on how people respond to injustices and evade the fault lines that might seem to predetermine life outcomes. While not all of the books take this direction, the aim is to widen the frame within which we conceptualize embodiment and suffering.

Medical anthropologists have written extensively of how medical technologies, personnel, procedures, and products have moved around the globe, bringing health and hope to some and disappointment to others. Globalization has allowed people to act expeditiously, taking advantage of the diverse economies, laws, and expertise that constellate around bodies and bodily processes. Even when medicine is not directly and immediately involved in providing care, it has increasingly become part of the apparatus of control. In Legitimating Life: Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology,

Foreword

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Sonja van Wichelen demonstrates how this is so through exploring the biopolitics of transnational adoption. In doing this, van  Wichelen draws on ethnographic work in the Netherlands and the US and a wide and critical reading of international and national law and ethics, science and technology, politics and reproduction, and kinship and the family. Formal and informal adoption has always been a strategy for families to reproduce, a way of extending care and meeting the affective and material needs of orphaned children and barren couples. Adoption through kinship networks has sustained kin lines and family names and property and met ancestral obligations while it has also, according to local economies, supplemented household labor and so economic resources. But increasingly and globally, adoption has come to be a means centrally to create or build a family, both in the face of failed biological reproduction and in response to the perceived needs of orphaned or abandoned children. In the present, few children are adopted within the borders of high-­income countries for many reasons: effective and increasingly reliable contraceptive technology, the reduced significance of formal marriage as a social prerequisite for family building, and the imperative to protect and support rather than to dismantle vulnerable families. Increasingly, as a result, the intercountry adoption of children has gained legitimacy, and both to facilitate this and to protect children, birth parents, and adopting parents, transnational family formation has become increasingly institutionalized and legalized. In exploring this and in explaining biomedicine’s and biotechnology’s involvement, van Wichelen focuses on “legitimation work” and what she sees as enactments of ethics. In describing and analyzing the very different worlds of adoption, she examines how institutional actors and individuals come together in usually, but not always, productive ways. The story of the adoption of children between countries brings together hopeful social parents, immigration authorities, psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, social workers, managers of orphanages, child traffickers, and a new field of medicine—­ “adoption medicine”—­and the theories it promotes for interventions in adopted children’s lives. Multilateral organizations and structures, including of international law, converge to define who might be adoptable and who might adopt, under what circumstances, in whose interests, and with what checks and balances. With Legitimating Life, van Wichelen takes readers beyond questions of family formation, kinship structures, and the desire for children that frame

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the predominant perspective on adoption—­of bringing a child into a family. She takes us also beyond questions of unintended pregnancy, maternal despair, gender preference, poverty and insecurity, war and terror—­all of which help explain the continued presence of infants and children in orphanages. Brought together, shadowed by humanitarian concerns and personal commitments, she asks us far trickier questions. For if children are considered adoptable and are adopted across national borders for any of these reasons, is adoption sustainable? Or is adoption, instead, a symbol of global inequality and social injustice?

LEGITIM ATING LIFE

INTRODUCTION Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology

event one In December 2013, the then newly elected prime minister, Tony Abbott, pledged to reform the adoption system in Australia. Convinced by concerns from the Australian adoption lobby that adoption in general, but especially international adoption, had been blocked by stringent and unnecessary regulations, he promised that he would do his utmost to set in place a “modern adoption system that gives children the best possible start at life.”1 In line with a government report in 2005 that encouraged more proadoption policies, the proposed measures by the Abbott government challenged the foster-­oriented culture of social reproduction in Australia, a culture that evolved out of a particular settler-­colonial context in which forced child removals played a prominent role.

event t wo In November 2016, the Council for the Administration of Criminal Justice and Protection of Juveniles in the Netherlands issued a judicial advisory report on international adoption. The report suggested that rather than a form of child protection, intercountry adoption had become a demand-­driven market in children. It also found that the principle of subsidiarity—­which stipulates that the adoption of a child should only be considered if no other solution can

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be found—­could not be adequately controlled in practice. Members of the council called upon the Dutch government to shift its focus and to support a “family in country of origin” scenario. This would advance the child protection system in the country of origin and, ultimately, put an end to the practice of international adoption in the Netherlands.2

These events are symptomatic of the contemporary debate on international adoption. They signal a practice in crisis, a place of reckoning with a phenomenon under change. The legalization of adoption in national and transnational contexts has been a relatively recent development. In Legitimating Life, I start from the premise that the phenomenon of Western legal adoption should be understood as a project of modernity, whereby scientific rationales, new legalities, and humanist moralities coincide to give weight to modern ways of thinking. In this book, however, I also demonstrate that the globalization of adoption—­combined with a more general biomedicalization and biotechnologization of society—­is disrupting this modern ontology. The aforementioned scenarios are indicative of this ontological disruption. Whether the standpoints are pro-­or antiadoption, they both rest on sustaining the modern. Legitimating Life is a meditation on the phenomenon of global adoption. There is a conceptual reason why I prefer the term “global” as opposed to “international,” “transnational,” or “intercountry.” I want to denote the increasing force that globalization has had on the phenomenon, which has altered the “internationalist” intent behind its original premise. The literature on international adoption tells us that the practice dates back to the Euro-­American post–­World War II period, when orphaned children of the war in Europe were brought to North America to be adopted into American and Canadian families.3 The rise of the phenomenon of international adoption, therefore, cannot be separated from the human rights context in which it took place. For Euro-­America, the emergence of human rights after the devastation of World War II was characterized by an internationalist mood that moved the imagination of cosmopolitan solidarity into formal international law and global governance. Child welfare—­incarnated as child labor, child trafficking, child abuse, and orphanhood—­played an important role in this imagination and fulfilled society’s humanitarian intentions, pushing the agenda of children’s rights as human rights.4 The original intent of international adoption, then, should be viewed as a liberal-­internationalist

Introduction

3

project. Such a project imagines “humanitarianism,” “rights,” the “family,” and the “child” in a particular way, foregrounding transnational solidarity in the pursuit of children’s welfare. But how these ideas emerged and took shape in the form of international adoption does not necessarily shed light on its spread and shape in contemporary practices across the globe. How has human rights law and discourse affected practices of international adoption? And what can we say about the impact of globalization and biotechnology on the meaning of these rights? I explore these questions in the chapters that follow. Subsequent wars in Korea and Vietnam sustained society’s humanitarian response to adoption. The Korean War in the early 1950s witnessed many children born to American GIs and local Korean women. Among other things, the lack of tolerance for mixed-­race children brought these children into new homes in North America, Western Europe, and the Antipodes. In the aftermath of the war in Vietnam (1955–­1975), a mass evacuation of more than 10,300 infants and children took place. They were airlifted from South Vietnam to countries like the US, Australia, France, and Canada.5 The following decades saw calls for an expansion of the humanitarian definition of adoption. The phenomenon became more socially accepted, and the process of intercountry adoption became legally streamlined. The institutionalization of intercountry adoption through international conventions and bilateral cooperation allowed the practice to flourish. International adoption figures soared during the 1990s and early 2000s and peaked in 2004 with an estimate of more than 45,000 children adopted globally.6 This was the heyday of international adoption. China and Guatemala topped the list of countries sending children. Popular culture embraced the phenomenon, securing it an important place in celebrity humanitarianism. Although adoptions by celebrities was not a new phenomenon, the highly profiled adoptions from Malawi and Ethiopia by American celebrities such as Madonna and Angelina Jolie solidified this trend.7 Another phenomenon was emerging in the interim. The advancement of assisted reproductive technologies not only led to a growing reproductive market in semen, eggs, and reproductive services; it also medicalized infertility. With reproductive technologies, family making became more and more attainable and also—­quite paradoxically—­renaturalized the idea of reproduction and, by extension, the idea of a medicalized right to procreate. At the start of international adoption, the majority of adopters already

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had biological children. At the time, infertility was not the main driver of international adoption. Today, however, the vast majority of adopters consider adoption only after failed experiences with reproductive technologies. Adoption is now firmly entangled in reproductive services; it has become the object of procreative consciousness and aspirational parenthood. Adoption today, then, can be regarded as a reproductive technology in itself. While it was law and not biotechnology that created the legal form of adoption, reproductive technologies were changing the motivations for and experiences of adoption. Coupled with global imaginaries, biotechnology promised hope and control over family-­making futures. Different from the promises of internationalism that were based on solidarity, human rights, and intragovernmental cooperation, globalism combined with biotechnology promised a future that was “manipulable” in the sense that globalization ensured remedies to (legal) shortcomings of the sovereign state, and biotechnology ensured remedies to biological and social shortcomings of reproductive life. Recently, however, the number of international adoptions has dropped dramatically. A global decrease was evidenced by at least 50 percent in 2011 compared to figures in 2004 (Selman 2009, 2012). “Sending” countries, those nations sending children away for international adoption, established a greater capacity to place children domestically. This resulted in a significant reduction of young and healthy children for the international adoption market, although older children and those with special needs were still available. Yet the shortage of adoptable children in the Global South did not diminish the desire for children in the Global North. An intensified debate unfolded among states—­between and within agencies, adoption lobbies, adult adoptee organizations, and antiadoption activist groups—­that presented novel and transnational justifications to ensure or discourage the continuation of international adoption. In Legitimating Life, I focus on these justifications and explore how global adoption practice navigates child welfare, humanitarianism, reproduction, capitalism, science, and health. I investigate the changes that cross-­border adoption is undergoing in an age that sees itself as controlling nature and transgressing borders. Hence I take seriously the promises of globalization and biotechnology: What are its imaginaries in the fields of reproduction and adoption? I explore the promise of “manipulability” (of nature, of culture) and assess how conditions under global economies and

Introduction

5

biotechnology, and discourses of globalism and geneticism, are affecting Euro-­American understandings of value and worth, kin and relationality, humanity, and the just. How do we morally navigate human needs, human desires, and human rights within a global economy of worth? In what ways do capitalist, scientific, and humanitarian intentions converge or constitute each other? And how are regimes of justifications structured and enacted in these dynamics?

Enactments of Rights In this book, I attest that the practice of international adoption today is imbued with, and driven by, human rights language. Human rights form the framework in which the modern project of international adoption is debated. In the chapters of this book, I engage with the prominent rights attached to the phenomenon: reproductive rights (chapter 1), the right to family life (chapter 2), the right to health (chapter 3), the right to citizenship (chapter 4), and the right to know (chapter 5). This is not to deny the importance of religion in the adoption process. On the contrary, for many individuals and couples, Christian and evangelical convictions guided their decisions. Moreover, denominational adoption agencies are still widely represented, especially in the United States. Nonetheless, religious forms of justification have not been forceful in public or legal discussions about global adoption. In contrast to the recent past, where Christianity, the Bible, and the rhetoric of rescue and redemption dominated justifications, the moral traction in today’s practice can more aptly be assigned to the language of rights. Again, this does not mean that theological values of rescue and redemption do not play a part, but they are increasingly packaged in terms of rights—­children’s rights in particular. The concept of “rights” has often accompanied the study of adoption. Yet in the anthropological and sociological scholarship on adoption, it has more often than not been treated as less important than “identity,” “culture,” “politics,” or “belonging.” Moreover, when “rights” or “justice” were central to the analysis, they were usually approached and utilized as given principles, as already formed doctrines through which practice should be valued and assessed. In contrast, Legitimating Life examines how rights are enacted in practice through the study of justifications. More precisely, the book is

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about the legitimation work of institutions engaging in global adoption services, how new justifications reconfigure adoption in the field of reproductive technologies, and what this entails for questions of global inequality and transnational forms of social justice. To summarize, rather than concentrate on the biopolitics of global reproduction (centered on the governing of populations through the apparatus of life) or on the bioethics of global reproduction (concerned with deliberate practices regulated through locations of power), in this book I focus on the work of legitimation, or put differently, on an “ethics in the making.” Such a focus buys us a view into the work we do to make sense of the fractured adoption worlds that traverse markets, laws, and publics. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship and engaging with theories from medical and legal anthropology, postcolonial sociology, and science and technology studies, I demonstrate that processes of globalization and biotechnologization are primary forces in the changing practice of, and attitudes toward, adoption. In the past few decades, adoption has become increasingly embedded in the politics and dynamics of assisted reproduction. In contrast to the beginning of international adoption—­when people adopted for humanitarian reasons and children came into preformed families—­couples and individuals today arrive at the adoption agency after failed attempts at in vitro fertilization (IVF). Research indicates that around three-­ quarters of adoption applicants start the adoption procedure because they were either unable to conceive naturally or equally unsuccessful with the assistance of medical interventions (Selman 2010, 82; Haworth, Selman, and Way 2010, 136). The rise, institutionalization, and normalization of reproductive technologies changed social perceptions of infertility, and reproductive desire became attached to the somatic performance of the maternal body (see chapter 1). Artificial reproductive technologies bore the promise of treatment and naturalized reproductive desire (Franklin 1997; Franklin and Ragoné 1998; Thompson 2005). This promise expanded to unpartnered aspiring parents and people in lesbian and gay relationships. The increasing acceptance of single and gay parenthood saw the informal development of reproductive technologies and adoption as a reproductive right. Certainly, adoption and family-­making practices based on reproductive technologies are different phenomena. They rely on different histories, legalities, and scientific practices. While adoption is foremost a legal

Introduction

7

technology enabling individuals to lawfully “kin” a child as if the child is biologically their own, reproductive technologies make use of the parents’ actual DNA and biological processes to form families. Legitimating Life demonstrates, however, that contemporary adoption practices exist in tandem with practices involving reproductive technologies. Not only does adoption today occur primarily as a reproductive choice, but also, ethical debates involving adoption are more and more analogous to bioethical concerns surrounding assisted reproduction. Moreover, the geneticization of kinship, dominant in contemporary public discourse, has as much of an effect on adoptive families and adoptees as it does on biogenetic families. It is because of these reasons that we cannot separate adoption from a broader reproductive landscape or from the realm of biotechnology. In Legitimating Life, I show that biotechnology is not alone in reshaping rights in cross-­border adoption. By analyzing how institutions navigate the roles of money, markets, and commodification in global practice, I illustrate how life becomes necessarily economized in this legitimation work. International adoption practice—­including the establishment of adoptability, preadoptive screenings, matching, and global and domestic competition between agencies—­is imbued with calculations about the value of life and justifying what a life is worth. In describing the material-­discursive circumstances that affect how rights are enacted in adoption practice, I reveal how cross-­border adoption is necessarily caught up in global inequalities and the valuations of life that are attached to such disparities.

“Legitimation Work” in Globalization Rather than approaching rights, legitimacy, and justice as a set of principles, in this study I look at how they are enacted in practice. I use concepts such as “enactment of rights,” “legitimation work,” and the “practice of justification” interchangeably, but as will become clear in the following chapters, each concept can emphasize a distinct feature and play a part in the others’ dynamic. Enactments are far from stable. Indeed, they need to be continuously stabilized. Take, for instance, the enactment of the right to family life (chapter 2), a right fundamental to the legitimation of cross-­border adoption. While the right itself might seem indisputable, the legitimacy work assisting this right—­for example, through international conventions, “best

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practices,” ethical guidelines, and “good governance”—­reveal the extent to which institutions need to continuously stabilize these rights. A core concern in cross-­border adoption is its legitimacy in globalization. What I mean by this is that adoption enters a different economy of legitimacy once it crosses jurisdictions. Justifications do not emerge from a vacuum, nor are they stationary; they travel. Studying their movements means looking at the ways in which people, institutions, bureaucracies, laws, and states enact, perform, and put to use certain rationales and legitimacies over others. Anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers have contemplated this problem at large as phenomena of globalization (Appadurai 1996; Braverman et al. 2014; Comaroff and Comaroff 2000, 2001; Coutin 2003, 2007; Silbey 1997; Tsing 2004). It is therefore useful to approach the legitimation work of international adoption as a deliberation on globalization more generally. In the analysis of adoption, this translates into approaching domestic adoption and global adoption as different phenomena. Different logics and laws apply here. The domestic situation can impact the demand for cross-­border adoptions. Some countries in Western and Northern Europe, and also Australia, have low numbers of domestic adoptions, and the domestic policies of these countries focus on family preservation and fostering rather than adoption. This pushes parents who want to adopt across borders. Moreover, as I narrate in some of my chapters, many countries are working toward “open adoption,” where children legally retain some form of contact with their birth parents. This is nonexistent in the world of international adoption. The process of globalization is key to understanding the contemporary “crisis” in international adoption. This book, however, avoids emphasizing “the global” as a homogenizing process that would see a progression of international adoption from the perspective of a humanitarian endeavor to a consumerist reproductive economy, devoid of social meaning or agency. Contrary to conventional social science research on globalization, critical scholars have challenged such perspectives and have argued that economic globalization does not necessarily lead to cultural homogenization (Appadurai 1996), the decline of the nation-­state (Sassen 2006), or the end of social movements (Tsing 2004). Globalization has produced new conditions and realities, but they are marked by subtle contingencies and uneven practices, sometimes without a clear direction to an endpoint.

Introduction

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In this book, I look instead at the normative and material conditions legitimating the global. As Coutin, Maurer, and Yngvesson argue, “Legitimation work (re)configures jurisdictionality, transparency, and sovereignty—­the constructs on which debates over globalization’s consequences hinge” (2002, 801). Legitimation work, then, is the work that institutions do to establish coherent narratives and worlds and to establish what Boltanski and Thévenot call “regimes of justification” (2006). There are moments, however, when regimes seem to collapse and the existing justificatory frameworks are not sufficient to stabilize the situation. I probe into such events, not only to analyze the crisis or failure of a certain regime of justification, but also to investigate the emergence of new justificatory frameworks. I will explore how justifications are reformulated and reshaped in order to maintain an “order of worth” or, if this appears unworkable, how new orders of worth are created and reintegrated in the worlds of adoption. In a way that might seem unusual, I combine insights developed in anthropology and science studies (Latour 2005; Mol 2002; Rabinow 2003) with the study of justifications from French pragmatic sociology (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). Brought together, these two theoretical approaches allow for a close examination of what I call an “ethics in the making.” Rather than pursuing an analysis in the vein of “local moral worlds” (Kleinman 1999; Karsenti 2012), I probe deeper into the “justification work” needed to produce social action in ethico-­moral economies (Rose 2007; Fassin 2007). My turn to justifications coincides with a desire to complement the study of biopolitics by including meaning and social action. A number of studies on global adoption have described the biopolitical frameworks accompanying adoption practice (Ali 2014; Briggs 2012, 2013; Cherot 2006; Dorow 2006; Kim 2015; Perreau 2014; Leinaweaver and van  Wichelen 2015). Here, Foucault (1997) and Agamben’s (1998) work on the regulation of populations and control over life have been particularly instrumental in explaining the flow of available children from the Global South to childless couples in the Global North. The biopolitics of adoption—­as Laura Briggs (2013) describes—­are often entangled in multiple biopolitical frameworks that govern reproduction transnationally. Focusing on adoptions from Guatemala to the US, these frameworks include, first, the reproductive biopolitics produced in the aftermath of (social) scientific and

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Keynesian developmentalism, which allowed conservatives in the US to take up human rights language (“right to life”) and celebrate (cross-­border) adoption. Second, it encompassed the biopolitics of US imperial imagination and humanitarianism that preferenced the “rescue” of children over aid or assistance with birth control programs in the Third World. Third, it comprised the biopolitics of adoption in Guatemala that removed children from leftist and indigenous homes to prevent the reproduction of communism. Fourth and finally, it included the biopolitics of genetics that introduced new scientific legitimation to accommodate the adoption process despite international trafficking charges. Though vital to my analysis, my aim with this book is not to map out such a biopolitical framework of adoption: I do not follow a particular trend, such as US adoptions from Guatemala or Dutch adoptions from China. Nor do I focus on the sum of institutions involved, such as orphanages, courts, hospitals, or churches next to markets and states. In taking the biopolitics of adoption as a starting point, my focus is instead on exploring what kind of legitimation work is labored in Euro-­American contexts today to justify or condemn cross-­border adoption. I argue that legitimation work reveals the stakes involved and the conditions attached to rendering certain lives more valuable than others. Following the anthropologist Didier Fassin (2007, 2009), this entails looking at the terms of legitimate life. In developing his idea of “the politics of life,” Fassin proposes four shifts with respect to Foucault’s (1997) theory on biopolitics: “(1) Politics is not only about the rules of the game of governing, but also about its stakes. (2) More than the power over life, contemporary societies are characterized by the legitimacy they attach to life. (3) Rather than a normalizing process, the intervention in lives is a production of inequalities. (4) The politics of life, then, is not only a question of governmentality and technologies, but also of meaning and values” (2009, 44). Fassin has denoted this shift from biopolitics to the “politics of life” as calling on the notion of “biolegitimacy.” Instead of focusing on the control over life in the domain of politics and governmentality, the notion of biolegitimacy permits us to examine qualities of certain lives and recognize the value of life itself. Biolegitimacy, Fassin suggests, allows us to “integrate the ethical dimension of the dialectic between the absolute value of life and relative worthiness of lives” (2009, 41). It emphasizes the “construction of meaning and values of life instead of the exercise of forces and strategies to

Introduction

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control it” (52). Hence in studying legitimation work, I aim to highlight the stakes involved in adoption and the manner in which these stakes reorder and coordinate the meaning and values attached to the phenomenon. I operationalize legitimation work by turning to the scholarship of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. In their book On Justifications (2006 [1991]), the pragmatic sociologists argue for the study of conditions that make it possible to render an evaluation fair or legitimate. In working toward agreement, actors use rationales that are linked to “orders of worth” or “justificatory regimes.” I describe, in chapter 2 for instance, how “transparency” functions as a regime of justification in international law to enable the legitimate flow of children from one place to another. Transparency embodies a practical condition (through the operations of information gathering, audit, and accountability) as much as it occupies and produces an emblematic attachment to humanitarianism and human rights. Studying justifications helps us understand the coordination of such attachments. In this book, I demonstrate that it is in justifications that an adherence to meaning and value becomes visible. The engagement with justifications is also an attempt to register the dynamics of social action, whether it is in the form of emancipatory movements or discursive shifts. This is not to say that I am normatively arguing for a progressivist emancipatory politics. Rather, I acknowledge that emancipatory shifts do occur and that they can be coordinated through changes in justificatory dynamics brought about by the emergence of new justifications. Although contingent processes do play their role in critical moments of change, the insistence on the work of justifications entails a commitment to the agency of actors. As Boltanski and Thévenot have explained, “By emphasizing the justification process, we want to take seriously the question of the legitimacy of the agreement, rather than set it aside in favour of an explanation of exclusively styled in terms of contingency, deceit or force. We certainly do not underestimate the importance in social life of domination, force, interests and even of deceit, delusion and self-­deception. But a representation of the social world which would be completely grounded on deception and delusion would no longer be able to give an account of the experience of the social actors themselves” (1999, 364). On Justifications had significant traction, especially in continental Europe, but also received its due critique. The foremost criticism was geared toward Boltanski and Thévenot’s organization of justifications in six regimes (cités)

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that were informed by philosophical traditions. Although they recognized that social action was not confined to these six cités, the makeup of the cités revealed their strong reliance on Western philosophical traditions insensitive to feminist or postcolonial perspectives. Moreover, they were bound to modes of action contained by the nation-­state, thereby omitting the significant shift that globalization has had on the structuration and meaning of justificatory practices.8 Rather than following the grand typology of six justificatory regimes, in my study I utilize justifications as a conceptual framework and methodology rather than theory (see also Nash 2009, 60). I aim to disentangle the coordination work involved in legitimating adoption across borders by looking at the justifications of adoption practices.

Institutions and the Practice of Modernity My exploration of justifications necessarily led me to “study up,” a term coined by the legal anthropologist Laura Nader (1969), who argued that alongside the study of the powerless, it is equally important to study the culture of the powerful. To get to a meaningful explanation of the justificatory work of global adoption, one ought to turn to the practitioners of the field. I take the institution as the central site of investigation. With Boltanski (2011), I concur that institutional settings are the places par excellence to study the ways in which social forces impact and change justificatory regimes. The institutional context is the place where global market forces intersect with humanitarian and scientific legitimacies. Moreover, it is where such justificatory frameworks are tested and given legitimacy. Of course, this happens in conjunction with the social and political world, but careful analyses of institutional practices reveal the complex choreographies that are required when primarily analyzing individual narratives or political discourses. It is within an institutional context that one is able to uncover the enactment of justifications—­the coming together of different ontological orders that make up a new justificatory regime. The turn to institutions is also a way of avoiding the forced dichotomy between the macro and the micro, or the global and the local: the global that is “out there” (imaginary, discursive, contingent) and the “local” that is “here” (real, contextual, material). As Boltanski contends, institutions can reconcile these dichotomous poles because they are the central foundations

Introduction

13

for establishing “the whatness of what is” (2011, 75). However, I take care to extend the notion of institution beyond the confines of a single organization. Following traditions in the study of science and technology, institutional practice encompasses networks and relations and is approached in this study as part of a broader apparatus. In her research on the clinical practices of artificial reproductive technologies (ARTs), Charis Thompson coins the term “ontological choreography” to refer to the dynamic coordination of the technical, scientific, kinship, gender, emotional, legal, political, and financial aspects of ART clinics: “What might appear to be an undifferentiated hybrid mess is actually a deftly balanced coming together of things that are generally considered parts of different ontological orders (part of nature, part of the self, part of society). These elements have to be coordinated in highly staged ways so as to get on with the task at hand: producing parents, children, and everything that is needed for their recognition as such” (2005, 8). The legitimation work of cross-­border adoption, as seen through the labor of agencies and their corresponding institutions, mirror similar “ontological choreographies.” As will become apparent throughout the chapters, institutions navigate through bureaucratic, political, affective, cultural, economic, social, humanitarian, and reproductive aspects of adoption. The question important to this study, however, is whether this “ontological choreography” takes place only on a contingent plane or, as I will explore, whether certain conditions and discursive contexts enable some form of coordination. I contend that in order to explore the actuality of the coordination of these choreographies, we need to analyze the motivations and rationales that institutional actors in adoption practices use to refute, negotiate, and resolve the moral tensions associated with adoption. Legitimacy work not only is confined to people but can be enacted by legalities and technologies. While the book probes into the subject of international adoption, the theoretical project is concerned with the broader question of how a Euro-­American legal practice is affected by globalization and biotechnology. Directing our anthropological gaze at “home” rather than a far-­flung, exotic, non-­Western culture, I am concerned with how Euro-­Americans appropriate and naturalize legalities and how such appropriations and naturalizations are altered in late modernity. This approach is very much influenced by new directions in the field that look at the “anthropology of the

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contemporary” and take the project of modernity as a central problematic (Rabinow 2003, 2009; Marcus 1999; Strathern 2005). Within this anthropological endeavor, I particularly engage with the scholarship on bureaucracies and legalities (Riles 2006; Coutin, Maurer, and Yngvesson 2002) to study the specific technicalities that law and bureaucracy bring to the legal phenomenon of adoption. As I will discuss throughout the book, uncovering the anthropological problem of adoption as legality unfolds the problem of modernity in the dynamic of globalization. Although attentive to historical reason, I follow the direction set out by Latour in pursuing an anthropology and sociology that departs from the divide between culture and nature, science and society, the modern and the nonmodern (Guggenheim and Potthast 2012, 172). The increasing penetration of science and technology in Euro-­American knowledge practices has augmented the idea that nature is fixed and determined. Latour argues in this respect that “the Internal Great Divide [between nature and culture] accounts for the External Great Divide [between us and them]: we [moderns] are the only ones who differentiate absolutely between Nature and Culture, between Science and Society, whereas in our eyes all the others—­whether they are Chinese or Amerindians, Azande or Barouya—­cannot really separate what is knowledge from what is society, what is sign from what is thing, what comes from Nature as it is from what their cultures require” (1993, 99). Hence as an anthropology of the contemporary, my study of justifications does not initially entail the intrinsic study of a particular time. Without dismissing the historicity of global adoption practice, I am instead concerned with “the search for an ethos through which to observe and gauge breakdowns and remediations of the modern ethos” (Rabinow and Stavrianakis 2016, 405). In other words, in this study I am committed to indexing the very counterpoints to modern practice, ethics, and politics.

Methodology: Connections and Relations The research conducted for this book spans a period of seven years, from 2007 to 2014, during which I used ethnographic methods, in-­depth interviews, and document analysis. The core of the empirical work involved ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a Dutch adoption agency over a

Introduction

15

period of five months (for a total of 160  hours between March 2008 and July 2008, with two return visits in December 2011 and September 2012).9 My data include ethnographic observations of institutional meetings, institutional events, meetings between social workers and prospective parents, meetings between social workers and medical practitioners, and (repeat) interviews conducted with social workers, the manager, and the three consecutive directors of the organization. The agency concerned, Children’s Alliance, is considered one of the more reputable and professional adoption agencies in the country.10 During the time of my empirical research, 20 full-­and part-­time staff were employed, and an extensive volunteer network spanned across the whole country. Due to the declining number of adoption placements in the subsequent years, the agency had to shrink; half of the organization’s staff either left or were made redundant. Moreover, the presiding director of Children’s Alliance resigned from the organization after public announcements that in the current situation, international adoption had become indefensible. I also made research visits to two other Dutch adoption agencies and four agencies in the United States between 2007 and 2012. These were single or multiple visits with the intention of getting a broader knowledge of the field of agencies.11 I conducted a total of 40 interviews with adoption professionals in the Netherlands. Half of these interviews were conducted with the directors, staff, and board members from Children’s Alliance, the main agency where I did extensive ethnographic work. The rest of the interviews included directors from other adoption agencies, staff from the Dutch Adoption Foundation (who carry out the compulsory adoptive parenting courses), social workers from the child welfare organization who carry out home studies, representatives from central state authorities (in the Netherlands, this falls under the responsibility of the Department of Justice), adoption medicine specialists, academic adoption experts, critical adoption activists, and adult adoptees.12 In the US, I conducted 21 interviews (formal and informal) that included adoption professionals and adoption medical specialists as well as adoption scholars and adult adoptees. From material collected in Dutch, American, and international institutions, I consulted and analyzed client records, policies, guidelines, and legal documents. I also participated in numerous (international) adoption-­related events.13 I started off by deploying George Marcus’s (1999) approach of multisited ethnography, starting with Children’s Alliance and following all of

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its connections with other organizations and actors involved in the adoption process. But with international adoption, as with other transnational practices, come loose and disconnections. So while I encountered problems with access to certain institutional spaces of adoption, I also realized that there are justifications that one cannot observe by listening to people. It is here that I found Gregory Feldman’s (2011) methodological approach useful. In The Migration Apparatus, he argues for a methodology that takes into account connections and relations. Connections are the links between things, actors, and/or processes that are observable by the senses, but there are also links that exist not necessarily in an observable, empirical way. Feldman calls these “relations.” Multisited ethnography follows the object, the person, and/or the process, but Feldman argues that the path emerges through a subject’s interaction with an apparatus. The geographic indeterminacy of an apparatus makes it a difficult object to research via observation alone (378). This is especially the case for a global phenomenon such as transnational adoption, as Feldman states, “Globalization involves qualitatively different forms of organizing society that likewise require different methodologies to apprehend it” (379). So complementing my local ethnography of Children’s Alliance is a nonlocal ethnography that takes into account the ways in which historical rationalities, scientific discourses, state practices of diplomacy, multiculturalism, and population control feed into the localized global adoption practice.

Outline of Chapters Institutions that facilitate adoption have often been accused of the commodification of children and the formation of so-­called baby markets. In turn, institutional actors complain about existing attitudes of intended parents that appeal tacitly to procreative rights or a “right to a child” In chapter 1 of the book, “The Ethical Market: Between Reproduction and Humanitarianism,” I explore how institutions perform “professionalism” to combat charges of commodification and to curb consumerist incentives from intended parents. Drawing on ethnographic observations in a Dutch adoption agency, an analysis of their policy documents, and interviews with directors and social workers, I investigate how adoption institutions navigate family-­making desires and humanitarian need. I describe the tensions between an inherent

Introduction

17

consumerism in professionalism and an explicit anticonsumerism espoused in nonprofit and humanitarian organizations. In this chapter, I argue that the legitimation work performed to balance this paradox points to the elusiveness of professional ethics in adoption practice. I discuss an institutional event that addresses alleged child trafficking cases from China. The event typified a failure of “professional ethics” and blurred the distinction between consumerism and humanitarianism. I assess the significance of this event to understand the promise of professionalism and the risks attached to amateurism. At the heart of such promises and risks are valuations of bodies and legitimations of life. In chapter 2, “Double Movements: International Law as Transparency Device,” I examine how the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-­operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (Hague Adoption Convention) plays a central role in justifying the institution of legal adoption. The Hague Adoption Convention has often been regarded as a response to the challenges that the “global situation” brings to adoption practice. Based on private international law, the agreement contains protocols and norms to ensure the protection of children in intercountry adoption. In this chapter, I propose that the Hague Adoption Convention can be understood as a “transparency device,” a complex assemblage working in pursuit of global “good governance.” The device, however, also operates as a justification within the institutional domain. For instance, implementation of the Hague Adoption Convention allows agencies to make distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate adoptions. However, focusing on the principle of “subsidiarity” in the convention, which prioritizes solutions in the country of origin, I demonstrate how the logic of transparency disguises as much as it promises to reveal. While the doctrine’s aim is to validate adoptability and combat trafficking, it also helps popularize Euro-­American kinship knowledge in other parts of the world. Ultimately, I contend that humanitarianism as ideology and transparency as device secure the distinction between “child” and “commodity” in international adoption. They serve to protect the very idea of modernity in a time when neoliberal globalization is increasingly challenging the moral distinction between a person and a thing. In chapter 3, “Valuing Bodies: Somatic Ethics in the Biomedicalization of Adoption,” I look at justificatory practices surrounding adoption in biomedicine. More specifically, I focus on adoption medicine as a body of biomedical knowledge that is increasingly defining the parameters of

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adoptability in the world of international adoption. While this biomedical discourse alludes to the health of adoptee bodies, I argue that it also constitutes ethico-­moral practices that produce new justificatory regimes of adoption in particular and humanitarianism in general. Centered on an analysis of a US handbook on adoption medicine and drawing from interviews and ethnographic data from US and Dutch adoption agencies that apply knowledge derived from adoption medicine, I demonstrate the emergence of a bioscientific legitimacy used to justify the transnational practice of adoption. I pay particular attention to the so-­called catch-­up theory, which promotes the idea that being adopted is a medicalized condition that requires treatment and that adopted bodies can be transformed so that a child’s adoptability is linked to the child’s medical classification. Through the catch-­up theory, the more familiar justification for adoption (the child’s “right to a family”) is linked to a different justificatory narrative (the child’s “right to health”). I argue that in current adoption practice, the medical conditions of the child have become entangled with the value assigned to the child (whether economic or emotional), thereby transforming degrees of disability into new somatic economies. In chapter 4, “Grievable Lives: The Adoptee and the Child Migrant,” I investigate the legal performativities of grievability by comparing international adoption and asylum for children. I do this to demonstrate the different scales of compassion underpinning current debates on the “moving” child. The chapter is based on data from two court cases in the Netherlands, one involving alleged child trafficking in international adoption and the other the threat of deportation for children seeking asylum. Although both cases concern the transnational movement of children from the Global South to the wealthy North, they are rarely investigated in tandem. By focusing on the legal concepts of “the right to family life” and “the best interest of the child,” I point to the performativity of law and how the cultural constructions of the child—­childhood, kin, and humanitarianism—­intervene in the work of justification. My contention is that placing these “different but same bodies” within a scalar dimension, one that takes into account spatiotemporal conditions of grievability, enables us to understand modern investments in children’s bodies and the complexities of justice in globalization. In the final chapter, “Economies of Return: Openness, Knowledge, Relations,” I turn to the justificatory framework of the “right to know” and focus particularly on so-­called roots questions or return journeys that have

Introduction

19

become an important part of adoption institutions. Backed up by international law, the right to know in the adoption context includes the right to know one’s biological parents, one’s birth culture, and one’s medical information. At large, the “right to know” signals a valuation of openness. But what are the problems that come with knowledge and information? What does the imperative of openness do to kinship relations? Looking at a number of instances where institutions discuss the necessities and implications of return journeys, in this chapter I demonstrate that the “right to know” is inextricably linked to moral economies of kinship. Returns make visible the transaction of adoption and the exchangeability of the adoptee body. In some instances, returns also bring about claims of dependency, be they moral (as in care) or economic (as in remittances). I also discuss how adoptees, as hybrids, are implicated in this moral economy but also how, as subjects, they negotiate, destabilize, or refuse openness as an imperative. I argue that in the end, while the “right to know” allows the discovery of relations, it fails to acknowledge the invention of relations. In the epilogue, I bring together the main problems from the chapters and reiterate the stakes involved. What kind of legitimation work underpins the global practice of adoption? Which lives are deemed abandoned and adoptable through these justifications? How do justifications facilitate adoption—­as a legal instrument—­to travel and to take root in other countries? I also pose the normative question addressing whether international adoption is a sustainable project. What would happen if we abandon the project? Alternatively, how would we reinvent cross-­border adoption in the age of reproductive technology and their attendant global economies? Ultimately, my ambition with this book is to reveal how the critical examination of cross-­border adoption forces us to think about the legitimation work of sovereignties, markets, and rights but also relationality and the commons. Here, adoption functions as a lens to study the impact globalization and biotechnologization have had on our institutions and laws as well as on our ways of thinking and relating. Without dismissing the political urgency of adoption or, better put, by moving beyond adoption’s political valency, it is a good topic to think with. I hope I was able to do this with due respect to the people involved, implicated, and affected by what we call adoption.

1 • THE ETHIC AL M ARKET Between Reproduction and Humanitarianism

Humanitarianism, by its logics of emergency, suspends both individual and collective times, biography and history. —­Didier Fassin, “The Predicament of Humanitarianism” The balance between seemingly contradictory values may be maintained by resorting to equally powerful cultural rhetorics. In the West, market talk has its appeal, but so does humanist antimarket talk. —­Igor Kopytoff, “Commoditizing Kinship in America”

The agency performs an important role in legitimating adoption. In the past few decades, domestic policies and international conventions have encouraged agencies to professionalize. Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, agencies were run primarily by volunteers who were often adoptive parents themselves, the 1990s witnessed a professionalization of the field, which meant that professional social workers took over, experts were called in, and operations were streamlined, bureaucratized, and made transparent. For states who ratified the 1993 Hague Adoption Convention, this process was further streamlined, and for many countries, this led to the closure of various smaller agencies that did not have the capacity to adhere to the new professional standards.1 The core impetus to professionalize was the belief that professionalism and “professional ethics” would be able to mitigate risks of corruption and child trafficking. Professionalization, of course, was dependent on the capacity to acquire adequate resources for 20



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the costs involved in running a professional organization. While some agencies benefitted from state funding, others relied solely on their own incomes, which every so often translated to dollar figures “per child placed.” This frequently meant that agencies had to compete against each other in the global arena. The philosophy of “finding the right family for a child” started to clash with administrative and managerial objectives that relied on steady revenues to keep the organization sustainable. It also clashed with the increasingly consumer-­minded client who started demanding transparency and accountability in an adoption process fraught with instability and insecurity. In both public and academic arenas, the globalization of reproduction has brought about a renewed debate on the economization of life (see Goodwin 2010). In this chapter, I demonstrate the intermingling of economy and intimacy in international adoption practice and analyze the normative ways in which Euro-­Americans resist economization in an institutional setting that is concerned with helping children and making families. What we witness in institutions is, on the one hand, that normatively, institutional actors perpetuate the modern distinction between the economic and the social, money and intimacy, persons and things. On the other hand, in their day-­to-­day practice, they also rely intensely on the intermingling of the economic and the social (Shamir 2008, 14). The professionalization of agencies occurred alongside the emergence of reproductive technologies and an increasing medicalization of infertility across society. More and more couples and individuals started arriving at adoption agencies after failed attempts At in vitro fertilization (IVF). As mentioned in the introduction, around three-quarters of adoption applicants start the adoption procedure because they could not conceive naturally and/ or were unsuccessful with the assistance of medical interventions (Selman 2010, 82; Haworth, Selman, and Way 2010, 136; Howell 2006, 21). This is different from motivations at the time of the inception of international adoption, when people adopted for humanitarian or idealistic reasons. It was not uncommon that already formed families chose to adopt a child or that couples preferred adoption over having their own biological children. The rise, institutionalization, and normalization of reproductive technologies changed social perceptions of infertility, and reproductive desire became attached to the somatic performance of the maternal body. While assisted reproduction yielded the promise that medical technologies could treat

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infertility, it also contributed to naturalizing reproductive desire (Franklin 1997, 2003; Thompson 2005). The naturalization of reproductive desire extended to individuals without a partner and to LGBT couples. At the same time that acceptance of single parenthood and gay and lesbian families increased, social infertility became more and more “treatable” through assisted reproduction and adoption. Although not a formal existing right declared by a legal institution, I argue that the marketization of adoption and the naturalization of reproductive desire led to legitimating a “right to a child.” I trace the work of legitimation that underpins this right through an analysis of how agencies negotiate and manage reproductive desire in their practice. Institutions that facilitate adoption are increasingly accused of commodifying children by participating in the marketization of reproduction. There are also institutional actors who, in turn, complain about the attitudes of intended parents that appeal to a “right to a child.” Drawing on ethnographic observations in a Dutch adoption agency, an analysis of their policy documents, and interviews with directors and social workers, in this chapter I investigate how adoption institutions navigate family-­making desires and the humanitarian project of adoption. I describe how institutions enact “professionalism” to combat charges of commodification and to curb consumerist attitudes from intended parents. I explore the tensions between an inherent consumerism in professionalism on the one hand and an explicit anticonsumerism espoused in nonprofit and humanitarian organizations on the other. I demonstrate how the legitimation work performed to balance this paradox points to the elusiveness of professional ethics in adoption practice. Even though the “right to a child” is not formally legitimized, I show how this right is legitimated in an ontological way. While the legal acknowledgments of “procreative rights” assume the naturalization of reproductive desire, this assumption is actively hindered in legal discussions of a “right to a child.” Nonetheless, in the realm of public justifications, a conflation seems to occur between the two. By considering reproductive desire as a form of “biodesire”—­an ontological position toward the value of life—­I discuss the changing meaning of infertility (biological and social) in the realm of rights. Here, the formal “negative right” attached to reproduction (that one cannot interfere in the freedom to reproduce) becomes, informally, a positive right in terms of the “right to procreate” (that one has the right to actively pursue procreative means to a child). To further examine the operation of



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biodesire and to demonstrate the role of the agency and the state in curbing or validating biodesire (and how they trouble humanitarian understandings of international adoption), I look into two events. One involves the management of a trafficking scandal involving children adopted from China to the Netherlands. The other concerns a US, Canadian, and Dutch airlift operation that included children processed for adoption from Haiti to these three nation-­states. These events illustrate the enactment and the failure of “professional ethics” and the ways in which distinctions between biodesire and humanitarianism become blurred. I assess the significance of such events for the justification work of adoption. At the heart of these justifications are valuations of bodies and legitimations of life.

Humanitarian Markets In our first meeting, the director of the Dutch Children’s Alliance, Iris Vonk, recounted how quickly she became disillusioned with the world of adoption—­a world she thought was about humanitarianism and child welfare. She explained how on day three of her new job as director, she had attended a national meeting that brought together all the agencies working on international adoption in the Netherlands. At this meeting, a newly formed agency, New Approach—­made up of disgruntled adoptive parents who were disappointed with the way adoption was organized—­accused the existing agencies of dividing up the world among them. The representative of New Approach argued that such a situation left no room for new adoption agencies to have a foot in sending countries. Not long after this meeting, New Approach filed a claim with the Dutch Competition Authority against the so-­called adoption covenant—­an agreement among existing agencies stipulating who gets to work in which countries. Vonk was shocked to find out about this claim and realized what this meant: adoption took place within a solid market mechanism. Competition between agencies pushed the practice of international adoption into the sphere of commerce. In the same month, Children’s Alliance was also sued for negligence by adoptive parents who discovered that their adoptive child, placed with them by the agency, had autism. They made a claim for more than a million euros, arguing that Children’s Alliance did not properly screen this child for this neurodevelopmental disorder. According to Vonk, this kind

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of claim emphasized the consumerist sphere within which adoption operated. It presented the child as a commodity and the prospective adopter as a consumer. She brought up the colloquial phrase “Not good? Money back” (Niet goed? Geld terug) commonly used in Dutch commercials, which, according to Vonk, very much resembles the mentality of present-­ day adopters, like the couple who brought the lawsuit against the agency. The domain of international adoption was not exempt from middle-­class subjectivities informed by consumer rights practices. Moreover, most of the couples starting the adoption process now came straight from the fertility clinic. Adoption came to be part of an infrastructure regulating reproductive choices, and in so doing, its core principles of child welfare or child protection were overshadowed. The influence of market-­like mechanisms was never explicitly denied in my encounters and interviews with people working in adoption institutions. Within the adoption process itself, money played an important role, ranging from fees to orphanage donations and various adoption-­related costs in sending countries that were not always warranted. Agency workers acknowledged that they needed to look at the yearly targets of children in order to keep the organization running financially: more children meant fewer worries about operational costs, communication expenses, and employees’ salaries. Furthermore, various adoption professionals described the existence of competition among agencies, both domestically and internationally. While agencies deployed different strategies to find the healthiest and youngest possible children, some orphanages preferred certain agencies over others because more donations were promised. European agencies from welfare states such as the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, and Scandinavian countries were critical and disturbed by US practices, which pointed to a culture of privatized competition that had begun to dominate the global adoption market. European agencies considered themselves to be the ethical ones. My interviews with professionals in US agencies, however, suggest that within the US, agencies similarly differentiated themselves from others, indicating which ones did, and did not, adhere to high ethical standards. Similarly, within Europe, there was much talk about the “Mediterranean countries,” primarily Spain and Italy, which, according to the “ethical countries” of Western and northern Europe, were not up to their ethical standards. Professionalism and transparency were key to upholding this reputation.2



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For adoption agencies, any sign of the market in adoption processes was considered highly problematic. Nevertheless, agencies also acknowledged that money played a significant role in sustaining international adoption. They knew all too well that the effects of a global market in children can facilitate baby buying and trafficking. In the US, one director of a respectable New York City agency remarked, “We don’t partner with other agencies unless we can believe in them; the problem is that other agencies go in and do things in other countries that we think are less than admirable. And the truth is that it’s hard to avoid. Families are so hungry for babies that they’ll do anything, they’ll pay anything, and all of a sudden you get these countries  .  .  . like what happened in Guatemala, it’s horrible. I think the agencies in some ways, and the practices of Guatemala, have kind of opened the doors for human trafficking.”3 In light of public scrutiny and highly mediated adoption scandals such as the ones that occurred in Guatemala and China, institutions felt it was necessary to give evidence of ethical practice. One of the questions I posed to people working in Dutch and American adoption institutions was how they considered their institution to be operating ethically, and I asked them to describe what an ethical institution looked like. A commitment to professionalism was noted as essential for ethical practice. Apart from being appropriately licensed by the state and accredited by the Hague Adoption Convention, agencies would point to various ways in which the organization was run professionally. Making sure that money was not involved in their placements of children was one of their main concerns and dominated much of the internal debates. This included discussions about domestic or foreign staff on the organization’s payroll, their relation to important adoption networks, their range of services, and the breaking down of all adoption costs and expenses that were reviewed by professional accountants each year and published in subsequent yearly reports. Organizations that depended (solely) on the work of volunteers were frowned upon. This was because most of the volunteers were (prospective) adoptive parents, and their interests were regarded as conflicting with the understanding of international adoption as a humanitarian “last resort.” Directors of such organizations took great care to justify their professional conduct despite being reliant on volunteer work from adoptive parents. Running a professional organization requires many resources, and the most reputable organizations were the most expensive ones. Institutions

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charging the highest fees offer the most comprehensive services and were regarded by the general public as complying with the highest ethical standards of conduct. On my research visits to a highly reputable agency in New York City, professionals would give evidence of their ethical practices by emphasizing their in-­house resources with respect to adoption experts, medical doctors performing medical screenings, and psychologists as well as postadoption services, a clinic for birth mothers (this pertained to an agency that also processed domestic adoptions), and a wealth of resources for community work and engagement. Although most of the institutions in Europe were partially run by the state (semigovernmental), they too confirmed that “best practice” coincided with regular and sufficient resources and professional staff. Only this would bring continuity to their institutional operations and could ensure the preservation of institutional knowledge. The latter was deemed essential to postadoption services, including services that facilitate adult adoptees’ requests for birth mother searches and/or return visits to countries of origin and/or orphanages. In the end, it all boiled down to money; the more resources one had, the more ethical one could become. This resonates with much of the scholarship that has emerged in the field of “new humanitarianism” (Barnett 2011; Barnett and Weiss 2008; Fassin 2007; Reid-­Henry 2014; Ticktin 2011). Since the 1990s, humanitarian organizations throughout the Western world have significantly professionalized their modes of operation. NGOs have turned to paid professional staff rather than volunteers and have utilized corporate techniques in their public relations with industry and their communication with the general public. Increasingly corporatized and instrumentalized, humanitarianism has become a full-­blown industry with its own standards of efficiency, transparency, evidence, and best practice. Fueled by global media reports of embezzlement, fraud, and misappropriation of humanitarian aid in developing countries, publics grew increasingly sarcastic and suspicious about where the money they donated ended up. The deployment of professional paradigms in humanitarian organizations was a response to this suspicion and aimed to at least give constituents some form of assurance that their contributions were going to the right places. Nonetheless, professionalization and corporatization cost money. Hence much like the adoption agencies that followed this trend, humanitarian organizations found themselves in a paradoxical situation where money,



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which seemed to be the root of corruption in many cases, also acted as the guarantor for ethical conduct. Another trend adoption agencies shared with humanitarian organizations was the increasing importance of celebrities in the promotion of the humanitarian cause. The world witnessed the rise of “celebrity humanitarianism” (Kapoor 2012; Chouliaraki 2013), where NGOs and international institutions have increasingly been led by high-­profile and wealthy entertainment stars such as Bob Geldof, Bono, Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Bill Gates, and George Soros. Scholars argue that this new direction in the humanitarian realm is symptomatic of the neoliberal condition. Here, humanitarianism is not only about the needy; it is also about the needs of the helpers. It endorses consumerism and corporate capitalism while legitimizing the global inequalities it seeks to address in the first place (Kapoor 2012). In the international adoption scene, the highly mediatized adoptions from Ethiopia and Malawi by celebrities such as Angelina Jolie and Madonna have led to a spike in adoption applications from those countries, signaling the actual effects of such mediations. Moreover, celebrities have taken an important role in the adoption lobby, promoting the plight of international adoption to the greater public and pressuring agencies and states to prioritize finding families for the “millions of orphans” out there. Replacing an earlier framework of internationalism, one that relied on the cooperation of nation-­states and their commitment to international law, humanitarianism’s justifications are increasingly entangled in a politics of life that is intimately connected to wider forms of liberal governance (Barnett 2011; Fassin 2012). In developing global institutions of care, humanitarianism is increasingly governing humanity and exercising power over the people it attempts to help and liberate. Thus the legitimating power of humanitarian reason today lies not so much in the authority of the political subject, as in a moral imperative to protect the depoliticized suffering body. The professionalization and the economization of the humanitarian field, including the arena of international adoption, greatly affected how international adoption was perceived. More and more, interests from prospective adopters, the adoption lobby, the state, and the emerging voices of adult adoptees beleaguered institutions dealing with intercountry adoptions, which were increasingly expected by the media and the public to account for their actions and positions. Although the state was often implicated in these narratives, it had a particular position vis-­à-­vis agencies. Divided

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interests typified the central paradox underlying international adoption today—­that it needs to represent family making and humanitarianism at the same time.

Divided Interests Since its founding, the core principle of Children’s Alliance has been “Every child has the right to a home.” The agency’s policies reflect a strong commitment to the ideals of the Hague Adoption Convention, of which the subsidiarity principle guides its justification process. This principle supports the preservation of families in the country of origin, and only as a last resort does it consider intercountry adoption to be a responsible option.4 Many agencies have this principle as their central mission. However, this is not how the practice is defined by the state. As the following excerpt from a welcome package of the Children’s Alliance explains, The Dutch government sees adoption as a form of family formation and therefore you as a prospective adoptive parent are expected to meet all the costs of the procedure. You can recover a small part of it via a tax refund. This view of adoption is opposite to that of Children’s Alliance. We see international adoption as a child protection measure. In line with this vision it would be more logical for the government to contribute financially to protect the child who is placed in your family from abroad. We have been advocating this view for years because it does more justice to the role you will play as an adoptive parent and to the background of the child. As a non-­profit organization with paid staff, we are not focused on making a profit. The rates we charge are based on actual costs. Because of the different perspective of the government on adoption, we depend entirely on the financial contribution of you as prospective adoptive parent/s. This means that besides the emotional side in an adoption procedure, there is also the business side. It is for this reason that we are not able to refund arrangements or remit amounts if you prematurely decide to terminate the adoption process.

The central question underpinning transnational adoption practice today is whether one should see it as a form of reproduction or humanitarianism. The role of the state is central to this dilemma, and although in this



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case it seems that the agencies are critical of the state because it does not acknowledge adoption as a form of child welfare, the state itself is in a double bind in regulating adoption on the one hand (to facilitate family desires of the middle class that are its constituency) and good governance on the other (based on child protection principles). Outsourcing the process of adoption (and its ethical oversight) to organizations separate from the direct state apparatus is a way of liberalizing the practice. It also introduces multiple institutions that facilitate adoption with varying interests. In the Netherlands, for instance, the Ministry of Justice has the final responsibility in matters concerning international adoption. Multiple intermediaries in the adoption process—­adoption organizations, national adoption information and training centers, child welfare organizations, adoption medicine authorities, and so on—­make the accountability process increasingly complex. Moreover, different institutions have different constituencies and therefore have to operate with different interests. Child welfare organizations that conduct psychological assessments of applicants prior to facilitating adoption work in the name of child protection, adoption agencies have adoptive parents and their reproductive interests as clients, and the state has an obligation toward diplomacy and the protection of economic relations transnationally. The excerpt from the welcome package shows that a double bind also marks the adoption agency. While it can uphold the welfare of the child in principle, its day-­to-­day operations reveal that it is working to accommodate prospective adopters. As mentioned previously, people now primarily adopt because they are not able to conceive biologically (with or without the help of reproductive technologies).5 This means that even though institutions are committed to seeing adoption as a practice of child welfare or humanitarianism, their “clients” and their daily operations follow the logistics and choices associated with reproductive choice. Professional ethics is seen as a practice to overcome these divided interests. At the same time, organizations were also wary of being depicted as “too professional,” which was seen as compromising a more intimate approach in working with people. Agencies made considerable effort to demonstrate that their organization—­although professional—­was still warm, friendly, and familiar. One example was to talk about “families” rather than “clients.” As one social worker at a reputable US international adoption agency put it, “The ethics of [agency name] are well-­known, and everybody in the

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field sort of knows that. One of the things that I was impressed about right away when I started with [agency name] is that there are no clients here. We never hear the word client . . . we work with families, and that really is a message—­to all of us, to each other. That really is the culture, that we’re here to serve the families. And it is a sense of pride we have that we’re representing an ethical organization.”6 Hence as organizations are investing in professionalism, by the same token, they are also communicating to the outside world that it is important to foster a culture of care. These efforts to “humanize” an organization reflect a tension between professionalization and a commitment to nonconsumerism, a tension inherent to many organizations that deal with either the intimate and domestic sphere (such as artificial reproductive technology [ART] clinics, family planning organizations, or more generally, hospitals) or the global humanitarian sphere of suffering and inequality (such as with charitable or humanitarian organizations). An alternative perspective would be to see this not as a tension but instead as a moralization of professional practice in which responsibility and ethics are increasingly embedded in economic rationales of markets (Shamir 2008). Such an approach would explain the paradoxical nature of professional ethics found in the contractual nature between organization and client. The promise of accountability, for instance, includes the promise of compensation. The welcome leaflet of Children’s Alliance explains this contractual setting when it explains how, as a professional organization, it has a clear complaints procedure. Clients can contact an external complaints committee in the event of a dispute that cannot be mutually resolved—­for instance, when there are conflicts about the process or certain decisions.7 By way of such procedures, professionalism promises accountability when things go wrong, and with this promise, institutions perform their commitment to ethical responsibility. Ironically, this contract of accountability between organization and client also feeds into middle-­class subjectivities greatly criticized by adoption professionals. In ways reminiscent of the Dutch director’s frustration with “claim behavior,” many social workers in both Dutch and American institutions were often disturbed by the highly privileged and self-­conscious attitude of mostly well-­educated middle-­class individuals and couples that betrayed feelings of entitlement and control. According to one US psychologist working in the field, these individuals are implicated in a culture



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of consumerism and choice: having been successful in yielding wealth and having adjusted to a certain lifestyle, they are now confronted with a situation that they cannot control (infertility), and this leaves them powerless. The adoption process adds another complex layer to the unruliness of reproductive life.8 Many agency workers identified consumerist behavior, and although they saw it as being at odds with their practices, it is arguably produced by the same discourses of professionalism with which adoption institutions profile themselves. This form of professional accountability fits neatly into neoliberal epistemologies that foster consumerist conflations of economy and morality (Shamir 2008, 6). Here, I join recent critics of neoliberalism (Brown 2015; Cooper 2017) who identify the effect of neoliberalism not only as growing inequality, commodification, the outsourcing of the state, and economic crises but also, and more insidious, as “an order of normative reason that, when it becomes ascendant, takes shape as a governing rationality extending a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life” (Brown 2015, 30). As Brown further argues, “To speak of the relentless and ubiquitous economization of all features of life by neoliberalism is thus not to claim that neoliberalism literally marketizes all spheres, even as such marketization is certainly one important effect of neoliberalism. Rather, the point is that neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities—­even where money is not at issue—­and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo economicus” (31). While organizations promise accountability, transparency, and the containment of risks, people who use their services are implicated in the very same dynamic that configures them as market actors. Moreover, as Melinda Cooper (2017) argues, family values are at the heart of the neoliberal imagination. She shows how, in the US context, the family has played a pivotal role in the political cooperation between neoliberals and social conservatives. Adoption fulfills an important function in articulating the imperative of family responsibility. The promise of future reproductivity through reproductive technologies and adoption has been carefully enveloped in this dynamic. States and markets, then, have an important stake in adoption. It is therefore vital to uphold and stabilize the legitimacy of adoption. In international adoption, this entailed the careful balancing of reproductive desire and humanitarianism.

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Managing Biodesire: Ontological Politics of Adoption In describing the transnational travel of couples and individuals in search of surrogacy services, legal scholar Richard Storrow coins the term “fertility tourism” (2005). The term—­as he argues—­alludes not only to cross-­border flows of people seeking fertility treatment but also to the reproductive economies sustaining the flows. Making analogies with international adoption and global sex work, Storrow draws out similarities and differences. One of the observations he makes is that people who cross national borders in pursuit of sex or a child do so because of an unbridled “urge,” however real or imagined: “The myth of unbridled male sexuality used to explain if not justify sex tourism is similar to socially constructed accounts of infertility as motivating desperate couples to undertake extreme measures in their single-­minded quest to have children” (2005, 328). The term “tourism” appeals to such quests and to the global industries that promise to fulfill them. But the term is also contested in feminist literature of reproduction and infertility. Inhorn and Patrizio (2009) argue against Storrow’s conceptualization of “fertility tourism” and explain how their research on infertile couples and individuals around the world indicate that the reasons people cross borders vary considerably. Besides costs—­ implicated by the word “tourism”—­they also include legal restrictions, religious/ethical norms, and lack of fertility services/technologies. Cross-­ border travel, therefore, is often not a choice; people feel forced to cross borders for legal, economic, and social reasons. Instead of “tourism,” one should speak—­Inhorn and Patrizio argue—­of infertility “exile” (2009, 906). Rather than approaching cross-­border travel in pursuit of a child as either tourism or exile, I propose to think of the movement as one that is driven by “biodesire,” a term first coined by the political theorist Antonio Negri (2004). Negri defines it as an ontological position toward the value of life in opposition to biopower: “Biodesire must be contrasted with biopower. The desire for life, the strength and wealth of desire, are the only things that we can oppose to power, which needs to place limitations upon biodesire. It is for this reason that power, faced with life, displays two contradictory attitudes: on the one hand, it works to organize life, relating subjects, multitudes, and singularities to each other, linking invention, resistance; and on the other hand, it imposes control over all this” (2004, 65).



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In the field of reproduction, biodesire denotes the desire for relational life. In using the term, I want to move away from understanding reproductive desire as either a form of representation or a biological reality to be reckoned with. Without dismissing the influence of neoliberal middle-­class subjectivities that buoy family citizenship (including multicultural and gay and lesbian families) or influences from more conservative cultures that uphold family values (and frown on infertility), the deployment of biodesire in reproduction uncovers the “ontological politics” of adoption practice, which contribute to defining what international adoption is today. Yet turning to biodesire does not mean that I understand reproductive desire as an essentialized, biological, or primordial “urge.” Rather, I understand the term as an approach to reproductive desire that recognizes an ontological desire for the constitution of relations. Biodesire, then, is not restricted to family life: it is a concept encompassing what one could call a force toward relating—­toward the capacities of love, attachment, and affect in a relational space. By suggesting that we look at the “ontological politics” of biodesire in adoption practice, I draw on the work of Annemarie Mol (1999), who defined the concept as investigating how the real is implicated in the political and the political in the real. Here, reality “does not precede the mundane practices in which we interact with it, but is rather shaped within these practices” (75).9 Biodesire is enacted within adoption practice, entangled in its “ontological choreography” (Thompson 2005, 8). The absence of a biogenetic link in the making of family life in adoption does not mean that the biological does not figure in the ontological position toward making life. On the contrary, the biological is implicated in different ways, as I illustrate in the following section, in the dialectic operation of “hope” and “rights” evident in the coordination work of biodesire. Ontological Politics of Hope

Biodesire as hope alludes to the enactment of “potentiality” in reproductive desire.10 In the Dutch agency where I conducted my ethnographic work, the majority of the aspiring adopters had fertility problems and had made use of reproductive services before turning to adoption. Only one or two showed interest in adoption out of purely idealistic or humanitarian motivations. Once they register with an adoption agency, prospective adopters are screened for their suitability to adopt by social workers from the Dutch Council of Child Protection, a national organization run by the state and its

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regional branches. Reports that the council makes typically address a number of issues of the individual or couple hoping to adopt, including employment, health, relationship, family, and personal history. What follows is an extract from an anonymized “home study” report from the Dutch Child Welfare Organization discussing three issues related to reproductive desire and motivation: children and childlessness Pregnancy did not occur. Entered the medical trajectory in 2002. Endometriosis. Pregnancy still did not occur. In 2007 they decided to stop the medical treatments. In the beginning it was difficult to see happy people with babies. Gradually they could be happy again for others. Thanks to their religion they have accepted that they can’t always get what they want. They want a family very much but have come to the conclusion that life does not end if this does not happen.

adoption motivation and (attachment) expectation They would much like a family but they would also like to provide an opportunity for children who have it difficult in their country of origin. But plenty love. They will make room and time for the child to get used to the new surroundings. Much rest and stability especially in the first period. Enforce few visits.

status information Culture important Right to know where they come from Open for roots travel11 Want to get acquainted with culture and living conditions in countries of origin in a meaningful way so as to guide the child in forming an identity. Biological mother gets a place in the life of the child by placing her picture in the room and by honestly talking about her/them.

These excerpts illustrate how in the adoption process, a person’s background and motivation to adopt are dissected and scrutinized. Professionals are attuned to the reproductive desires of couples and individuals so as to measure to what extent infertility forms the primary reason for their interest in adoption. Figures indicate that overall, 75 percent of couples intending to



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adopt internationally do so primarily for infertility reasons, although numbers may vary in individual countries (Selman 2010, 82; Haworth, Selman, and Way 2010, 136; Howell 2006, 21). In the Dutch adoption agency where I conducted my ethnographic work, agency staff indicated that more than 90 percent of their applicants were experiencing infertility problems and that a majority of these people had sought treatment in one way or the other.12 In contrast to past practices, applicants are not advised to “hide” their reproductive desires by foregrounding humanitarian intentions but to state their explicit desire for a child in their paperwork. The excerpts show, however, that there is a delicate balance in disclosing reproductive desire and showing a genuine interest in the humanitarian aspect of adoption. The home study report is preceded by a compulsory six-­day course organized through a national adoption foundation that consists of themes ranging from attachment to loss and identity. During these informative events, applicants are advised to shy away from humanitarian mentalities of “saving children.” Instead, they are encouraged to assume more pragmatic narratives—­so-­called win-­win narratives that include their own family-­ making intentions. Foregrounding reproductive desires subverts the idea that humanitarian intentions are considered more moral. Some professionals made an explicit point that they wished to eradicate the “rescue narrative” evident in past practices of adoption. Within the context of the Netherlands, such rescue narratives were associated with Christian narratives of salvation. Professional ethics were secular, disposed of religious mores and myth-­making narratives of redemption. Others indicated the need to dispose of any colonial narratives of rescue, particularly in their paperwork that would be assessed and scrutinized by organizations in the respective sending countries. These countries, professionals argued, are not waiting for white prospective parents to save “their” children but need people who are willing and able to care for these children, to help sending countries realize practical solutions. Attuned to these sensitivities, agencies sought a more pragmatic narrative of justifying adoption. Foregrounding reproductive desire was such a pragmatic and realistic narrative—­one that respected people’s reproductive desires but also one that was intended to abandon any remnants of colonial rescue narratives. Reproductive desire has been analyzed thoroughly in the field of assisted reproductive technologies (Gupta 2012; Leve 2013; Kroløkke 2015; Martin

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2009; Nahman 2013) and more recent studies on egg freezing (Van de  Wiel 2014, 2015; Waldby 2015a, 2015b). The literature indicates a focus on maternal desires that are inextricably linked to the performance of the body. Infertility is often experienced as a failure of that body (or specific body part), and assisted reproductive technologies are seen as medical technologies that help treat an illness. The biomedicalization of infertility also makes infertility a public matter—­something to be debated in the public sphere as it increasingly involves public services and monies (van Dijck 1995). This publicness is inextricably related to the neoliberal context in which biomedicalization is managed (Rose 2001; Clarke et al. 2003, 2009; Reith 2004). While infertility as an illness facilitates a somatic desire to restore procreative capacities of the body, it also naturalizes the desire to procreate. When measures to assist biological conception are unsuccessful, these desires and legitimacies are transported onto other options, such as adoption. Adoption professionals advise applicants to work through grief and mourn over their inability to have biological children before they embark upon the journey of adoption. Increasingly, the adoption process resembles matching and decision-­ making processes in the ART clinic. Legal and biomedical restrictions can occupy the spaces previously limited by biological and reproductive boundaries. Rather than the biological clock, many prospective adopters, for instance, are confronted with the ticking of the “legal adoption clock.” In the Netherlands, there are clear age restrictions that limit older applicants from adopting, and when eligible applicants are over a certain age, they are matched with older children, limiting the age difference between parent and child.13 Moreover, as I describe in chapter 3, medical screenings in adoption mirror diagnostic screenings of the fetus in biological conception. People starting the adoption process have strong hopes of (still) realizing their desire for family life, but this hope is often accompanied by a deep sense of embodied loss that the imagined biogenetic child will not be realized. Social workers and adoption professionals assess the capabilities of prospective adopters to mitigate this loss and judge whether prospective adopters are resilient enough to start a lengthy and emotional adoption process: caseworkers test whether their clients’ expectations align with realistic accounts of adoptive parenthood. The hope implicated in biodesire, then, is a hope continuing from a biological reproductive desire. This desire to have a biogenetic child morphs into a desire to make a different child



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one’s own. It is also a desire that was first projected onto the technological (in)capabilities of a medical world and then onto the bureaucratic (in)capabilities of a social world. Both, however, indicate an ontological sense of plasticity and possibility. As Sarah Franklin (1997) has described, unsuccessful attempts at assisted reproduction and a naturalization of reproductive desire act as commanding drivers of hope and imagination. This does not stop at the doors of the adoption agency. Different and multiple projections of the future are imagined in the ART clinic. The “adoption clinic” is not exempt from such future-­generating assemblages. Ultimately, the desire is about what the child “reproduces”: biodesire is not invested in the reproductive moment per se; that moment is instead “the acting out of intention or desire” (Strathern 1995, 355). The futures generated by the ART clinic and the adoption clinic create not only hopeful anticipation for what might come (certain kinds of family life) but also anxiety about what might not come or come in different ways than anticipated. Sara Ahmed talks in this respect about the coupling of hope with anxiety (2010, 181). The anticipation of family life suggests the promise of happiness. Such promises fit well into neoliberal formulations of middle-­class family citizenship (Berlant 1997; Anagnost 2000; Eng 2003) and liberal understandings of freedom and choice. Ontological Politics of Rights

I am much in agreement with scholars who argue that parenthood is increasingly linked to value, self-­worth, and robust citizenship; those who desire parenthood see it as a legal right. The structure of ownership inherent in such a right is not new but is newly reconfigured in an age of biotechnology (Strathern 2005, 56–­58; Rose 1996). This is especially true for single, gay, and lesbian individuals and couples. Their desire to parent a child becomes an equality issue, and in the Netherlands, this is a well-­established claim that involves a strong lobby and receives political support. Here, biodesire is not only a desire stemming from biological (in)capacities of the reproductive body (whether male or female); it also involves the development of what Marsiglio and Hutchinson (2002) call “procreative consciousness.” People are tuned in to aspirational parenthood by their context: their partners, friends, and family; marketing; the media; and the availability of reproductive services (such as ART, adoption, and surrogacy). This all points to the growing biolegitimacy of reproductive services for family making. The basis

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of rights claims seeks to validate their procreative consciousness—­that is, “rights” become formal manifestations of this desire. Many professionals in the field refute the “right to procreate” and insist (both genuinely and strategically) that they are there to find families for children, not children for families. They feel great pressure from prospective adopters, and tensions arise between professionals, who see their task as representing the child (their clients are the children), and the applicants, who (reluctantly) have to deal with their reproductive desire outside of the private realms of the home. The family has often been approached as the sacred, private, and nurturing unit in opposition to the profane and economic world (Zelizer 2010). In the adoption agency—­as in an ART clinic—­family-­making intentions become public. The adoption agency destabilizes the privatized notion of family life. Intimacies that applicants feel should be kept private are now on display and subjected to public scrutiny. There is much (silent) resistance by applicants to the exposure of their feelings, emotions, and histories in the adoption process. For many, the adoption process produces (another) loss of control over some crucial part of their private lives, but they also know that there is no choice but to go along with the vicissitudes of the bureaucratic procedures. Some, however, push their desires onto professionals and demand of them, or of the organization, a stronger commitment toward finding children. Feeling this pressure, professionals in turn allocate worthiness to some applicants over others. For instance, single young women who are “not fussy” and “take anything” (older children or children with special needs) are preferred over demanding couples who will not compromise their preference for a healthy light-­skinned baby.14 Attitudes that are seen as consumerist are chastised and can (behind closed doors) affect an applicant’s place on the waiting list. Although many think the waiting list is formed like a line, the hierarchy on the list is much more mutable. Performing professional ethics in the adoption agency is all about making sure that the world of money and business is cordoned off from the intimate practice of placing children with parents. Biodesire cuts through those boundaries, and the performance of professionalism, therefore, must be constantly demonstrated: “It must be bureaucratically evidenced, revealed, documented, enacted, performed” ( Jacob and Riles 2007, 181). In the next



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section, I examine two events to further analyze the operation of biodesire and to demonstrate how the agency and the state are implicated in its enactment. The first involves the discursive management of a trafficking scandal involving children adopted from China to the Netherlands. The second concerns the state’s management of biodesire in a US, Canadian, and Dutch airlift operation that included children processed for adoption from Haiti to the three nation-­states.

Crisis of Legitimation In examining events that exemplify a crisis of legitimation, I am concerned with the investigation of “where it hurts” (Fassin 2007, 502). In a crisis situation, the legitimation work occurring in mundane practice falls short; in such spaces, “a certain truth gets told that would not be told otherwise” (Fassin 2010, 42). Whereas the formal justification of adoption is “humanitarianism,” it will become clear in the descriptions of the two events that follow that this justification becomes an aporia. In instances of crisis and emergency, an irresolvable internal contradiction arises in which the plight of humanitarianism in adoption fails while other values and moralities come to light. Reports of trafficking, wrongful adoptions, and child trafficking present a discursive problem for the rescue story embedded in the humanitarian justification of international adoption. Stealing and Buying

In May 2008, a media frenzy unfolded after an extensive editorial investigation by Netwerk—­a news program on Dutch public television—­on stolen children in the province of Guizhou, China.15 The broadcast depicted the story of a Chinese couple who in 2002 lost one of their twins to local officials when it became apparent that they were not able to pay the fine associated with violating the one-­child quota of China’s population control policy.16 When the family was able to raise the money, they asked the local authorities to return their child, but they were informed that the child had already been placed for adoption outside of China. The program also reported two other couples with similar stories. Their (grand)children were taken away by the family

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planning agency that brought the children to the Shaoyang Social Welfare Institute in Hunan, where the children most likely were adopted by foreign couples without the parents’ consent. In response to this account—­especially to the possibility that some of the trafficked children were adopted by Dutch parents through Children’s Alliance—­the agency organized a meeting intended for adoptive parents who were concerned about the situation. Around 50 to 60 people attended the event, which took place outside of the agency in a city centrally located in the Netherlands. Besides information updates from the agency’s caseworkers who managed adoptions from China, a trained psychologist, well known to people working in the Dutch adoption field, gave a presentation to inform parents about how to deal with this news.17 During the meeting, many questions were raised concerning the details of the trafficked children, the orphanage, and the people involved. The agency replied that it had screened the children’s documents (between 2002 and 2007) for the names of the people associated with the scandal. None of the names came up in the files except for the name of the director of the orphanage. The overall conclusion of the agency’s representatives was that there were very few facts known about the scandal. The representatives informed parents that their director was planning to meet with people from the China Center of Adoption Affairs (CCAA) to ask for clarification about specific cases. But the representatives did not expect that the visit would result in more certainty. As one representative of the agency, Joke Smit, explained, “The CCAA has informed numerous countries that the stolen children did not involve the adoptions going to their countries [US and France]. But it seems that the children went nowhere then. The Justice Department tells us time and time again that none of the children involved came to the Netherlands.”18 The purpose of the meeting was to determine the best way parents could tell their children that trafficking was suspected in some adoptions. Some of the questions from the audience focused on this. One woman mentioned that there were rumors on the internet that the orphanage from where she adopted her child had been involved, and she asked the agency how to deal with this information. “What if,” she posed, “my child would ask me whether she was trafficked too? How do I respond?” These questions were answered primarily by the psychologist present. Her overall advice was to be as honest as possible about the situation, emphasizing that it was



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OK for these parents to tell their children that they didn’t know anything for certain. It appeared that such advice was difficult to accept, and it did not satisfy adoptive parents’ need for clarification. After asking repeatedly whether the Dutch justice department could do more research and why the agency—­via their caseworkers in China—­could not obtain more information, the agency’s head of adoptions, Joke Smit, turned the question around and asked the audience, “But what is it about the story [of the adoption scandals] that especially resonated with you? The fact that someone paid for your child or the fact that someone stole your child?” One parent responded by saying, “Well, I wasn’t even thinking about [the act of] paying for a child. To be honest, if a child lives on the street, that’s not even that bad. But stealing, that’s something different.” A caseworker who specialized in adoptions from China said that most of the children trafficked were healthy boys and that they were often destined for domestic adoption. “The only children still coming from Hunan,” she explained, “are special needs children.” The communication officer of the agency, Vera Slotman, then commented, “Of course we need to wait for the information from the Justice Department. But with respect to whether you tell this [the possibility that she might be trafficked] or the fact that she was abandoned—­I don’t know, that is also very bad, right? I don’t want to belittle [bagatelliseren] the situation, but you can compare the situation.”19 The meeting, as an event created outside of the regular adoption process, could be seen as a tool for managing a crisis of legitimation. News about trafficking disturbed the moral frameworks of humanitarian adoptions. The fact that many people attended the event served as a testament to the need for answers and the desire to repair some of the damage to the justificatory regimes of adoptions from China. A dominant legitimation was legal abandonment. Agencies and prospective parents relied on the “knowledge” that most children (primarily girls) are abandoned because of a combination of China’s one-­child policy and Chinese culture’s gender discrimination that favored boys.20 When news of trafficking and baby selling entered the scene, this justificatory regime was threatened. The caseworker’s information that most of the children trafficked were healthy boys and that they were often destined for domestic adoption in China momentarily suspended the crisis. Her additional comment that only special needs children were still coming from Hunan emphasized once again that the scandal did not involve the

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children of the parents who attended the meeting—­that the problem was still “far away.” She reiterated that parents need not worry, for “their girls” were not involved. The distance, or “far awayness,” of the problem, however, was challenged by the more sarcastic remarks by Joke Smit. According to her, the confirmations from Chinese state officials and the Dutch Justice Department that no trafficked children were involved in adoptions to the US, France, or the Netherlands were suspicious. Smit’s sarcasm (“But it seems that the children went nowhere then”) stems from her experience of dealing directly with Dutch and Chinese officials. In an interview a few weeks prior to this meeting, she explained to me how adoptions from China were frequently too standardized and too neat. Often, the files about the adoptable children they received looked uniformly the same: “How many times can children crawl, pull up, or speak at the very same time? And why are many files identical, along with their typos, even though they are supposed to represent different children?” Aware of the diplomatic interests involved and knowing that even a research visit from Dutch officials to China would not provide the information that professionals wished for, Smit alerted the parents to the possibility that they might never really know what happened in China; thus they would never truly know the circumstances of their children’s adoption. This is the reality that parents need to accept and, consequently, that they need to be able to communicate to their children. There was tension between the two informants. While the China caseworker tried to mitigate concerns by claiming that children from the agency were not involved, Smit actually acknowledged that the transparency promised through documents was flawed. In turning to the parents to ask them whether the “buying” or the “stealing” bothered them the most, Smit offered a new dimension to the reordering of justifications. The distinction itself would be hidden if trafficking were not involved. The thought of stealing, theft, or trafficking—­and the proximity of that thought through the knowledge that it might involve one of the agency’s adopted children—­opens up the moral space necessary to voice the opinion that “buying” a child was not even that bad, especially if someone is “taking children off the streets and putting them in loving families.” The subject of “buying” became speakable only through the grander moral violation of trafficking.



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The representative of the agency’s communication department, Slotman, who shifted the moral concern from the subject of “buying” and “stealing” to the psychology of the adoptee, surpassed this moral reordering. By suggesting that it might not matter whether a parent told their child whether she was abandoned or trafficked, Slotman suggested that there was no difference in the pain this knowledge would inflict on the child—­stealing should not be that much more destructive than abandonment. Slotman proposed a new referential frame that addressed adoptive parents in a different way. This shifting and reordering of moral frameworks demonstrates that there is a more ontological form of justifying. In crisis situations, when the mundane is suspended and there is a serious threat of existential pain or harm, ontological justifications take hold and affect the coordination of future actions. People are willing to defy the law and the state when it concerns their (future) kin—­particularly their child or children. In adoption, we observe this ontological tendency in rescue operations involving children who were already placed for adoption. Saving and Rescuing

In January 2010, Haiti was struck by a catastrophic earthquake affecting around 3  million people. The massive force of a magnitude 7.0 earthquake destroyed the capital city, Port-­au-­Prince, and brought about the loss of more than 100,000 lives, leaving around 250,000 people displaced. There was general consensus among political observers that the nation’s impoverished economy, exacerbated by debt, corruption, and foreign involvement—­remnants of colonization and slavery (Fassin 2013)—­helped aggravate the scale of the disaster. Humanitarian aid flooded in from various countries, but due to a number of reasons, including the blackout of communication systems and damage to infrastructure, emergency aid was difficult, complicated, and chaotic, leading to several incidences of looting and violence. Amid all the mayhem, news traveled around the world that an American Christian church group had entered Haiti on its own initiative to search for orphans and to bring them to the US for adoption. With 33 children in tow, church members attempted to cross the border to the Dominican Republic, where they had ties with an unlicensed orphanage. It became apparent that all of the children still had a surviving parent. In the chaos, disarray, and despair, children either had been taken away from their

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parents or were taken before their parents were able to locate them. At the Dominican border, the 10 Americans involved were charged by the Haitian authorities with trafficking, but they were released without further charges and were free to return to the US.21 Around the same time, several countries in North America and Europe—­including the US and the Netherlands—­decided to airlift hundreds of children from their Haitian foster homes.22 Due to the stories circulating about the dubious Christian rescue missions, the agencies and officials involved took great care to justify their procedures and distance themselves from the actions of the American Baptist church group. The children involved in the airlifts were already in the process of being adopted, and most of them had already been matched to adoptive parents in these countries.23 The justification underpinning the airlift was that there was no guarantee for the safety of these children if they remained in Haiti, and so on humanitarian grounds, US and Dutch authorities accepted and initiated the airlifts despite acknowledged insecurities and risks. They did so under strict conditions and with the backing of the Hague Adoption Convention, whose representatives insisted that even though Haiti was not a member of the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) and had not ratified the Hague Adoption Convention, countries dealing with Haiti should work in ways consistent with the principles of the Hague Adoption Convention. In the US, the children were granted “humanitarian parole,” and the Dutch followed suit, activating clauses that would allow children to be removed from Haiti without the appropriate passports.24 The situation in Haiti underscored the core paradox of international adoption. Humanitarian rescue was the overall narrative supporting North American and European authorities’ actions, but the intervention occurred on behalf of adoptive parents. Because these children were already in the adoption process, the prospective parents saw them as their children. In other words, it was not just another misguided rescue mission of naive Christian do-­gooders (such as the Baptist group mentioned earlier) but rather an attempt to rescue the adoptive parents’ own children, which, in the greater scheme of things, surpassed all other forms of justification. An adoptive father, John Seabrook, a regular writer for the New Yorker, made the following remark about his child, Rose, who was matched with him and his partner before the earthquake happened: “In the days after January 12th, we agonized about what we should do. Before the earthquake, we



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had never thought of ourselves as Rose’s saviors. We wanted a child, and Rose needed a family: it seemed like a fair trade. But after the earthquake, circumstances changed, and, like it or not, our adoption became a rescue mission” (Seabrook 2010). The opinion that things were out of the ordinary and demanded a different moral response and legitimation was also voiced by the US authorities involved. Whitney Reitz, a citizenship and immigration services official who oversaw the parole program, recognized that decisions were made in haste: “We did something so fast. . . . We did something that normally takes a couple of years and that we normally do with excruciating care and delay. There’s so much time for deliberation in the way the program normally goes, and we condensed all that into a matter of days” (Thompson 2010a). Other US officials remarked, I don’t know how it happened, but I didn’t ask a lot of questions, and if you had seen the faces of those children as we loaded them onto the airplane, you wouldn’t have asked a lot of questions, either (Thompson 2010b).25 This was an extraordinary situation. There wasn’t the benefit of time. And there was a gut decision that the administration believed was in the best interests of the children (Thompson 2010b).

When lives are at stake, laws and regulations are temporarily suspended. Didier Fassin and Paula Vazquez have argued in this respect that as “a last resort, when ‘the simple fact of living’ . . . is under threat in human communities, whether confined to refugee camps or subjected to the whims of nature, humanitarianism always justifies a form of exception” (Fassin and Vasquez 2005, 391). In an age of extreme global inequality, humanitarianism “provides the illusion of a global moral community that may still be viable and a solidarity that may have redeeming powers” (Fassin 2013, 37).26 As these excerpts from US officials indicate, it was crucial to do something—­to not passively witness the destruction but to trust instincts and to operate swiftly from the strong conviction that the actions taken were in the best interest of the child. It is important, however, to address the broader historical context of adoption in Haiti. Prior to the earthquake, events of child trafficking were commonly reported, and many were linked to domestic and foreign

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adoptions (Smolin 2010, 493). Many child protection organizations, including UNICEF and Terres des Hommes but also adoption agencies, would attest to the fact that the adoption process in Haiti before the earthquake was very disorganized. Rife with corruption, it was widely acknowledged that the Haitian government was not able to guarantee transparent processes. The Dutch authorities also signaled problems in relation to adoption in Haiti, and Children’s Alliance had indicated that before the earthquake, it was phasing out adoptions from Haiti because the procedures were getting very long and corruption was widespread. Yet when situated in a time of emergency, “not asking questions” and “gut feelings” took over the language of accountability, transparency, and professional ethics. The incredible stream of humanitarian aid to Haiti not only represented global forms of compassion toward Human suffering but was also symptomatic of a politics able to mobilize this compassion by evacuating or suspending history. What differentiates this particular rescue mission from, for instance, the “Operation Babylift” in Vietnam in the 1970s27 is that these children already had a legal, bureaucratic, and affective link to prospective adopters in the West (from the standpoint of the receiving country and the adopters). The rescue of these particular children from Haiti therefore is not only couched in humanitarianism; rather, I would argue that it is couched in biodesire. In situations of threat and human crisis, ontological positions toward the value of life take precedence. And one could argue that in honoring the powerful narrative of adoption as occupying an as-­if condition of biological relatedness, the adoptive parents, backed up by officials, were honoring the power of kinship in defying and suspending the law. My rendering of biodesire can here be understood as the ontologized form of kinning in adoptive relationships. The legal technology of adoption has naturalized relatedness in the same way that assisted reproductive technologies have naturalized reproductive desire. Rescue takes different forms. The rescue represented by the church group and the rescue represented by the adoptive parents and their nation-­states were based on different ontological positions. Whereas the first grew out of the Christian and humanitarian desire for salvation and redemption, the latter grew out of a constitutive desire to save kin and (would-­be) citizens.28 But the collapse of humanitarian government with biodesire characterizes the return to a status quo of international adoption. The US and the Netherlands (and other countries) either continued adopting from



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Haiti or resumed adoptions after a brief moratorium. The state of emergency revealed for a moment the two paradoxical legitimations underpinning adoption. Secular narratives of humanitarian government, combined with naturalized forms of reproductive desire and adoptive kinship, supported the equilibrium of the “fair trade” of international adoption, as John Seabrook so expressively articulated. The truths underpinning the aporia of international adoption come alive in the event and space of emergency. Hence while international adoption—­as a humanitarian protection of the right of the child to live in a family environment—­is held as the ultimate and only justification for the current practice, the event of the emergency disclosed how biodesire played a consistent and justificatory role in the legitimation work of parents, institutions, and the nation-­states involved. Theorists in the social study of childhood have indicated that in late modernity, children’s lives are valued more than the lives of adults (Ruddick 2007a, 2007b). What is more, “orphanhood” in the context of poverty, conflict, and war complements the powerful figure of the child with a construction of victimhood (Malkki 1996). Narratives of rescue play into these figurations of the global orphan. And while biodesire, understood here as the ontological and naturalized dimensions of reproductive desire and adoptive kinship, usually figures on its own, in the justificatory framework of international adoption, it becomes entangled in the humanitarian politics of life that defines children as lives in need of rescue. Moreover, the humanitarian logic does not work without the knowledge of where the children would need to be rescued to. The Euro-­American, (neo)liberal, and capitalist assumption that children would be “better off ” in the Global North is central to the particularities of humanitarianism in international adoption (see also chapter 6). This assumption was evident in the justification for child “buying” expressed during the meeting I attended about the stolen children from China that was organized by Children’s Alliance. It was also manifest in the rescue narratives of adoptive parents and nation-­states in the event of the babylifts in postearthquake Haiti.

Conclusion During my fieldwork, a social worker from Children’s Alliance confided in me that if she were to adopt a child, she would not go through an adoption

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agency. She would travel and live in a country and try to adopt locally. Within the discourse of the professional, transparent, and ethical institution, her remark could be regarded as peculiar. What does she want to convey by opting to bypass the institution? Her particular stance can be understood as an evacuation from both the humanitarianization and the economization of the adoption process. It might also indicate an evacuation from modern bureaucracies and sensibilities in which international adoption is couched. Within a transnational legal framework of adoption, her private action would be deemed illegal and could potentially violate child-­buying or trafficking laws. Her desire to transgress the current adoption system is an ontological one. It encompasses humanity not necessarily in a modernist sense (of humanity as an important facet of political life) but more so in a premodern or nonmodern sense (of kinship postulating the coming together of economy and sociality). As individuals, we oscillate between different ontologies. Globalism, like modernism, feeds into these ontologies. This social worker’s wish to evacuate herself from today’s system could point to a refusal to relate to the ideological aspects attached to modernism, globalism, and humanitarianism. Although we don’t need to abide by its ideology, globalism is a practice in which we are unavoidably embedded (Tsing 2004; Gibson-­Graham 2006). If we understand humanitarianism—­like Didier Fassin does—­as an ideology that “suspends both individual and collective times, biography and history” (2013, 46), one that is entangled in global ideologies, then it stands opposed to biodesire and the ontological justifications transgressing law and the state. In this chapter, I aimed to demonstrate how contemporary practices of international adoption navigate these internal paradoxes of globalism and humanitarianism by drawing on discourses of professionalism. Biodesire cuts through these discourses. Characterized by a politics of hope and “rights,” biodesire—­as the naturalized and ontologized form of reproductive desire—­becomes inextricably entangled in adoption practice. Managing reproductive desire is vital in securing the humanitarian logic of international adoption. The agency and the state play a central role in sustaining the internal aporia of adoption—­namely, that it is a form of humanitarianism and a form of family making. Critical events, such as the crisis meeting attending to stories of child trafficking or the expedition of adoptions from postearthquake Haiti, illuminate these contradictions even further. The events demonstrated a “crisis of legitimation,” and they allowed



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us to see the unviability of the aporia as well as the postcolonial dimensions that constitute international adoption. I hope I made evident in this chapter that international adoption— ­although sharing many characteristics with domestic adoption—­should be approached as a distinctive phenomenon. Domestic adoption is not necessarily constituted by humanitarianism. When things go awry in domestic adoption, nation-­states are responsible and can be called on to respond to criticism and protest. Adult adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoption activists have entered this political arena and are at times successful in achieving legal reform and instituting cultural change. In contrast to the civic actions within the framework of the nation-­state, the global nature of international adoption, and I would argue, of humanitarianism more generally, makes it much more difficult to critique. As Negri (2004) points out—­and as I have tried to argue through an analysis of contemporary global adoption practice—­biodesire (as ontology) stands opposed to biopower (and in the case of international adoption, opposed to the biopolitics of international adoption). In foregrounding biodesire in globality, however, action becomes inevitably depoliticized. This situation is the subject of the next chapter, in which I focus on the role of international law in the regulation of transnational adoption.

2 • DOUBLE MOVEMENTS International Law as Transparency Device

Globalization means never having to say you’re sorry. —­Carlos Monsiváis, “Todos somos indios” The prevailing of reason over body runs parallel to that of the proper over the common, the private over the public, and individual profit over collective interests. This happens when the push for immunity prevails over the passion for community. —­Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things There is nothing innocent about making the invisible visible. —­Marilyn Strathern, “The Tyranny of Transparency”

One of the core objectives of international law is to protect human rights in situations where the jurisdiction of the nation-­state is insufficiently equipped to perform the job. The 1993 Hague Adoption Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-­operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (Hague Adoption Convention) has often been regarded as a response to the challenges that the “global situation” brings to adoption practice. The early surge of cross-­border adoptions in the 1950s occurred primarily within Europe and was a response to children orphaned by the two world wars.1 However, starting in the 1960s, there was a dramatic increase in cross-­border adoptions of children primarily from developing countries who were brought to welfare states in Europe, North America, and the Antipodes.2 Complex legal situations emerged from these transnational child migrations. It was unclear which laws were to be followed, what 50



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rules were to be put in place for an orderly process, and what the responsibilities were of the sending and the receiving states. The circumstances typified a “conflict of law” that needed transnational legal address. Moreover, concerns of child trafficking dominated public debate on cross-­border adoption during the 1960s and 1970s. Discussions that lead to the drafting of the 1993 Hague Adoption Convention held these views in tension. While some made efforts to draft a working treaty that would facilitate and enable the practice of intercountry adoption, the treaty also had to function as a safeguard to protect children from trafficking and illegal sale. In the previous chapter, I focused on the legitimation work of adoption agencies. I analyzed how social workers had to navigate consumerist visions of a “right to a child” and humanitarian intentions of adoption upheld by the “right to family life.” In this chapter, I examine how transnational initiatives in the legal field attend to the ethics and politics of adoption, affected by reproductive desires on the one hand and global inequalities on the other. In my examination of the Hague Adoption Convention as a key player in the regulation and justification of adoption, I criticize a central notion underlying Karl Polanyi’s socioeconomic theory—­namely, the “double movement.” The first of this double movement involves the expansion of a capitalist market to the point where abuses are committed, and the second involves a countermovement when social protections are put in place to combat the abuses. The Hague Adoption Convention can be seen as responding to the tribulations of “marketization”—­that is, the abuses that arose from the market mechanisms underlying adoption practices in a globalized world—­and, as such, can be considered as a countermovement. However, I demonstrate that the double movement is embedded within the Hague Adoption Convention itself. The treaty functions, on the one hand, as an enabling force, intended to allow adoption to take place within a streamlined conception of global governance. The restructuring of legal matters pertaining to adoptability, accreditation, and citizenship is supposed to make adoption processes in the sending and receiving countries more compatible and therefore more expedient. On the other hand, the convention’s reliance on public international law makes cross-­border adoption a restrictive practice, one that has to undergo numerous protection measures in order to comply with the ethical principles of human rights. The chapter probes this double movement within a countermovement.

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Away from the normative functions of the convention, my chapter also focuses on the enactment of the Hague Adoption Convention in institutional practice. I argue that the convention can be approached as a “transparency device” (Harvey, Reeves, and Ruppert 2013)—­that is, a complex assemblage working in pursuit of global reproductive governance. Focusing on the principle of “subsidiarity” (an important principle that only allows international adoption after due consideration for alternatives in the country of origin) and the debate about so-­called independent adoptions (adoptions arranged individually, though the state needs to approve at some point), I examine the logic and effect of transparency as it unfolds in US and Dutch adoption practice. Ultimately, I argue that the “transparency device” helps keep the double movement in check: while the convention legitimizes cross-­border adoption through its emphasis on protection, transparency facilitates an ordered global adoption system by making legal adoption compatible across borders. In the final part of the chapter, I argue that humanitarianism as an “internationalist” ideology, combined with transparency as a device, depoliticizes international adoption. While the debate on international adoption necessarily treads on the postcolonial question as to whether it serves wealthy childless couples in the North at the cost of birth families in the South, my point is of another postcolonial nature—­namely, that only a certain kind of kinship knowledge becomes known through international law, screening out other kinds. The problem of such filtering cannot be addressed merely by making the process of international adoption transparent. Instead, it demands a political response and a global debate about how we can honor, respect, and legally work with different kinds of kinship knowledge in a transnational space.

Double Movements: Enabling and Responding to Adoption Markets The Hague Adoption Convention was concluded on 29 May 1993 and entered into force on 1 May 1995. Based on private international law—­which is concerned with relations across different legal jurisdictions between natural persons or other legal entities—­the agreement contains protocols and norms to ensure the protection of the child in intercountry adoption. As I



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write this chapter in December 2017, the convention has been ratified by 96 states. France, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, and the Nordic countries were the first to ratify the convention as receiving countries (1990s). Countries that send large numbers of adoptees, such as South Korea, Nepal, and Russia, have signed but not ratified the agreement. Moreover, it was not until 2008 that the US, the country receiving the highest number of adoptees, finally ratified the convention. Ratification means that the member state is expected to apply the values and norms set out by the convention to its international adoption practice. The Guide to Good Practice (volumes 1 and 2), published by the Permanent Bureau in 2008 and 2013, respectively, forms the more practical guide to implementing the principles of the convention. Private international law is a system designed to harmonize and resolve situations where there is a conflict of law when private and nonstate disputes cross jurisdictions. These issues usually pertain to marriage, birth, divorce, property, and commercial disputes. The Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) is one of the world’s leading organizations for cross-­border cooperation and commercial matters. Established in 1892, it is an intergovernmental organization, today including 75 states and the European Union, responsible for the regulation of private matters across jurisdictions. Over the years, it has adopted numerous conventions that aim to harmonize conflict-­of-­law situations. The status of children in cross-­ border settings has been a primary focus: conventions in this area include child abduction, maintenance obligations, and intercountry adoption. More recently, HCCH has been researching the possibility of formulating a Hague Adoption Convention on International Surrogacy Arrangements (ISAs). An important discussion document informing the creation of the convention was written by the Dutch legal officer Hans Van  Loon, who acknowledged that compared to the inter-­ European post–­ World War 3 period, a new situation had emerged. He found that children were now being abandoned for structural reasons—­namely, in response to socioeconomic constraints relating to poverty and unemployment or cultural and religious constraints pertaining to the stigmas attached to family planning and unwed mothers. At the same time, industrialized countries experienced increasing infertility, partly due to the influence of Western feminism and the participation of women in the workforce. Moreover, the increasing

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use of birth control resulting in fewer unwanted pregnancies, the growing acceptance of single mothers, and the reorientation of domestic adoption to either permanent fostering or open adoption led to a significant decrease of children available for domestic adoption. This in turn increased the demand for cross-­border adoptions. As Van  Loon argues, at this point the language of economics intervened in the phenomenon: “A structural ‘supply’ of children ‘available’ for adoption abroad in economically developing countries met with a structural ‘demand’ for such children in economically advanced countries” (1990, 39). This situation could lead to abuse such as child trafficking and, according to Van Loon, demanded as much attention as the technical legal issues concerning which laws to adhere to in cross-­border situations. In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi (1957 [1944]) proposed the model of a “double movement” to designate the ways in which capitalism treats all exchange as commodity exchange (the first movement) and the ensuing ways in which society responds to such an unparalleled process of “marketization” (the second movement). It does so, not in a grand movement and countermovement, but in a series of successive waves informed by a cyclicality of actions. However, not all forms of exchange can be successfully transformed into commodities. Polanyi refers to land, labor, and capital as being forms of “fictitious commodities,” since they are not intended to be traded in the marketplace. Children, commodified as either labor or capital, fall directly into this category. From a Polanyian perspective, an adoption “market,” left to its own devices, distorts the idea of humanity in profound ways, leading to the exploitation and harm of children. The Hague Adoption Convention may be viewed as a response to the chaotic expansion of adoption markets, the type of countermovement that Polanyi refers to as the “self-­protection of society.” By signing and ratifying the conventions, states enforce transnational regulation to protect themselves against the instabilities of the market (Burawoy 2003; Guthman 2007). Yet the focus of private international law, as the legal theorist Horatia Muir Watt contends, has always been on enabling rather than disciplining capacities (2011, 354), focusing primarily on regulatory rather than normative dimensions. Private international law, she argues, is founded on the schism between law and politics and between the public and the private. It is time, she argues, for private international law to mature into an international law instrument in which political function is reappropriated: “Private



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international law should reclaim its governance potential and work to fill the holes created either by excluding or denying non-­state authority. Paradoxically, when domesticated and thus reduced to dealing with the ‘private’ sphere, it was actually disabled from taking the ‘private’ seriously. To a large extent, ‘privatising’ international law meant reducing its status—­like that of classical private law—­to the merely facilitative. Used to enable but not to discipline, it was prevented from identifying and regulating private economic power, which it was complicit in unleashing from public constraints” (2011, 389). Watt was primarily concerned with economic disputes. In contrast, one could argue, along with Van Loon, that the Hague Adoption Convention represented both an enabling as well as a disciplining instrument. Human rights were closely entangled with the normative principles of the convention, and it can therefore be reasoned that as a discipline, private international law was becoming increasingly implicated in public international law, which covers relations between nation-­states: “Private international law is becoming permeated by elements of judicial and administrative co-­operation and likewise, the fields of human rights and private international law are touching more and more frequently. The convention is the fruit of this new development and, in order to be well understood, it should be looked at with a mind aware of the increasing significance of international co-­operation for the unification of private international law and the growing interaction between human rights law and private international law” (Baker 2013, 421n13, quoting Van Loon 1990). Following the nature of this particular multidimensional instrument, one that is enabling as well as regulating, the Hague Adoption Convention can be approached as a double movement within a countermovement. On the one hand, the Hague Adoption Convention facilitated adoption markets, enabling adoption—­as argued in the first chapter—­to have its own niche in the global reproductive economy.4 On the other hand, it also functioned as a protective instrument, one that safeguarded children from abuses such as trafficking and sale. In the next section, I examine how the dual function plays out in the standards and rules formulated by the convention.

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Making Adoption Compatible The preparatory discussions informing the birth of the convention centered on the need for global regulation and the prevention of abuse. The convention was to accommodate civil issues pertaining to adoption and was required to distance itself from criminal matters, which would be covered by international criminal law. It was acknowledged that the proposed instrument should go beyond matters of administration and include sociopolitical inquiries regarding social welfare, migration, and nationality. The Hague Adoption Convention, therefore, is a multidimensional instrument: at the same time that it is an instrument for judicial and administrative cooperation, it is also a human rights instrument (Van Loon 1990; see also Baker 2013, 420). As a private international law instrument, it works to eradicate so-­called limping adoptions, referring to the non-­or weak recognition of adoptions in either states of origin or receiving states, as a result of which children are left stateless or without formal legal parentage. Quite uniquely, however, the Hague Adoption Convention can also be qualified as a human rights instrument, for it incorporates and complements the principles and norms of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).5 But a closer look at some of their shared principles reveals important differences between the Hague Adoption Convention and the CRC. The so-­called subsidiarity principle, for instance, seems to align the convention with the CRC in the first instance. But the precise wording of the principle reveals that it contains a crucial difference: hague adoption convention (preamble) Recognising that the child, for the full and harmonious development of his or her personality, should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding, Recognising that intercountry adoption may offer the advantage of a permanent family to a child for whom a suitable family cannot be found in his or her state of origin.

un convention on the rights of the child (article 21 ) Recognize that inter-­country adoption may be considered as an alternative means of child’s care, if the child cannot be placed in a foster or an adoptive



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family or cannot in any suitable manner be cared for in the child’s country of origin;

The difference between the two conventions is the emphasis on “family” (Hague Adoption Convention) versus “care” (CRC). The convention clearly prefers permanent placements in families over alternative forms of care. In practice, this means that children can be placed for intercountry adoption as soon as it is established that they cannot be placed for domestic adoption. Foster care, group homes, or institutional care are not considered in the best interest of the child. The CRC, on the other hand, widens the opportunities for children to be cared for in local arrangements (such as foster care) before international adoption, defined by the CRC as a transnational alternative form of care. Chad Turner (2016) describes the discussions on subsidiarity among member states preceding the drafting of the document. Subsidiarity is a vital principle in the Hague Adoption Convention and places emphasis on local or national solutions first before international adoption. But drafters made a fundamental shift from the CRC’s emphasis of adoption as “care” to the Hague Adoption Convention’s final emphasis on permanent families. Although consensus was reached on the wording, member states from the non-­Western and developing countries suggested different wordings and criticized the drafters for not adequately adhering to the CRC. Egypt, for instance, was very critical of the direction that the drafters were taking the document, pointing to a cultural bias in the understanding of adoption. an Islamic form of fostering—­ be The delegate insisted that kefala—­ included in the document as an alternative form of care (Turner 2016, 105). Moreover, the delegate found the drafters to be disregarding the CRC by not providing provisions in relation to children’s nationality, culture, or religion. Such clauses of cultural diversity are encompassed by the CRC and central to the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child.6 The debate around the principles of subsidiarity echoes discussions about simple and full adoptions. Comparable to fostering, simple adoptions do not terminate the original parent-­child relationship. Instead, a new parent-­child relationship is established on top of it. In contrast, in full adoptions, the preexisting relationships are completely terminated. Simple adoptions were problematic and needed to be addressed in order to make adoption possible and compatible across borders. In his discussion

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paper, Van  Loon describes how developing countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa mostly supported simple adoptions rather than full adoptions. Citing anthropological research, he writes that “in many small scale societies adoption is between relatives; it is not always permanent although this may be the intention at the time of adoption; it does not involve cutting of ties with the birth parents; and may involve continuing or additional inheritance and successional rights” (1990, 34).7 He acknowledges the challenges that these situations can bring to receiving states when the child is adopted to a person or couple in a welfare state that may only have the capacity to accept full adoptions. The relativity of adoption in the Global South can pose a problem to a more closed idea of full adoption in the Global North. Furthermore, the discussion paper acknowledged that open adoption in the Global North is increasingly a fact, insofar as stepparent families allow for less rigorous forms of closed adoptions. Nonetheless, the 1993 Hague Adoption Convention clearly works toward the achievement of permanent adoption and so, one could argue, for the eventuality of full adoptions.8 Supported by scientific evidence in psychology and child development, which underscores that permanent adoptions achieve more stability for the child, the best interest of the child was seen to be best safeguarded by permanent adoptions. However, as Van Loon already predicted, “the general ‘relativity’ of adoption in the Third World may pose special problems of a transcultural nature in the context of intercountry adoptions” (1990, 209). In order for the convention to work, lawmakers needed to standardize what is understood by legal adoption. Such standardization processes are not innocent. By sanctioning the conditions that enable full adoptions, simple adoptions were not simply excluded or omitted. Rather, as I will show next, they were changed by these regulatory processes. The two volumes of the Guide to Good Practice indicate how this problem has been handled since the establishment of the convention. The guide, drawn up in 2008 and 2013, was published by the Permanent Bureau of the HCCH with the aim of assisting the central authorities and contracting states that are responsible for applying the conventions and to help practitioners (judges, lawyers, notaries, social workers, etc.) working with the convention.9 The first volume of the guide explains, for instance, how the convention (following the CRC) includes a nondiscrimination clause in which “the child’s rights resulting from the adoption should be equivalent



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to those resulting from a similar adoption made under national law in the receiving State.”10 Although formally the convention applies to both simple and full adoptions, the guide excludes simple adoptions that do not entail permanent placements. Moreover, the guide suggests that full adoptions are the ultimate aim: Under Article 26(1), a simple adoption certified under Article 23 by the State of origin must be recognised in all other Contracting States, as a minimum, with the effects that the simple adoption has under the laws of the State of origin. However, under Article 26(3), nothing prevents the recognising State from giving additional effects to the recognition (for instance, in terms of inheritance rights vis-­à-­v is the adoptive parents, or the right of citizenship).11

This excerpt makes the recommendation that simple adoptions can be strengthened by “additional effects” to the legal recognition of the child-­ parent relationship.12 Likewise, the following excerpt suggests that full adoptions are the forms to which states can advance to: In order to enable the receiving State to “upgrade” a simple adoption to a full adoption, Article 27 of the Convention provides the possibility of converting a simple adoption into a full adoption. But since the simple adoption does not lead to severing the links with the birth parents, this is only possible under the condition that those parents, if they have not already done so, give their permission to the full adoption (see Art. 27(1) b). In the case of a conversion under Article 27, the newly created full adoption will replace the original simple adoption, and, if certified in accordance with Article 23, will be recognized in all Contracting States.13

On the surface, like many documents of this genre, the language is slippery. The convention is cautiously expressed (using terms such as “permissions” or “possibilities”), which seems to cover earlier concerns expressed by Van Loon and others but also to foil a clear reading. The guide’s suggestion of an “upgrade” hints at the opportunity to transform simple into full adoptions. In practice, this is exactly what is happening. The transformation of simple adoptions to full ones can be seen as an attempt to make adoption compatible in a global regulatory system. Such conversions are not entirely

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innocent; active conversions contribute to facilitating a distinct form of legal adoption. Anthropological research from different contexts throughout the world demonstrates that there are many ways of organizing family and alternative forms of adoption (Bargach 1998; Bowie 2004; Fonseca 2002; Fonseca, Marre, and San Román 2015; Leinaweaver 2008; Malingreau 2014; Notermans 2004). In her work on family practices and values among Brazilian favelas, Claudia Fonseca (2004) demonstrates how since colonial times, a form of informal fosterage was common among working-­class populations in Brazil. Here, children lived with extended family chosen by their birth mothers, a situation that rarely involved cutting off the original ties with birth parents. Following ideologies that deemed pitiful the kinds of kin arrangements existing among these communities, the state and its adoption laws intervened in these practices and followed the dynamic of what Shellee Colen has termed “stratified reproduction” (1995). Favela residents are at the bottom of this stratification process, surrendering their children without fully realizing the legalities implicated by adoption, whereas middle-­ class Spanish parents and adoptive parents from the Global North are enabled in their reproductive desires. In the context of Brazil, full adoptions were introduced to eradicate “direct adoptions” (adoptions arranged directly between adoptive parents and birth mothers), which were considered by the elite to be prone to abuse. According to Fonseca (2009), however, full adoptions benefitted middle-­class adoptive parents in and outside of Brazil at the expense of poor birth parents. Moreover, in its fight against abuse and commodification, the Hague Adoption Convention allowed no contact between birth parents and adoptive parents before adoption, which was contrary to the practices of child circulation. Here, transnational institutional rules aligned the “best interest of the child” with “no contact,” which in the Brazilian context led to the suppression of the already restricted forms of agency that birth mothers have had in the past (Fonseca 2009, 28–­30). Such practices raise the troubling prospect that the convention and its guidelines, although intended to offer safeguards and protection against abuse, also obscure local dimensions of adoption and transform the meaning of child adoption as it moves into the international sphere. It is the “multidimensional” aspect of the convention that generates friction and imbalance in its attempt to reconcile different understandings of



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adoption. As an enabling instrument, it cannot avoid overriding some of its protective measures. The shift to “permanent family” from “care” and the preference of full over simple adoptions reveal the implicit predilection of Euro-­American kinship knowledge in the restructuring of legalities around cross-­border adoption. It holds the naturalized assumption that the family unit is made up of the nuclear unit, encompassing a maximum of two legal parents.

The Hague Adoption Convention as Transparency Device At the time of my empirical research between 2007 and 2012, US and Dutch perspectives on the Hague Adoption Convention differed notably. Similarly, opinions and practices also varied considerably among adoption organizations within each country. My ethnographic data and interviews conducted with adoption professionals in the US showed that the enforcement of the convention in 2008 presented major challenges to many agencies, since the implementation rules constituted a substantial change from earlier practices. Whereas international adoption practices in the past were primarily guided by state laws, with agencies formulating more specific guidelines, they were now directed by national rules devised to conform to international law. For the first time, agencies had to be accredited by a centralized authority at the federal level and report their services and activities on a regular basis. The final national rules were introduced in 2006, and it was expected that agencies would comply with these rules before the Hague Adoption Convention was implemented in 2008. National requirements included minimal educational degrees of supervising staff in agencies, minimal insurance obligations to mitigate liability, and training and education for prospective parents (Bailey 2009). When I conducted my interviews, informants indicated that some agencies were unable to comply with these new rules and ceased to exist, some struggled significantly to implement the new guidelines, and others reported having little trouble because their agency already complied with such principles. The situation in the Netherlands was somewhat different. The Hague Adoption Convention has a unique place in the Netherlands: not only is the Permanent Bureau of the Hague Conference located in the Netherlands,

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but this is where the convention was drafted, and its chief promoters were Dutch lawyers—­one being Hans van Loon, who wrote the key 1990 document used in creating the convention. The Netherlands is also where the organization Euradopt was founded in 1993. This European organization aims to establish common ethical rules, promote cooperation between governments and adoption organizations, and improve legislation among European countries.14 In contrast to the US, the Netherlands was an early adopter of the Hague Adoption Convention. It signed the convention in 1993 and ratified and enforced it in 1998. Agencies are now called “licensed operators” (vergunninghouders) and are accredited by the Dutch state. They collaborate with regional child welfare organizations (which are responsible for screening adoptive parents) and the Department of Justice (which is responsible for authorizing applicants). Staff in Dutch agencies with whom I spoke tended to be critical of US agencies. In their experience, the US often had a monopoly over children from sending countries; their adoption numbers were higher and their donation sums were much greater than their European counterparts. Dutch agency staff often referred to their long history of working according to the principles set out by the Hague Adoption Convention. At the same time, staff at some agencies distanced themselves from other Dutch agencies, criticizing them for not complying as closely to the convention’s principles as they themselves did. Despite the differences, adoption agencies in both receiving states—­ whether private, state regulated, or somewhere in between—­were all increasingly subjected to expectations set out by the Hague Adoption Convention. The convention became the ultimate justification for complying with ethical standards. In both countries, it was generally assumed that if an agency complied with “the Hague,” then the institution and the adoptions it arranged were legitimate. The phrase “we comply with the Hague” became synonymous with ethical practice and was integral to the enactment of the convention by institutions. When I probed deeper into the naturalization of the justification “complying with the Hague,” it became evident that the idea of “transparency” was central to how institutions understood the ethical dimensions of the convention. When I would ask adoption professionals in the US and the Netherlands what “complying with the Hague” meant to them, they often said it referred to making their daily operations as transparent as possible. “Transparency” was a term mentioned for a variety of matters, ranging from costs and fees to



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communication and legal processes. The first Guide to Good Practice (2008) said the following about transparency: “One of the best protections against misuse of a system and exploitation of children is transparency. Laws, regulations, policies, fees and processes should be clearly defined, and clearly communicated to all who use the system. This transparency enables users to see what protections are in place and to identify where actual or potential abuse of the system may occur.”15 The most obvious application of the principle of transparency lies in clarity and openness in the communication of costs involved in the adoption process. This can refer to agency costs, including application fees, expenses for mediation, documentation, and legal matters, and costs for home studies and screenings, translation, and travel. Transparency of costs also refers to the rules and ethical guidelines involving donations to orphanages, financial relations between aid and adoption services, and the distribution and rationalization of monetary assistance to humanitarian and child welfare projects in sending countries. In the field of adoption, the imperative of transparency also applies to the disclosure of information, including data about the past and present practices of agencies, orphanages, and their facilitators. I argue that the Hague Adoption Convention functions as a seal of ethical approval and can be approached as what Harvey, Reeves, and Ruppert (2013) term a “transparency device.” Such devices are complex assemblages in pursuit of global—­in this case, reproductive—­governance. Transparency works as a reactive apparatus. By making visible “laws, regulations, policies, fees, and processes,” transparency devices are “purposeful apparatuses devised to enact transparency and provide a space of moral certainty about what constitutes good governance or harmonious social relations” (Harvey, Reeves, and Ruppert 2013, 295, 299). In the case of international adoption, transparency represents a promise to deliver some form of certainty to the adoption process and to combat corruption and abuse in the system. In adoption, people (social workers, adoptive parents, representatives of central authorities, orphanage directors, lawyers, translators, mediators, and medical practitioners) as well as artifacts (legal documents, referral photos, video material, data systems, and software) all facilitate matching and thus become implicated by and constitutive of the transparency device. As Harvey and colleagues (2013) argue, these devices are vital for negotiating state–­subject relations, although the state is often absent in enactments of transparency: “In the end, it is not the vows, character or commitments of

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humans but the transparency of their actions that matters and convinces. Indeed it is the very technicality of the devices—­of all their material and social technologies—­that make moral certainty a possibility” (299). In receiving states, accountability at the level of transparency differs among agencies and depends on a variety of factors. One such factor I heard about during my fieldwork was whether an agency was sufficiently funded, either by the state or, in the US, through private means, in order to fulfill its financial reporting requirements. The well-­funded and well-­ endowed agencies were able to hire enough professional people and construct administrative infrastructures, which, they asserted, made them more professional and led to more efficient practices of transparency, including financial transparency and expedient reporting. Smaller and volunteer-­run agencies, meanwhile, struggled to meet the administrative requirements of the convention. Transparency issues were subjected to the unpredictability of processes in sending countries. The implementation of transparency regimes represented a means for receiving states to manage this unpredictability according to the convention’s principles. One of the core issues in transparency involved the management of privately arranged adoptions. Here, US and European perspectives differed significantly, which I will discuss next. Transparency = Bureaucracy

Although the Hague Adoption Convention is critical of privately arranged adoptions between biological parent(s) in one state and prospective adoptive parent(s) in another, such arrangements are not forbidden. Private adoptions do come within the scope of the convention, although they are subjected to requirements resembling those for agency-­led adoptions. These requirements range from due consideration to the possibilities of local placements, the counseling of biological parents, the explicit consent of the birth mother (after giving birth), and the suitability of adoptive parents. As such, they lose their private character, as indicated by the Guide to Good Practice: “Private adoptions arranged directly between birth parents and adoptive parents come within the scope of the Convention if the conditions . . . are present. This means that these adoptions should comply with the Convention standards and requirements, but this is not possible without losing their ‘private’ nature. In other words, a purely private intercountry adoption arrangement is not compatible with the Convention.”16



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The guide makes a distinction between “purely private adoptions” and “independent adoptions,” with the latter term used to refer to those cases where adoption arrangements made by prospective adopters are approved by their central authority or accredited body. Although “independent adoptions” occur in many countries, the US is particularly known to facilitate them, since privately arranged adoptions were legal in some US states. Until recently, anyone in the US was able to start an adoption agency specializing in international adoption without accreditation or licensing from the federal administration. This changed in 2008, when the US ratified the Hague Adoption Convention.17 For agencies, ratification meant that they had to become accredited by the central authority—­in this case, the State Department (the Office of Children’s Issues of the Bureau of Consular Affairs). And while privately arranged adoptions were commonplace before the implementation of the convention, such arrangements were subsequently scrutinized by the convention and subject to international legal control. Members of denominational and other smaller volunteer-­run agencies in the US saw the implementation of the Hague Adoption Convention as blocking the adoption process with more “red tape.” These groups understood the necessity to document their actions but felt it hampered the expedient placement of children with families, which impeded children’s development. As one caseworker explained to me, “It would have been a nicer world if we could all do it for the right reasons and do it the right way without having to have the Hague Convention. The Hague Convention brings with it a lot of bureaucratic implications that agencies like us need to work hard on. But for good reasons. But it also slows down especially now.”18 The bureaucratic paperwork accompanying the Hague Adoption Convention was arduous labor, and some agencies questioned whether it helped the adoptee and adoptive families. These agencies longed for a looser system in which personal contact and trust were the primary tools of communication between countries and organizations. One American informant explained how she thought the Hague Adoption Convention functioned as an intervention into a growing presence of agencies in sending countries that had set off market mechanisms. The result is further restrictions and curtailment: “It really was a simpler system in the past. There [were] in-­ state [agencies] and agencies who did the overseas part so . . . people could become very skilled. What happens now is that everyone wants to do both

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and be very skilled. They want to do it better, faster—­it’s more consumer driven.”19 Most of these organizations had their own contacts within their religious or charitable networks. Before the implementation of the Hague Adoption Convention, they placed their trust in these individual contacts in the countries of origin. Transparency regimes stimulated by the Hague Adoption Convention slowed down the adoption process, since it meant relying on other mechanisms besides trust. Documentation, legal authorization, and medical reports were now the centerpieces of communication between organizations in the country of origin and those in the receiving countries. The implementation of the convention in the US commenced in a turbulent time, one in which controversy over intercountry adoption dominated, marked by declining numbers and publicized adoption scandals (Smolin 2010, 441). One well-­known advocate of adoption in the US was of the opinion that, to a considerable extent, the Hague Adoption Convention was responsible for the demise of adoptable children. When the US implemented the convention in 2008, many local institutions facilitating adoption in sending countries folded: I think it was misinformed to begin with. Even when, finally, all the iterations were finished and they came with the document, I think the mission of it was wrong. . . . They could have done so much, and it’s a complete loss, because then it went into effect with this one narrow focus to prevent trafficking, and it ended up destroying and closing countries and actually misinforming people about trafficking. . . . The core premise was “We’re going to end trafficking and make this a more moral process and more transparent!” [But] you need to provide training and in-­country capacity. . . . The problem here is that if you don’t have the other investment, then everyone’s going to be hanging.20

What my informant was alluding to was the interaction of transparency with the subsidiarity principle of the convention, which explains that intercountry adoption can only be carried out when due considerations have been made for placements of the child within the state of origin. Thus states of origin that lack the capacity and/or the bureaucratic infrastructure to follow the subsidiarity principle are passed over because they cannot meet the criteria of “due considerations.” In my informant’s view, these considerations would be met—­and children would become available for



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intercountry adoption—­if the federal government would invest more in the administrative and legal capacities of sending countries. The United States signed the convention in 1994 but did not bring it into effect until 2008. While some argue that this was due to technical reasons (as a result of the large number of states in the US with different rules and regulations around adoption), others argue that the US’s tardiness was due to the perceived threat that the convention would impede adoptions rather than facilitate them. The steady decrease of adoptions after 2004 preceded the implementation of the convention, and many other factors should be included to explain the dwindling numbers of adoptions worldwide.21 Nonetheless, the implementation of the convention was often mentioned—­particularly by smaller agencies that struggled to sustain themselves—­as “not helping” and creating more impediments than before for the realization of adoptions. Not Transparent Enough

In contrast to some of the US agency staff who viewed the transparency regime of the convention as promoting overbureaucratization and thus slowing down or halting adoptions, agency staff in the Netherlands viewed the convention as not transparent enough. Moreover, they felt the convention relied too much on the goodwill of other nations, which was especially problematic in the case of major sending countries such as Russia and Korea that had not signed or ratified the convention. Thus in the opinions of these adoption professionals, the source of bad practices was the insufficient implementation of the convention. The solutions these critics offered remained within the realm of law and advocated a more rigorous adherence to the convention through state control, assessment, and intervention. The resulting two volumes of the Guide to Good Practice published in 2008 and 2013 are good examples of how the reformers believed that “gaps” in legal practice could be resolved through more legality. As mentioned earlier, privately arranged adoptions through lawyers occurred frequently within the US and sometimes among other countries. European states, however, frowned upon the phenomenon and saw “independent” adoptions as a legalized form of private adoption. While the move by the Permanent Bureau to replace private adoptions with independent adoptions through the Guide to Good Practice was seen by some as taking unnecessary control over privately arranged adoptions (as described

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previously), other professionals—­especially in Europe—­saw the move as a necessary step to protect children and birth mothers. Nonetheless, the implementation of stricter conditions surrounding “independent adoptions” remained ambiguous, and therefore “independent adoption” was still seen as a cover term for privately arranged adoptions. In the Netherlands, an “independent adoption” was known as a “partial mediation” (deelbemiddeling). While some agencies chose to facilitate these independent adoptions, others were principally opposed to them but were forced to review them by their central authority because of the expertise they have in working with particular sending countries. There was much debate about such arrangements and the time allotted to agencies for reviewing these cases. One caseworker indicated to me that “for the allocated time and money that we get to review them, I can barely open the dossier.”22 Agencies were expected to review whether the arrangement was conducted in an orderly fashion and in compliance with Hague Adoption Convention, but while such work could take months and even years in their general practice, professionals were expected to review “independent adoptions” in a couple of days’ time. These agencies clearly indicated that with very few resources to conduct the review, they were not able to ethically account for the process. Advising the government to do something about “independent adoptions” has therefore been high on the agenda for many agencies and adoption reformers in the Netherlands.23 Professionals critiqued the Hague Adoption Convention for not sufficiently facilitating practices of transparency, and some were also skeptical of the thought that more rules could improve transparency practices: “They’re mostly lawyers that work at the Department of Justice [the Dutch central authority]. They tend to think that reality can be caught in rules, but the practice is so much messier. And you can’t catch everything in rules. They have the impression that if you set up adequate procedures and rules, [you are ethically engaged].”24 These professionals recognized that ratification did not necessarily mean that adoptions were performed ethically, but they also did not find that the status of nonmembership automatically implied unethical procedures. There were “non-­Hague” countries that followed the convention’s principles much better than some countries that had ratified the Hague Adoption Convention—­South Africa and Colombia, for instance. The professionals



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observed that rather than foster transparency, the multiplication of rules and procedures often led to opaqueness and false securities. During my fieldwork in the Dutch Children’s Alliance, discussion on transparency culminated in a politicized disagreement between the executive and groups of prospective parents about whether the agency should stimulate and support what was called “adoption capacity.” A vocal group of prospective parents accused the agency of not doing enough to explore other potential sending countries in order to extend their adoption capacity and realize more adoptions. This was a complicated and fraught debate in a time when the availability of adoptable children had decreased dramatically. It was particularly when China restricted adoptions to married couples, and when placements primarily encompassed older and special needs children, that agencies (often pressed by prospective parents) turned to counterparts in Africa. Ethiopia was one of those countries. And while there was a frenzy of Western agencies going into Ethiopia to set up international adoption programs, some made genuine attempts to do this according to the convention and to principles of transparency. This often involved proper documentation for the purposes of assessing subsidiarity. As one director of a reputable American adoption agency explained, Here’s a country we’re about to go in. It’s non-­Hague, and we know that what we’re weighing is we know we’re going to do everything ethically, and we have a good contact there, and the reason we think of it as a good contact—­some agencies think a good contact is somebody who’s going to bring us a lot of children—­we think of a good contact as somebody who’s really going to do due diligence, and they’re going to know where the children came from, they’re going to have some kind of documentation that they were released for adoption.25

The degree of unpredictability in a country, especially non-­Hague countries, is something that agencies find hard to grapple with in relation to their clients, the prospective adoptive parents. As I mentioned in chapter 1, clients were often well-­educated middle-­class individuals who expect professional accountability and believe that the agencies they’ve picked out are able to exercise some form of security and control of the adoption process. However, the process became even more unpredictable as the number of

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children available for adoption declined and agencies had to adapt their practices to new countries. The convention’s subsidiarity principle, as I described earlier, differs from the subsidiarity principle of the CRC. The Hague Adoption Convention clearly prefers permanent placements and favors intercountry adoption over care that is legally less defined, such as institutional care, foster care, or simple adoptions (see also Turner 2016). This difference becomes acutely visible in agencies’ efforts to advocate and help shape in-­country adoption capacities in states of origin. One of the Dutch organizations, for instance, was working on a two-­pronged approach to Ethiopia (a non-­Hague country). They facilitated adoptions from the country to the Netherlands but with the tacit knowledge that most of the process did not follow convention protocols, including the subsidiarity principle. To improve this situation, they cultivated diplomatic ties and fostered humanitarian projects that helped facilitate foster care and in-­country adoption, as one professional explained: Take Ethiopia, and if one takes a look at their laws, it wasn’t that long ago that they integrated guidelines for alternative care into their own legislation. Their foster care has improved tremendously, and I hope this will be the case for in-­country adoption as well. I’d like to stimulate this by helping the delegation that comes to Europe to accommodate their learning needs and by assisting to strengthen their state so that they can effectively ratify the convention. . . . In this way, I attempt to close the gap between the very individual question around one child [in adoption] and the more structural question of strengthening child protection.26

What took place in cases like this was that Western agencies that came into new “non-­Hague” countries took on a pedagogical role by instructing these countries on the rules of the convention and good practices such as transparency. Nonetheless, as an organization with staff and running costs, adoption agencies could not afford to have children placed in their home countries; their ultimate objective was to place children internationally. As the same professional further clarified to me, Look, to say it simply, you can’t keep an office running if the adoption doesn’t deliver the 80,000 Euros. So that’s very complicated. And 80,000 Euros is a lot



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of money. And you can imagine that around 70,000 of that money stays here [in the Western agencies], and only 5,000, or in the odd cases 10,000, stays in the country itself. And if you then see all the Western countries that are doing the same thing there, then you can only conclude that economic factors play an important role.27

Given the developments and debates on “adoption capacity,” the Hague Adoption Convention performed legitimation work that went beyond its formal structures. When agencies set up ties in new countries that have not signed or ratified the convention, these countries come in contact with the norms and conditions of the convention through the pedagogical work of Western agencies that train and develop in-­country capacities. Such measures can be seen as strengthening child welfare protection measures in the countries of origin. However, the ultimate objective of Western agencies lies in placing children in permanent families through full adoptions. By going beyond the convention as an abstract document, I would argue that in practice, concerns over children’s welfare through in-­country institutional or foster care or other forms of placement that may be acceptable in their country are brushed aside in favor of enabling international adoptions that conform to a particular Euro-­American notion of adoption. In this regard, I would argue that the convention—­as both a protective and enabling force—­relies on the pedagogics of transparency. These pedagogics operate beyond its formal rules and principles. The protective aspect includes the ways in which Western agencies attempt to establish regimes of transparency within the infrastructure of child welfare in such countries. But such measures are also intended to enable the legal means for international adoption that favor Euro-­American practices. Hence at the same time that transparency regimes aim to illuminate bad practices and prevent abuse, they also obscure the economics and politics behind good practices.

The Tyranny of Transparency These problems with transparency in the Hague Adoption Convention raise broader questions about the contemporary creed of “transparency” that underpins a wide array of regulations. As Marilyn Strathern observes, “There is nothing innocent about making the invisible visible” (2000, 309).

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Transparency is often upheld as the epitome of accountability in our times. Seen as a moral and political principle, the value placed on transparency permeates numerous institutions in Western societies, such as legal institutions, national governments or local parties, and private and nongovernmental organizations that want to convey their commitment by making themselves accountable and “transparent.” However, recent studies on the turn to transparency call for critical scrutiny of the imperative (Davis, Kingsbury, and Merry 2012; Gupta 2008; Jacob and Riles 2007; Riles 2006; Strathern 2000). The rhetoric of transparency seems to promise ethical conduct in the globalization of reproduction. However, when documents, figures, and statistics tell one story (the legal story of informed consent or relinquishment), other stories (histories, cultures, economies, power dynamics) get lost—­that is, transparency makes certain things visible while obfuscating others. While transparency devices set rules and norms about what gets included and what is made explicit or visible, they displace rather than erase what is implicit (Strathern 2000, 2005). In the case of transparency regimes such as in the implementation of the Hague Adoption Convention, rules proliferate on top of each other: local rules, state rules, national rules, and convention rules create a multiplication of regulations (see also Mansfield 2004). In the past, adoption practices used to evolve around intimate relationships and systems of experiential knowledge. Trust was a vital component in these dynamics. But transparency regimes seem to destabilize these expert systems (Tsoukas 1997; Han 2015). Rather than heighten responsibility, this situation can erode it. As we have seen, the use of transparency as a device—­the enactment of “complying with the Hague”—­suggests ethical conduct, whereas practitioners know very well what is concealed by the layers of bureaucracy. As Strathern explains, “This rhetoric of transparency appears to conceal that very process of concealment, yet in so far as ‘everyone knows’ this, it would be hard to say it ‘really’ does so. Realities are knowingly eclipsed” (2000, 315; following Tsoukas 1994). At best, the realities that are knowingly eclipsed pertain to issues of inequality, locality, or culture. At worst, they refer to issues of coercion, abuse, and trafficking. In the case of the latter, despite the convention’s adherence to the CRC and its optional protocol that prohibits the sale of children, legal documents have often “white-­washed” corruption and abuse, leading to what Smolin calls “child laundering” in global adoption practice



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(2006). Market mechanisms still played a major role in the international practices of adoption. However, with the Hague Adoption Convention, these mechanisms were harder to detect. Because transparency regimes seem to operate above politics, these issues are concealed once convention rules are implemented and transparency is used as a device. What is more, in the practice of cross-­border adoption, transparency regimes conceal the ways in which Euro-­American notions of autonomy, ownership, and kinship are implicated and privileged. Here, the modern bureaucratic and administrative enactments of Euro-­American knowledge practices through the implementation of the Hague Adoption Convention erase the intrinsic complexity of social and cultural life in the sending countries (see also Knox and Harvey 2015). For instance, the “upgrade” of a simple to full adoption does not occur automatically. Consent needs to be sought from the birth parents to transfer rights of parentage, and therefore rights of disposition, to the adopting parties (Strathern 2004). As many scholars have observed, the ethics behind informed consent are also based on Euro-­American ideas of freedom, autonomy, and choice (Mills 2011; Rapp 1999; Cooper and Waldby 2014, 223). These moral notions are central in legal thinking, particularly in human rights domains, and confer the legal status of personhood to the subject. Individuals are seen as “freestanding, information-­processing, cognitively controlled executioners of rights and personal judgments” (Hoeyer and Hogle 2014, citing Lock and Farquhar 2007, 2). Informed consent epitomizes a legal technique that functions as a moral and ethical safeguard against coercion and exploitation. However, as evidence indicates in the field of adoption practices, the primacy of choice often conceals the power dynamics underpinning decision-­ making for birth mothers or birth parents (Fonseca 2011; Johnson 2005; Leifsen 2004; Leinaweaver 2008). Moreover, knowledge of the legal consequences of adoption varies enormously across cultures. When transplanting legal techniques in other localities, differing accounts of autonomy and choice are not sufficiently taken into account. Such views were also underscored by my informants. In many countries, birth mothers are either not fully aware of legal issues such as the cutoff period for changing their minds or, if they were aware, they came to regret having relinquished their children. For birth mothers in the Global South, choices are very much informed by sociocultural and economic circumstances.28

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Returning to the argument that the Hague Adoption Convention functions as a countermovement to the neoliberal and globalized reproductive market, it seems that the convention is as much a countermovement as it is a neoliberal form of global governance, one that produces competition among agencies and states and reproduces inequalities between Euro-­ American countries and developing countries—­the global North and the global South, the wealthy and the poor (see also Guthman 2007). Private international law’s upholding of “transparency,” “choice,” and “informed consent” ignore foundational inequalities informing reproductive exchangeability, thereby depoliticizing adoption and obscuring the politics of value.

Giving In to Markets? The globalization of reproduction has brought about a renewed debate in legal and social scholarship on the economization of life. In an attempt to approach the intermingling of economy in society seriously, scholars now theorize the viability of “giving in to markets” and provide an alternative vision to the economization of life (Ertman 2003, 2014; Goodwin 2010; Zelizer 2000, 2010). Rather than go against the mixing of money and intimacy, these scholars argue that the ethics of reproduction (including assisted reproduction, surrogacy, and adoption) might be improved by accepting market logics and by investing in a reproductive market that is as consumer friendly as possible. This, they insist, will prevent practices of trafficking and serve the child’s best interest. These proposals offer a pragmatic approach to counter the negative consequences of the globalization of reproduction, such as trafficking, abuse, and coercion. The common argument is that these abuses happen because of gaps and loopholes in the law. By properly economizing reproduction via the incorporation of clear laws and rights that aim to protect all “stakeholders” involved (prospective or intended parents, birth parents, surrogates, children), these abuses can be minimized. This calls for a legalization of a market in babies and reproductive material and for the sale of parental rights and obligations (Ertman 2003). Here, the social becomes an instance of the economy, and laws are subjected to the realm of facilitating this economy.29 It is telling that proposals for a legalization of commercial reproductive services come primarily from the US. This is a country where commercial



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reproductive services—­including sperm, oocyte, and embryo donation as well as commercial surrogacy and commercial adoption—­have been legalized in a number of states. Contract law is central to these commercial arrangements. Although there exists a good mix of prohibitive and permissive states, compared to Europe, the US tends to follow the consumerist and capitalist logic of contract law. European counterparts remain more committed to resolving reproductive matters within family law.30 But in both localities, this is a site of cultural and legal contestation. As the anthropologist Igor Kopytoff (2004) argues, capitalist market talk has its appeal in Western modernity but so does humanist antimarket talk. The mechanism of modern law is such that it refuses to allow economic and consumerist thinking to inform family-­making practices. The separation between economy and kinship in law has a distinct status in modern Euro-­American legal thinking (Dolgin 1997; Radin 1994, 1996; Hadfield and Radin 1998; Strathern 2005). The question is whether changes in thinking about reproduction and family making in the 21st century—­partly prompted by reproductive technologies and adoption but also by gay marriage, blended families, and the acceptance of single parenthood—­will change this legal status quo. In her provocative article “Is Europe ‘Giving In to Baby Markets’?” the European legal scholar Britta van Beers (2015) demonstrates the growing appeal of the view that cross-­border reproduction is making prohibitive domestic laws ineffective. Here, legal restrictions in the country of intended parents are considered the main issue, and these views are leading to pragmatic proposals of more tolerant and lenient regulations with regard to the reproductive market. Van Beers makes an appeal to a more positive understanding and recognition of the symbolic dimensions of reproductive legislation and argues that artificial reproductive technology (ART) laws “have an important communicative, expressive and anthropological meaning and function, which surpass these laws’ practical effectiveness” (2015, 103). The Hague Adoption Convention can be viewed in similar ways. Laws have important anthropological functions whereby ideas of nature, culture, kin, and relations are constantly reworked. The ways in which some states and agencies have appropriated particular aspects of the Hague Adoption Convention, especially in the past decade, have put serious diplomatic pressure on noncomplying states. For instance, moratoria on adoptions from Guatemala, a state where baby selling and

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trafficking is notorious, indicate a clear path away from commercial and private adoptions. The work by certain central authorities, as well as agency directors and adoption reform activists, has strongly relied on principles of the Hague Adoption Convention to signal abuse, corrupt practice, and bad governance. Furthermore, the convention allows sending countries to refuse intercountry adoptions. While this aspect of the convention has not often been recognized, it has helped sending countries position themselves vis-­à-­vis the pressures of the global reproductive market. But again, my observations in this chapter showed that certain laws were also instrumental in enabling cross-­border adoption at the cost of foster care or simple adoptions in countries of origin. This was made possible not only by the convention itself but also by the circulating technologies of “best practices” brought forth by numerous handbooks, manuals, and guides to good practice used by states, authorities, lawyers, medical practitioners, and social workers alike. The political scientist Wendy Brown observes that the pervasiveness of such practices “indexes and facilitates neoliberal economization of heretofore nonmarketized spheres and activities.” She further comments, “Best practices stand for value-­free technical knowledge validated by experience and consensus, where the alternative is not only tradition or mandate, but partisanship and contestation over purposes, values, and ends. Best practices connote both expertise and neutrality; they emerge from and cite research, as well as frame it. Their authority and legitimacy is corroborated through replacing rigid rules and top-­down commands with organically gestated procedures validated by experience and success” (2015, 139). In connoting neutrality, such practices can claim to be unpolitical. Private international law’s upholding of “transparency,” “choice,” and “informed consent”—­while discounting foundational inequalities informing reproductive exchangeability—­depoliticizes adoption and renders invisible the politics of value. In other words, the politics of adoption become eroded by “best practices.” But “depoliticization” or “neutrality” do not lead to an apolitical situation. As Brown argues, neutrality constitutes a form of antipolitics and constructs a specific configuration of the political. In suggesting that the Hague Adoption Convention mimics the double movement, I am arguing that markets and the law coconstitute international adoption practice and that this dynamic is at the heart of neoliberal governance. I follow the sociologist Thomas Lemke’s critique of Polanyi’s double



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movement, which relies on “the (defensive) strategy [that] aims to ‘civilize’ a ‘barbaric’ capitalism that has nowadays gone beyond control; the emphasis is put on regulation and reembedding: neoliberalism as an economic-­ political reality” (2002, 54). Lemke proposes instead that these dualisms play an important role “in constituting and stabilizing liberal-­capitalist societies” (Holmes 2013, 275). Viewing global reproductive economies from an approach that aims to balance or counter the market by regulating adoption, assisted reproduction, and surrogacy leads to an either/or situation: either the market wins and the commodification of children becomes commonplace or the practice is to be completely regulated and sealed off from gaps and loopholes, preventing the possibility of bad practice. As Holmes argues, both views “either serve to justify inaction or to furnish legitimacy upon processes of state power” (2013, 276). Apart from recognizing the symbolic value of the Hague Adoption Convention, it is also necessary, then, to view the operation of private international law as an enactment of legitimacy.

Conclusion According to the legal scholar John Tobin, the Permanent Bureau has made extensive references to human rights and children’s rights, but these rights have been inadequately addressed; the bureau defines them primarily as “needs to be met” rather than as substantive issues to consider thoroughly (2014, 320). While I am in agreement with Tobin, I proposed in this chapter that it is worthwhile to study this idea of “needs to be met” more closely and to look at how agencies and professionals use the Hague Adoption Convention’s stipulations as “needs to be met.” Hence beyond a formalist approach that assesses how well human rights are represented and protected in regulations, I examined what was understood as needs, whose needs were implicated, and to what end these needs were to be met. I observed that the conditions that allowed these “needs to be met” were already shaped by interests, strategies, and knowledge practices of Euro-­American (legal) concepts such as “transparency,” “choice,” and “informed consent.” Anthropologists have linked these concepts to Western notions of property, ownership, and personhood in kinship thinking (Povinelli 2002; Strathern 2005). In an age where biotechnological and globalizing processes rearrange the nature of reproduction and kinship, investigations into how they are legally

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governed are vital to understanding how these concepts travel and are appropriated. The Hague Adoption Convention (and, by extension, private international law) not only met the needs of prospective adoptive parents in the North; it also served as an important instrument of global governance. Whether this instrument served the ideal of social justice is a question that is, of course, highly debatable. This is because the Hague Adoption Convention “means” different things to different institutions and countries and also because the legal instrument is enacted in different ways. For agencies and states in the North, the convention functioned as a transparency device, thereby forging a technology that could measure how well particular “needs” were met. Such a transnational legal technology not only enabled the formation of adoptive families but also produced knowledge about kinship relations as property relations. The Hague Adoption Convention can be seen as enacting particular norms and values: tenets of choice and autonomy dominate the regulation of cross-­border adoptions. These norms and values, represented by the authority of international law and the idea of legality in general, underpinned the legitimacy of moving children from one part of the world to the other. In the next chapter, however, I will demonstrate that the movement of children for international adoption involves a differentiating and discriminating practice that encompasses fleshy matter and the scrutiny of adoptee bodies. In principle, the legitimacy of international adoption indiscriminately encompasses all children in need of families. In contemporary practice, however, children are being differentially and particularly considered for international adoption. Economies of adoptability, informed by a biomedicalization of adoption practice, disclose to what extent biomedicine is increasingly entangled in the legitimacy work of international adoption.

3 • VALUING BODIES Somatic Ethics in the Biomedicalization of Adoption

Biomedicalization is a shift from enhanced control over external nature (i.e., the world around us) to the harnessing and transformation of internal nature (i.e., biological processes of human and non-­human life forms), often transforming “life itself.” Thus, it can be argued that medicalization was co-­constitutive of modernity, while biomedicalization is also co-­constitutive of postmodernity. —­Adele Clarke et al., “Biomedicalization” Try as we might to distance ourselves, there is no way of living that is not also a way of someone else dying differentially. —­Donna Haraway, When Species Meet

Among the changing practices of international adoption throughout the last decades is the way in which medicine has emerged as an important factor in the adoption process. Although most countries require only minimal medical screenings of adopted children,1 adoption clinics have emerged throughout the Western world, and an increasing number of medical doctors have moved into adoption medicine as their specialization (Tuller 2001). The medicalization of adoption is often rationalized in two ways: it satisfies adoptive parents’ demands for paying attention to the specific medical problems of their adopted children, and it addresses the growing number of placements of “special needs” children resulting from a worldwide decline in healthy adoptable children. But as I will 79

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explain in this chapter, adoption medicine has a much broader implication that goes beyond the so-­called adoption triangle consisting of birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees. It is forcefully integrated into institutional policies and national laws and readily accommodated by media and the general public. As a consequence, adoption medicine is increasingly charting moral grounds in the legitimacy over adoption. Scientific knowledge has always been part of adoption’s legitimacy and of kinship’s design, and the medicalization of adoption should be placed within the historical context of adoption research and research on children’s development more generally. In this chapter, I describe the checkered expansion of this research and highlight the centrality of a “catch-­up” theory in the knowledge production on adoption, especially international adoption. This theory promotes the idea that adoption (i.e., being adopted) is a medicalized condition that requires treatment and that adopted bodies are bodies that can be transformed; thus a child’s adoptability is linked to his or her medical classification. Through the catch-­up theory, the more familiar justification for adoption (the child’s “right to a family”) is brought to another level of humanitarian adoption and linked to a different justificatory narrative (the child’s “right to health”). I argue that in current adoption practice, the medical conditions of a child have become entangled with the value assigned to the child (whether economic or emotional), and degrees of disability have thereby been transformed into a new somatic economy. Medical practitioners, professionals in agencies, and adoptive parents are very invested in these newly created medical practices and increasingly appeal to discourses of transformation (from deprived and needy bodies to good physical and psychological/emotional bodies) in their justifications of adoption. Although medical screenings have always been part of adoption practice, their current manifestation comprises diverse functions that are not solely confined to the plight of treating bodies in poor health. Drawing on the work of Clarke and her colleagues (2003, 2010, 2011) on the transformation of medicalization to biomedicalization, I demonstrate how, in their valuation of adoptee bodies, institutions, experts, and individuals are increasingly entangled in virtual, commodified, and technoscientific assemblages of health that help shape new institutions, economies, and selves. Rather than adoptee bodies in poor health, the focus of contemporary biomedicine is



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on healthy adoptee bodies, defined through their at-­risk conditions and by their flexible capabilities to be transformed. The biomedicalization of adoption, I argue, brings forth its own morality and justification. The argument that particular moralities underpin biomedical discourses has been sufficiently made (Lock and Nguyen 2010; Rose 2007; Zigon 2010), but few studies have focused on the actual technologies of morality that come into play in public and institutional uses of biomedicine. In the second part of the chapter, I examine such “moral technologies” by looking at how emerging knowledge paradigms from the field of adoption medicine are arranged and deployed in institutional practice. What are the ethico-­moral frameworks supporting the scientific production of adoption medicine? How do institutions negotiate these justificatory regimes? And how do such practices relate back to the moral legitimacy of the phenomenon itself?

The Medicalization of Adoption The influx of children from foreign countries has brought certain diseases and medical conditions previously unfamiliar to general health practitioners in the West and calls for specialized medical knowledge to address these concerns (Miller 2005; Nicholson 2002; Welsh et al. 2007). The steady rise of international adoptions from the 1980s through the late 1990s (Selman 2002, 210) and the steep increase between 2001 and 2004 (Selman 2009, 577) have consolidated this demand and engendered the professionalization of a medical specialty within the field of pediatrics. As I have described in the introduction, while there continues to be a strong demand for adoptable children, and prospective parents are placed on long waiting lists, sending countries are closing some of their international adoption programs. Between 2004 and 2010, there was a 36 percent decrease in international adoptions worldwide, primarily attributable to dramatic decreases in adoptions from China, Russia, Korea, and (since 2008) Guatemala (Selman 2010, 390).2 More recent figures indicate a 64 percent drop, from 42,194 to 15,188, between 2004 and 2013 in the top ten adopting countries (Mignot 2015, 3).3 The current pool of adoptable children includes fewer babies and healthy older children and more special-­needs children.4 This shift has led to a

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greater need in both the sending countries and the receiving countries for medical practitioners who can assess the medical conditions of orphans and adoptable children. In the United States, the American Academy of Pediatrics has formally recognized “adoption medicine” as a specialization concentrating on the physical and mental health assessment of adoptees before and after placement (Herman 2008, 293). In the Netherlands, although the term “adoption medicine” is not commonly used, the Dutch Association of Pediatrics (Nederlandse Vereniging voor Kindergeneeskunde) has formally established a working group on adoption that advises similar screenings for adoptees before placement and upon arrival. Although the degree to which adoption medicine has been incorporated into routine practices is unclear (Welsh et al. 2007), my empirical findings suggest that adoptability is being increasingly shaped by the judgments of physicians who specialize in adoption medicine (see also Cartwright 2003; Lebner 2000; Leinaweaver 2009). Data from the United States and the Netherlands clearly show the influence of adoption medicine on adoption practice both in the intake process and in medical screenings performed by pediatricians either inside or outside the agency. In the Netherlands, the intake process involves negotiating a long list of medical(ized) conditions that adoptable children might have, with the aim of clarifying the wishes and capabilities of prospective parents (see table 3.1). Pediatricians who specialize in adoption play an important role during the preadoption phase. When referral photos become available, especially for children with special needs, agencies consult with pediatricians to ascertain the veracity of the accompanying medical information and to discuss the associated risks for possible matches with prospective parents. Agencies that do not have direct associations with medical practitioners advise parents to take the referral photos and medical documentation to adoption specialists. Outcomes are then negotiated with caseworkers at the agency who apply their institutional knowledge to contextualize the medical information. Risks are assessed and are crucial in negotiations among caseworkers, prospective parents, and institutions in the sending countries. As a new research field, adoption medicine should be situated within the broader realm of public and global health. Like refugee medicine, adoption medicine incorporates domains from the medical and social science disciplines, including demography, economics, epidemiology, and psychology. Adoption medicine aims to identify major health problems in adoptees;



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describes the pathology of diseases and issues related to development, behavior, and mental health; and promotes the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of these diseases and other conditions. However, health not only shapes biomedicine; it also shapes new moralities in anticipated and unanticipated ways. As I will describe in the next section, this “morality work” unfolds in the narratives produced by the scientific studies underlying the consolidation of this new medical profession.

The Science of “Catching Up” The professionalization of adoption medicine would not have been possible without the unique genre in adoption research known as “the outcome study” (Herman 2008, 156; Kim 2010). Primarily embedded in social work and psychology, adoption outcome studies aim at examining how adoptees adapt to their new environments after placement. A binary logic underpins these outcome studies and characterizes the well-­being of adoptees in terms of classifiable and quantifiable variables within the framework of developmental progress. Outcome studies are inclined to reveal to what extent adoptees are “well-­adjusted” (emphasizing the ingredients of a successful adoption) or “maladjusted” (emphasizing the risks of adoption and so-­called adoption disruption/dissolutions). A number of studies conducted in the Netherlands and Sweden in the late 1990s described the maladjustment of adoptees by pointing to their increased risks for behavioral problems, mental illness, and suicide (Hjern, Lindblad, and Vinnerljung 2002, 2004; Hoksbergen 1997; Juffer and van IJzendoorn 2005; Verhulst and Versluis-­den Bieman 1995).5 Many of these studies stressed the need to examine the reasons for these outcomes and what could be done to address them (Hjern, Lindblad, and Vinnerljung 2002, 446). For example, Juffer and her research team (1997) in the Netherlands demonstrated that behavioral and mental problems are related to early attachment issues in adoptees and can be recognized and addressed through early interventions. While studies demonstrating the more problematic outcomes for adoptees’ well-­being penetrated public discourse in both the United States and Europe, adoption practitioners in various institutions emphasized the need to focus on the other side of the binary and look at how well adoptees adjust to their new environment. The latter

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studies are dominated by a belief in the “catch-­up theory,” which points to the resilience of internationally adopted children and their ability to recover from early deprivation or trauma, including that associated with separation from birth parents. We can observe the catch-­up theory at work in Laurie Miller’s Handbook of International Adoption Medicine (2005), one of the two readily available resources on adoption medicine in the United States.6 The book covers medical problems that have previously been diagnosed in international adoptees, including infectious diseases, physical and mental disabilities, and trauma-­and attachment-­related issues. Miller describes how international adoption affects children positively and details the remarkable transformations they undergo. Images on page 2 of the Handbook (see figure 3.1) illustrate some of the adopted children’s transformations. The photographs depict apparently deprived children, malnourished and small (figure 1-­1 on the Handbook page) but also sad (figure 1-­2 on the Handbook page) and shy (figure 1-­3 on the Handbook page). The captions of these figures read, respectively, “Amazing transformation after adoption from Russia,” “Remarkable growth and change in mood after adoption,” and “The transformation to a ‘regular American kid.’ ” The basic premise for the catch-­up theory, underscored by these images, is that children available for adoption are often developmentally delayed—­mentally, emotionally, and physically. The intervention of adoption, illustrated by the “before-­and-­ after” photos, can transform a child into not only a healthy but also a happy “regular American kid.” The tropes of catching up and transformation can be traced to the rise of the child sciences and the idea of the malleable child body that emerged at the beginning of the 21st century. The figuration of the malleable child was evident in popular representations of neuroscience—­in particular, the development of children’s brains (Castaneda 2002). This scientific discourse, which recognized the qualitative progression of childhood development (neurologically and also psychologically) accomplished through the modular plasticity of children’s brains, made it possible to develop a hierarchy of bodies based on “normal” abilities and “abnormal” disabilities (Castaneda 2002, 63). The knowledge stemming from neuroscience confirmed the views of developmental psychologists who saw “culture” as affecting stages of

Figure 3.1. Visual representations of “adoption transformation” in the Handbook of International Adoption Medicine

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development: “Human nature is the effect rather than the cause of the human organism’s interaction with its environment” (Castaneda 2002, 73). This perspective of an “ecological niche” incorporates culture within evolutionary theory and considers the environment—­including the cultural context—­to be crucially involved in human development.7 This idea of an ecological niche sat uncomfortably between the dominance of genetic explanations of development and behavior and the post-­1945 ethos that renounced earlier hereditarian understandings of child development. Such a hereditarian understanding was proffered by the work of the American child developmentalist Arnold Gesell, described so well by the historian of science Ellen Herman (2008). One could say that Gesell was the first to establish what is called “scientific adoption,” and, by extension, what Herman terms “kinship by design.” Gesell was a well-­known developmental psychologist and physician at Yale (between 1911 and 1948) and championed professional child welfare and adoption practices. Gesell’s work and campaign were highly instrumental in transforming adoption from a private affair to a modern and public institution—­a transformation legitimated through the promise made in the name of science. His scientific work gave the public assurance that risks associated with the adoption of other people’s children could be known and predicted in advance and therefore reduced to a bare minimum. Gesell devised a number of well-­known studies where children were observed in laboratory situations and in an actual observation dome. The technology that came out of these observations of developmental stages was a scale, the Gesell scale, which within a few decades was widely used in agencies placing children for adoption. The scale differentiated “adoptable” from “unadoptable” children and suggested that the matching process between child and adopter could be controlled by scientific methods. The promise to adopters was that science could direct the matching process in such a way that it mirrored biogenetic kinship as much as possible. Much of Gesell’s work had been discarded in the meantime, especially his ideas that children with “bad blood” could be singled out and that children could be matched according to heredity. Nonetheless, the idea that science—­ and especially biomedical sciences—­can intervene, control, and promise remains strong. The ecological niche perspective popular with child psychologists, pediatricians, and social workers working in international adoption agencies has been eagerly used to argue that children’s bodies (and



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brains) are malleable and receptive to change and that the intervention of adoption leads to a normal range of development. By the mid-2000s, the ecological argument was deployed in two ways in international adoption. First, it was used to account for the different ways in which child development progresses in different regions of the world. According to Miller’s Handbook, different health risks are associated with children coming from particular countries. Children from Russia, for example, are at greater risk than others of developing fetal alcohol syndrome. In China, because of the one-­child policy, children are often abandoned and their infant years are spent in state orphanages; yet because these institutions are considered to be well run, this projects the idea that Chinese orphans are relatively healthy. This contrasts with data from Romania, where the dictatorial regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu left the country with 700 ill-­equipped and poorly managed institutions that housed up to 300,000 children. It is commonly accepted that institutionalization has a detrimental effect on children’s development, as reflected by a maxim commonly used by specialists and circulating among agency workers and adoptive parents: “For every three months spent in an orphanage, a child loses one month of linear growth.”8 The ecological niche perspective is deployed to argue that children’s bodies are receptive to change and that the intervention of adoption allows for a normal range of development. Marinus H. van IJzendoorn and Femmie Juffer, the leading Dutch specialists on adoption, state that it is the transformation of deprived bodies into healthy bodies that makes an adoption successful. In one of their coauthored articles, they note that the evidence for their professed “catch-­up model” comes from a meta-­analysis of 270 studies that includes more than 230,000 adopted and nonadopted children and their parents (2006), and they conclude that adoption is an effective intervention that leads to massive catch-­ups in physical growth, attachment, and cognitive development. Moreover, according to their meta-­ analysis—­ and contrary to common opinion—­adopted children do not seem to struggle with self-­esteem any more than their nonadopted peers; the differences in problem behavior between adopted and nonadopted children are remarkably small, and international adoptees present fewer behavioral problems than domestic adoptees. The medical and psychological research I have discussed falls into the category of evidence-­based research (EBR), a generic term for research that

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aims to influence public policy and practice by an insistence on quantitative and statistical methods. This form of scientific research obtains its legitimacy by collecting data as evidence, and it is popular with administrators and policy makers because it promises to deliver efficient assessments of (biomedical) interventions to provide the evidence that public policy demands for advancing practices and improving health (Lambert 2009, 17). Like outcome studies, EBR reflects the modern desire to assess progress and predict outcomes (Herman 2008, 176). The evidentiary turn is widely embraced by institutions that facilitate adoption and impacts adoption practices, as can be particularly seen in risk management within such practices. The anthropologist Thomas Csordas (2004, 475) argues that evidence has to be evidence of or evidence for “something”—­a “something” that facilitates a hypothesis.9 In medicine, this usually translates to the hypothesis that evidence facilitates the accurate assessment of biomedical interventions so that practice will be advanced and health improved. If we were to extend this understanding to adoption medicine, the hypothesis underlying EBR about adoption would include advancing adoption practices and improving adoption outcomes. However, such a premise complicates the foundational principle of international adoption, which is legally based on child protection. For example, van IJzendoorn and Juffer identify (international) adoption as a successful natural intervention in a child’s development (2005, 326). This classification of the intervention as “natural” is significant insofar as it biologizes a legal phenomenon. In our modern understanding of the concept, adoption is the formal event by which an individual or a couple become the legal and permanent parent(s) of a child who either has been surrendered by the birth parent(s) for adoption or has been declared adoptable by the state. Defining adoption as an intervention that is natural seems to conflate a cultural phenomenon (the culture of legal adoption) with evolutionary biological phenomena. Through their scientific results, the Dutch researchers legitimate adoption as a successful way of making kin by stressing children’s biological adaptability. Here, the “kinning” process (Howell 2006, ch.  4)—­which replaces biogenetic kinship with an “as-­if ” (biogenetic) construction of the family (Modell 1994)—­is newly defined within a biological framework. Moreover, because it is assumed a priori that adoptable children are in need of catching up, adoption becomes articulated as a medical condition, much like ADHD or autism—­a medicalized phenomenon for which the



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efficiency of interventions can be assessed. Finally, understanding adoption as an intervention in children’s bodies turns adoption into a treatment, not only defining the adoptee as “at somatic risk” but also reifying orphanhood or adoptability as a disease that requires intervention. It is striking how these claims resonate with new research on epigenetics. The science of epigenetics is heralded as a revolution in the biological sciences, and various experts and publics eagerly anticipate its authority in claiming certain epistemological knowledge on bodies and organic life. Epigenetics studies the relationship among genes, bodies, and the environment. It looks at “long-­term alterations of DNA that don’t involve changes in the DNA sequence itself ” (Francis 2011, x; as quoted by Meloni 2016, 197), or to put it in lay terms, the science explores how the gene is switched on or off by environmental factors. Epigenetic knowledge is constructed out of different forms of other knowledge, including epidemiology and psychology. Its wide appeal links back to the promise that epigenetic sciences can provide evidence of the inextricable material entanglement of social and biological life. As the science studies scholar Niewöhner indicates, “Changes in the practice of doing epigenetic biology contribute to a molecularisation of biography and milieu” (2011, 279). Epigenetics produces a novel view of the body, one that is embedded and reconfigured through a somatic sociality. Although the Dutch scientists investigating international adoption did not base their research on epigenetics, adoption—­along with twin studies— ­is becoming an important site for epigenetic research (Niewöhner 2011; van Wichelen 2016). While studies suggest that there is a strong association between early environmental deprivation, neglect, and abuse and later outcomes of unsocial behavior and less-­developed cognition, other studies point to the variety in children’s responses to their environment, arguing that not all children develop these conditions. Epigenetic knowledge is also invoked to indicate that internationally adopted children—­in particular, girls—­are at risk of early puberty, also known as precocious puberty (Berg-­ Kelly and Eriksson 1997; Miller 2004; Kuzawa and Bragg 2012). Here, rapid catch-­up growth after severe malnourishment is given as an explanation for the early onset of puberty (Proos, Hofvander, and Tuvemo 1991; Teilmann et al. 2006). While this could complicate the catch-­up theory, interventions of hormonal therapies seem to sustain the overall idea of malleability and adaptation. Further in the chapter, I will discuss some of the implications

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of hormonal treatments that Dutch practitioners are offering to adoptees who are experiencing puberty earlier than their Dutch peers. It suffices to say that the emotional plasticity of children’s bodies is heralded as evidence that children can successfully integrate into adoptive families. It also fuels the imperative to move high-­risk children as soon as possible from an abusive, volatile, and/or precarious situation to new homes and families.

The Imperative to Care My intention is not to critique adoption medicine or the theory of malleable bodies per se but rather to evaluate the purpose that should be served by the scientific results of such studies. The knowledge paradigms of adoption medicine covertly implicate a paradoxical merging of two justificatory regimes: the child’s “right to a family” and the “right to health.” Scholars have critically examined the former justification (Howell 2006; Kim 2011; Yngvesson 2004, 2010), pointing to the opacity of the notion of “family” in cross-­cultural contexts. The second justification further complicates the ethical parameters of international adoption by conflating what can be called “biomorality” with cosmopolitan advocacy. As Miller’s Handbook indicates, The rapid recovery from growth and developmental delays, improvement in general health, and emotional blossoming of the children are all an astonishing testament to their resilience. It is a great pleasure to witness the emergence and consolidation of attachment between parent and child after adoption. The special delight of adoptive parents in the accomplishments of their child is contagious. But these children add another dimension to daily pediatric practice. Caring for internationally adopted children connects us to children outside of our practices, our communities, and our country. Internationally adopted children remind us of our obligation as pediatricians to provide care and advocacy for the world’s needy children—­especially those without families. (Miller 2005, 3)

Through adoption medicine, pediatricians perform both care and advocacy, responsibilities that are perceived as connecting two separate causes: provision of medical care for the community and nation, on the one hand, and international humanitarianism, on the other. The obscured distinction



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between the two moral responsibilities is important. The first concerns postadoption care, ranging from medical screenings by adoption specialists to subsequent medical and mental care during the adoptees’ developmental years. This care is provided for adoptive families (mostly affluent, well educated, and white) and accommodates the desires and fears of middle-­class (parental) subjectivities. The second concerns preadoption advocacy and consists of a cosmopolitan ethic, a moral responsibility expected of physicians to provide care (as in being concerned) beyond borders and to have a particular compassion for children in need. The two distinct responsibilities are evident in daily adoption practices, where pediatricians and social workers oscillate between caring for the adoptive family unit and caring for the global orphan. During a preadoptive medical screening, one pediatrician explained that he struggled with indiscriminately “letting through” all children for humanitarian reasons and, conversely, adhering to practices that ensure the well-­being of adoptive families. There is therefore a double imperative to care in adoption medicine. Although both imperatives concern the same child’s body, the merging of the two differently situated imperatives produces two different figurations: the global orphan and the adoptee. The question thus arises: Can biomorality, or the normative claim that bodies have a right to health, provide a new legitimization for (international) adoption? If this is the case, and adoption can be redefined within a “politics of care” (Ticktin 2011), then it would seem that all “deprived” children (with medical, physical, and/or mental health problems) would benefit from the intervention of adoption, regardless of their orphaned/adoptable status. It would also seem to assert international adoption as a family-­making institution based on a developmentalist biodiscourse that advances the lives of children as long as they are adopted in the resourceful West (Harding 2011; Lock and Nguyen 2010). Biomedicine functions here as a moral technology that extends humanitarian reasoning not by a universal idea of justice but by a universal idea of science.

Somatic Ethics The translation of these new knowledge paradigms into institutional practice occurs through three modalities: objectification, standardization, and commodification. Describing these processes in the context of general health

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care, Timmermans and Almeling (2009) note that the three concepts have often been viewed as representing the pathologies of modern medicine: objectification dehumanizes the human subject, standardization marginalizes certain groups of people, and commodification leads to the corruption of the social world (a world supposedly devoid of economic interest). They argue that narrowing the scope of these analytical concepts to highlight a normative position weakens their heuristic value, and they advocate instead a more complex analysis of their consequences in practice that, paradoxically, can lead to a stronger sense of agency for the parties involved. In light of their critique, in what follows, I demonstrate the moral complexity of the objectification, standardization, and commodification processes vis-­á-­vis adoption. I do this by describing the legitimation work of pediatricians and social workers. Objectification

Objectification occurs through the medical gaze of medical practitioners in the receiving country who, either independently or in collaboration with adoption practitioners, assess the documents accompanying children who have been matched to prospective parents. In the absence of medical records or birth certificates, visual materials such as photographs (and occasionally videos) are the primary sources physicians use to assess these children before placement, and these are crucial for determining whether a child is growing and developing at a normal pace. For example, medical practitioners will often ask for a follow-­up photograph of a child’s hand so that they can approximate his or her age through a hand–­skeleton calculation. Determining the real age of a child is vital in cases where the receiving country’s national rules only permit the adoption of children under a specific age (e.g., the maximum age for adoption in the Netherlands is six).10 In addition to their use in ascertaining age, photographs of children’s bodies are scrutinized for evidence of disease, pathology, and/or disabilities. During my fieldwork, I observed cases where fetal alcohol syndrome, missing or amputated limbs, and an intersexed condition were discussed.11 Because very little documentation is available about birth parents, the child’s body is used as visual evidence, and the referral photo contains important data for reaching a possible medical diagnosis (see also Cartwright 2003, 96). To arrive at “the truth [of] the body” (Fassin and d’Halluin 2005), visualization and medicalization of the child’s body—­and its



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parts—­are critical. The growing practice of preadoption medical screenings suggests that they provide prospective parents with sufficient guarantees concerning a child’s medical condition, enabling them to channel their hopes, anxieties, and fears into more palpable and evidentiary truths about their (family) future. At first glance, this process of objectification appears to depersonalize and render the child as a disease/deformity/disability, or more accurately, as a risk that needs to be assessed. The idea of managing risk indicates late-­ modern preoccupation with autonomy and control over life courses—­risk here encompasses both facticity and causality, which makes prediction and planning possible. Within the reproductive technology field, most moral responsibility has been placed on (prospective) parents for assessing and managing risks, but if we are to make prediction and planning possible, we need a scientific apparatus (such as adoption medicine) to define these risks. In other words, subjects (prospective parents and adoptees) are interpellated in assessing and managing risk through the science that produces the idea (adoption medicine) and the practices that institutionalize, sustain, and reproduce its knowledge (social, legal, medical, and political institutions). But in these interpellations, not only is the merely objectified body discussed; social values inherent to the child subject are recognized and appropriated. A straightforward example of this is people’s recognition of agency and identity for adopted children with cleft lips. Rather than simply assuming alienation when the child’s body is assessed for risk, that body also becomes reified within these social relations (Miller 1987; Strathern 2005). As Timmermans and Almeling put it, objectification can, paradoxically, also lead to “a sense of authenticity, singularity, and even social identity” (2009, 23). Standardization

Standardization occurs as new knowledge is incorporated into institutional routines and procedures. One example of standardization in adoption practice is the way that adoption medicine informs the bureaucratic technologies that facilitate the adoption procedure. At the Dutch agency where I conducted my ethnographic research, all prospective parents are expected to complete, as part of their adoption applications, a form entitled “Wishes and Capabilities.” This form includes a long list of medical conditions and circumstances related to a child’s possible social and psychological background that applicants must consider (see table 3.1). The medical conditions

Table 3.1.

List of special needs conditions

Birth state

premature low birth weight undescended testicle navel rupture unopened anus

hypospadias (urethra does not result in the end of the penis) phimosis (foreskin too tight) intersexuality

amniotic band syndrome cleft lip cleft lip/palate/jaw closed spina bifida open back

Orthopedic problems

facial abnormalities hip dysplasia (congenital hip disease) scoliosis hand abnormalities

congenital deformity of fingers

foot abnormalities

bone abnormalities (bowed legs due to rickets, which is not completely corrected)

missing toes, feet area, foot, leg, missing fingers, section of hand, hand, forearm, arm

scars from burns

strabismus (crossed eyes, wandering eyes, needs surgery to correct)

toe deformity

Skin condition

hemangioma (red birthmark, usually goes away but can have lasting effects) nevus (giant congenital nevus) visible scars

condition of the eye vision in one eye partially blind, needs surgery to correct missing an eye drooping eyelid

nystagmus (“dancing” eyes, this is usually not corrected) glaucoma

Condition of the ear

hard of hearing deaf

deaf but able to speak

deformed ear

Heart problems

atrial septal defect (ASD)

ventricular septal defect (VSD) tetralogy of fallot

open ductus arteriosus transposition of great vessels

Infectious diseases

tested positive for tuberculosis tested positive for hepatitis B / carrier

active hepatitis B tested positive for VDRL (venereal disease) but treated after birth

tested positive for HIV/antibody but negative for the AIDS virus (child is healthy)

Developmental problems

restriction of movement / motor skills by spasticity or paralysis

several causes, such as encephalitis [inflammation of the brain], meningitis, premature birth, or serious epilepsy)

limitation in intellectual development (this too can have

speech-­related problems (e.g., stuttering) limitation in psychomotor development delays due to institutionalization

Other conditions

asthma

sickle cell anemia

dwarfism

allergies

thalassemia

albinism

diabetes

malnutrition

epilepsy

Background biological parents

history of drug use history of alcohol abuse

history of mental conditions (e.g., schizophrenia, psychosis, mental retardation) criminal record

Source: Children’s Alliance (translation mine).

rape victim victim of incest lack of history (unknown history)

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range from operable and relatively minor conditions (such as a cleft lip or palate) to complex, contagious, and seriously chronic conditions (such as spina bifida, tuberculosis, and inoperable heart conditions). Possible background information about family members is also listed, including histories of drug/alcohol abuse, mental illnesses, criminal records, and sexual assault victimization. As part of the intake process, prospective parent(s) indicate whether they find the conditions on the list “acceptable,” “unacceptable,” or “negotiable.” A social worker evaluates and discusses this list with the prospective parent(s), usually through a phone call, and the list is then used as a guideline for further processing and matching.12 Adoption medicine’s standardization of special needs conditions into a workable bureaucratic form can be viewed as a technique of normalization in which medicalization becomes a regulating project of the adoption procedure. This technique opens the possibility of evaluating or assigning values to children’s bodies based on health and sociogenetic backgrounds. Negotiations between and among medical practitioners, prospective parents, and adoption professionals engender new moral economies that separate “acceptable bodies” from “unacceptable bodies.” The practice of ticking items on the list thus performs a somatic ethics and produces new (bodily) norms for “adoptability.” Here, adoptability is dependent not only on medical knowledge; the social, cultural, and political backgrounds of the child are equally morphed into conditions that can be screened.13 Even though this fusion of the social and medical backgrounds of the adoptable body was already implicated in adoption medicine’s catch-­up theory (exemplified by the notion of the ecological niche), its implementation in a bureaucratic form was needed to give it the potential to impose an ordering on children’s bodies—­an economy, so to speak, of acceptable adoptee bodies. Both scientific and institutional practices now constructed the child’s life before adoption as a series of life events (such as histories of violence, conditions in utero, lengths of time spent in institutions, and abandonment at birth), classified and medicalized as episodes or conditions: at risk for fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), at risk for developmental delays, at risk for mental health issues, and so on. Many social workers and medical practitioners indicate that in addition to normalizing and possibly marginalizing and stigmatizing certain children, the negotiation of these forms can also broaden parents’ knowledge about certain medical conditions beyond “risk assessment” and contextualizes



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these conditions in the child’s everyday life. For example, during an intake session in the Dutch agency (conducted over the phone), one couple indicated that they found a child bound to a wheelchair “unacceptable”—­they did not mind that a child might be missing limbs, but they felt it was important that the child was mobile and could move independently. Other applicants were willing to accept children with conditions as serious as hepatitis B but were unwilling to accept children with facial deformities. Although they always sympathize with the applicants’ opinions, social workers negotiate the parameters of prospective parents’ choices. They specify, for example, that “mobility” and “(psychological) health” can be ambiguous categories for justifying choices, arguing that many children have developed ways to cope with their disabilities and manage to work around their medical conditions in everyday life. Social workers responsible for the intake process explain and contextualize the medical classifications on the form and make the conditions “social,” enabling prospective parents to “demedicalize” these children and imagine them within the contexts of their families and homes. Commodification

Commodification interacts with the processes of objectification and standardization. In July 2008, I attended an informational meeting on “Adoption from China” held at the Dutch adoption agency where I conducted my fieldwork. The convener explained the need to devote more attention to their “special needs” program. The agency had begun working with a new digital system provided by the China Center for Children’s Welfare and Adoption (CCCWA; formerly known as the China Center for Adoption Affairs [CCAA]). This system, which was intended to facilitate and speed up the process of placing special needs children outside of the regular procedures, includes a so-­called individual list that allocates children to specific agencies in receiving countries and a “shared list” that is publicly available to agencies, who are then responsible for examining the list to identify the children they believe can be placed with Dutch applicants. Alluding to the desirability of minor handicaps and operable conditions and the consequent ease of placing such children, the social worker was careful to mention that the agency “snatches these children out of the system” (emphasis mine) to make sure that the agency’s clients receive a share of the globally available pool of children.

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The mention of snatching is symptomatic of the global economy of adoption. The shared lists are open to agencies worldwide, and agencies compete electronically for these desirable special needs children, their success depending on staff sizes, time differences, and degrees of persistence. The idea of snatching not only reflects the size and scope of the adoption market; it also encapsulates how children with operable conditions—­in other words, transformable bodies—­are redefined in terms of relative worth. Disease or disability thus becomes a technology of reproduction in much the same way that race became a technology of reproduction (see Castaneda 2002). Racial economies greatly influenced the adoption market, privileging white and female Asian children as desirable objects for kin in the American and European imaginary of multiculturalism. Somatic economies complement racial economies of adoption and reconfigure bodies of worth. However, pointing to a somatic economy and the process of commodification at work in the global practice of adoption does not necessarily (or exclusively) reveal a corruption of the intimate or affective world of kinship. Certainly, commodification practices in international adoption—­as well as our instinctive resistance to such practices—­disclose the modern ways in which we utilize capitalist and anticapitalist paradigms in our modern repertoires of justifications (Kopytoff 1986; Zelizer 1985). Yet kinship relations, even in their modern configurations, still inhabit nonmodern and premodern paradigms, and it is here that forms of “economism” (rather than capitalism) enter the private/domestic domain. Hence the (effective/ attractive) marketization of adoption through images of waiting children and racial classifications can lead to the increased adoption of less desirable children (Cartwright 2003; Castaneda 2002), while the commodification of somatic qualities enables new families to adapt and incorporate somatic differences in their kinship arrangements.

Adoption as Postcolonial Technoscience The processes of objectification, standardization, and commodification in adoption medicine contribute to establish new ways of seeing adoptable and adoptee bodies. More so than medical clinics, where medical knowledge is directly communicated between doctors and patients, adoption agencies navigate through multiple knowledge paradigms—­institutional,



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medical, bureaucratic, legal, and political—­aligning this information with the wishes and capabilities of prospective parents. These interrelated processes make up the “ontological choreography” of adoption practice and coordinate the convergence of knowledge from different ontological orders: “Part of nature, part of the self, part of society” (Thompson 2005, 8). Adoption—­in particular, international adoption—­does not merely involve the placement of a child with a family; it also generates new spatiotemporal networks that bring together (imagined) birth parents, adoptees, and adoptive parents. These assemblages help shape new ideas of kinship, but they also establish new financial, institutional, and I would argue, moral relations that make the practice possible. Medicine and biomedicine hold a privileged space in the legitimation work of international adoption. But while medicalization can be seen as an epiphenomenon to the globalization of adoption, biomedicalization— ­through the emerging new apparatuses that accompany contemporary practices of adoption—­makes biomedicine constitutive to legitimacy. So while medical checklists and preferences in adoption are shaping new social forms through “dividing practices” in which certain groups are defined as at risk (Rose 1996), technoscientific software programs are encouraging cultures of “snatching” and economies based on somatic qualities. Biomedicalization does not merely intervene from the outside in; it transforms from the inside out (Clarke et al. 2003). Objectification, standardization, and commodification, therefore, enable the further alteration, customization, and modification of bodies. Particularly poignant is the story I encountered about early puberty in adopted children. In 2008, I attended a meeting organized by adoptive parents on medical screenings. Two physicians were invited to answer any questions. One of the questions concerned precocious puberty, also known as early puberty. According to several pediatric studies, adoptees are at greater risk to develop precocious puberty than nonadopted children.14 The doctors at the meeting explained that parents of children with early puberty could be referred to an endocrinologist, from whom the children could receive hormonal treatment. What struck me, however, was not so much the occurrence of early puberty but the fact that physicians use Dutch growth charts and the Dutch average age at puberty to assess the growth and development of adopted children. Also, according to the physicians, even in situations where adopted children were not necessarily diagnosed with

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the clinical condition of precocious puberty but instead were experiencing psychological difficulties because of their height or an earlier puberty than their peers, there were possibilities for treatment.15 My point is that hormonal treatments that delay the onset of puberty might not be entirely benign. The model that the pediatricians use and communicate to adoptive parents (based on Dutch growth charts and the Dutch average age for puberty) assumes that there is a “universal” age for puberty and understands puberty as a single, timed event. According to the medical literature, however, children may have adrenarche when quite young (e.g., pubic hair at 9) but not start menarche until much later (12 or 13).16 This points to a more general medicalization of childhood beyond the medicalization of adoptees. Similar “somatechnical” issues have been observed in the intervention of intersexed conditions (Butler 2001; Sullivan 2009) or race-­based plastic surgery (Davis 2003), which all aim to normalize otherwise healthy bodies via medical intervention. The question here is whether hormonal treatment for early puberty compromises rather than corrects health. As stated earlier in this chapter, the catch-­up model conveys the message that adoptees’ bodies have much catching up to do. In the discussion of puberty, however, many parents and doctors seem to think that there is also risk involved in developing too quickly. Adoptive parents and pediatricians seek to fix early growth so that it is “just right”—­not too fast, not too slow—­ by requesting and administering hormonal treatment, respectively. There are many ethical questions to be considered in these medical attempts at “fixing” growth or delaying puberty (rather than treating precocious puberty). The use of Dutch growth charts and the Dutch average age at puberty suggests that bodies are expected to catch up with and reach benchmarks of development in ways that are consistent with a particular normalized body. Adoptees who are not hitting these benchmarks with their peers are said to experience psychological distress, which is then used as justification for doctors to medically intervene in an otherwise healthy body. In the case of hormonal treatment, one could say that adoptee bodies are endocrinologically modified to fit most closely with Dutch standards. What is not emphasized in talk of treatment is that adoptees’ bodies are catching up or slowing down in order to look and be more like their nonadopted peers. Adoptees’ bodies become bodies that look more and more



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like Western middle-­class bodies, more and more like their adoptive parents’ bodies. Even when the children’s bodies are in good health, biomedical interventions suggest that their condition can be improved. Rather than challenging the status quo—­for instance, by acknowledging and allowing for difference—­biomedical interventions in healthy bodies sustain the morality underlying biomedical discourse and, by extension, keep the ethical justification of international adoption intact. Epigenetic explanations can feed into this logic in a similar way. Most of this research focuses on early deprivation and the ways in which the environment can have a long-­ term impact on adoptees who “escape” this environment through the intervention of adoption (Nelson et al. 2011; van IJzendoorn et al. 2011; Julian 2013). The translation of postgenomic knowledge into a biomedicalization of adoption, then, operates in comparable dynamics—­dynamics in which biomedical discourses allow for the formulation of a moral imperative that helps sustain the legitimacy of adoption. Hence as much as I concur with Timmermans and Almeling (2009) that a more complex analysis of objectification, standardization, and commodification can lead to a stronger sense of agency, I question whose agency is getting stronger in our global and postcolonial context. The moral economy of adoption medicine evokes a constant slippage between the figuration of the global orphan and the figuration of the international adoptee; this slippage, I argue, is symptomatic for postcolonial technosciences (Anderson 2002, 2009; Anderson and Adams 2007). Here, adoption medicine—­in particular, the biomedicalization of adoption—­designates the conditions that allow the appropriation of a Western and modern legal technology of kinship in specific ways. The slippage or paradox brings to the fore the postcolonial dimension of transforming Third World bodies into First World bodies. Biomedicalization does not merely help make adoptive families; it also helps make adoptee bodies. These are bodies that adapt to their new environments (naturally or through biomedical intervention) and therefore actively transgress their histories. Biology—­and biomedicine in particular—­has come to dominate the human sciences in such a way that, within the field of ethicopolitics, it is replacing political or philosophical justification (Rose 2007; Ticktin 2006). The increasing role of biomedicine in the humanitarian field further distances humanitarianism from politics. Health and “life itself ” increasingly serve as moral justifications in the “new humanitarianism” that values bare

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life, or “life as bios,” over political life, or “life as zoe” (Agamben 1998). This same trend is evident in the world of international adoption. Privileging the politics of “life itself,” a new moral economy is reshaping the humanitarian commitment to bring adoptable children, mostly from developing countries, to the West. Discourses in adoption medicine define adoption as a natural intervention and provide the imperative that such an intervention is a humanitarian obligation, not necessarily (or only) to rescue the political orphan, but to provide the conditions in which children’s bodies can thrive to their fullest potential. Adoption practices enacted to realize these imperatives reveal the multiple ways in which children as subjects are framed by discourses of somatic economies that reconceptualize and revalue children’s bodies through strategic arrangements of biomedical knowledge. As it produces new categories of adoptee bodies and rearranges the order of worth, biomedicine functions as a moral technology. Within the continued adoption “crisis,” in which the number of adoptable children worldwide is decreasing, this moral technology provides new legitimacy for the practice of international adoption that complements the weakening legitimacy of humanitarian justice as such. The paradigmatic shift in legitimacy creates a new kind of adoptee. In his well-­known article “Making Up People,” published in the London Review of Books (17 August 2006), Ian Hacking describes how science sometimes creates new classifications of people. This is done to better contain them (prostitutes or the homeless), to change them (the obese), to help them (suicidal adolescents), and to emulate them (geniuses). Hacking argues that simply knowing the shared properties of these categories of people will not generate truths that science or the public can work with. Rather, new classifications interact with and change these people so that they are “moving targets”: they are not quite the same kind of people as they were before classification. In a similar vein, adoptees can be regarded as moving targets. Their bodies are scrutinized, evaluated, and valued for good but also for more problematic reasons. In 2017, a simple Google search for the term “adoption medicine” produced 94,800 hits, while “refugee medicine” and “immigration medicine” only produced 19,400 and 8550 hits, respectively. This disproportionate emphasis can be explained by social dynamics and class-­based power differentials in Western society that have produced mostly white, heterosexual, and well-­educated prospective adopters, the quintessential modern subjects



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who seek to educate themselves and become somatic individuals equipped to assess the risks involved in adoption and take measures to contain those risks. There is no handbook on “foster medicine.” In contrast to fostering, adoption involves the transfer of legal parental rights from the birth parent(s) to the adoptive parent(s). Adoptive parents are not only more resourceful but much more invested in doing the right thing with respect to parenting. While there is little pressure to invest in the science of fostering, much political effort and sizeable financial resources are being devoted in building adoption institutions, including preadoption medical clinics, postadoption services, and roots journeys. In chapter 5, I will discuss the latter in more detail.17

Conclusion The consequences of the biomedicalization of adoption are paradoxical. As part of a reproductive technology, the biomedicalization of adoption and the development of adoption medicine extend the arena of choice. They allow not only the realization of the desire to have children but also the conditions under which we would like to have these children. Like racial economies, somatic economies contribute to the array of choices and enable a reorganization of reproductive desire. This is not to say that (prospective) adoptive parents are merely consumers, institutions are merely brokers, and children are purely commodified products of the adoption market. As they encounter the institutions, prospective parents’ romantic visions of adopting healthy (multicultural) children with no (birth) strings attached are quickly destabilized. The available range of choices is extended while the market shrinks. Besides enabling prospective parents to choose a child based on health status, the medicalization of adoption also allows for a reconfiguration of kinship in which disability plays an important role. Successful outcomes of such kinship arrangements will contribute to new configurations of reproductive desire. However, when these arrangements fail and adoptions end in “disruptions,” new risks will be identified and added to the body of adoption knowledge. For adoptees, the stakes are similarly contradictory. Initially, their bodies were objectified, standardized, and commodified, and their beings were molded into reproductive choices. The “kinning” process of adoption can

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individualize the child, but whether the adoptee experiences this kinning as individualization depends on a number of factors that involve deobjectification, destandardization, and decommodification and an appropriation of the very same processes—­for example, by explicitly claiming an “adoptee identity.” The question remains, What happens when (adult) adoptees do not want to catch up? That is, what happens when they do not want to attach, develop, assimilate, or become the regular American or Dutch kid on the block? The ultimate crisis for the biomedical justification of adoption may not be the “failed adoption” (as compared to the “successful adoption”) but rather the successful adult adoptee (intelligent, healthy, exhibiting high self-­ esteem) who nevertheless rejects the legitimacy of international adoption on ethical grounds. The current discourse and practice of adoption medicine result in constant slippage between the figuration of the global orphan and the figuration of the international adoptee. This slippage is symptomatic of the complexities that the subject of adoption brings to the field of ethics, morality, and politics. The “target” moves not only according to our scientific investigations but also through our moral deliberations projected onto the child’s body via reproductive desires, middle-­class family subjectivities, multicultural imaginations, and cosmopolitan ethics. The figurations traverse the ontological frameworks of nature and culture, constantly shifting between mutability and immutability: the mutability of the adoptee body through its somatic ability to catch up and the immutability of the somatic realities of the global orphan for whom adoption has not intervened. In the next chapter, I explore these very same slippages in the realms of legality and citizenship. By bringing the adoptee into an analogical relation with the asylum seeker, I explore the reach of the “moving target” discussed earlier and the implications that this can have on our capacities for humanitarian compassion.

4 • GRIEVABLE LIVES The Adoptee and the Child Migrant

Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. Instead, “there is a life that will never have been lived,” sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost. The apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life. Grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living, exposed to non-­life from the start. —­Judith Butler, Frames of War

As we witnessed in the previous chapter, children’s bodies are the quintessential sites of moral compassion. In this chapter, however, I will argue that geography matters in assessing which children’s bodies deserve what kind of moral concern. Taking adoption out of its vacuum and placing it in an analogical relation with migration, I aim to consider how the adoptee is differentially situated from other children who move transnationally. There is considerable critical scholarship on the geographies of childhood and on children’s mobility in the global age (see, for instance, Aitken 2001a; Katz 2004; Ruddick 2003; Wells 2001). These studies have had two central concerns: how the global restructuring of society impacts the livelihoods of children and how “children’s rights” can do the work of justice. In what follows, I work through these central questions by focusing on the moral justifications presented in court cases in the Netherlands that concern the moving child. I examine how these justificatory practices relate to the governance of children and family in an age of globalization, where place, culture, nation, and state are increasingly removed from each other (Coombe 105

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2001, 313) and where the notion of citizenship is more and more defined by biopolitical legalities. In exploring these questions, I compare the international adoptee and the child asylum seeker. In their geographically mobile bodies, they bring together distinct discursive tropes of transnational child migration. I describe their differential treatments through an analysis of their legal cases in the Netherlands. The first relates to the so-­called Mauro case, which involves a child who failed to secure asylum after having lived for eight years with Dutch foster parents and who was threatened with deportation after he had turned 18. I examine two different legal rulings—­the decision in the District Court of Amsterdam that approved continued residency for Mauro and the decision from the Council of State in the Hague (an adjudicative division of the Supreme Court) that denied him continued residency. The second concerns the so-­called Rahul case and refers to a court’s decision to respect the wishes of a 12-­year-­old boy, adopted from India, who did not want to give a DNA sample to prove to an Indian couple that he was their legitimate son and, consequently, the victim of child trafficking. The two cases cannot be compared with each other in a purely juridical manner, since the Mauro case involved a person who had just turned 18 (and thus was an adult by law), while the Rahul case involved a minor. Nevertheless, the comparison of these two cases is crucial to understanding current debates on the moving child and the boundaries we draw to constitute the “child” and the “family.” I am specifically interested in how geographies of childhood and kin come into play in the courtroom when information becomes available that disrupts the legal status of the child, moving him or her from refugee to illegal migrant or from adoptee to trafficked child.1 As I will argue, the relationship between migration and humanitarian sympathies is difficult, and the comparison serves to demonstrate that these difficulties are tightly bound to spatiotemporality—­that is, a spatial and temporal dimension to humanitarian compassion for singularized subjects. By analyzing these two seemingly opposing cases (adoption and child asylum) within the same framework of “child migration,” I investigate adoption outside of the conventional fields of psychology or anthropology and within the fields of human geography and citizenship. Furthermore, bringing in child asylum as an (incomplete) analogy to adoption further complicates our (Western) notion of reproduction and kinship vis-­à-­vis



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democratic citizenship. Hence the analogy makes visible the dilemmas of liberal theories of citizenship vis-­à-­vis childhood. The nonkinned status of the child asylum seeker not only disrupts legal formulations of liberal citizen­ship that are dependent on structures of kinship but also makes apparent how our justificatory systems are contingent on new meanings of the legal concepts of “family life” and “the best interest of the child.” These “emergent properties” (Strathern 2005) produce new knowledge of relatedness and kinship, knowledge that inhabits Euro-­American forms of “spatiotemporal distancing” (Fabian 2002). As I will demonstrate through the cases, such knowledge makes apparent the differential power locations of the Global North and the Global South and helps govern the ways in which life is valued. Hence in examining how legal justifications affect children’s status of precariousness, I analyze to what extent the child’s “grievability”—­as defining the difference between life as qualified or as objectified—­alternates between humanitarian sensibilities and national interests and is informed by geographies of kinship and childhood.2 I ultimately argue that such alternations materialize the scalar relation between justice and pity and necessitate a revaluation of the child citizen under conditions of globalization.

Two Tales of Child Migration In May 2011, the Dutch Council of State, which serves as a court of appeal for citizens against executive branch decisions, denied continued residence for an 18-­year-­old boy, Mauro Manuel. Mauro had come from Angola at the age of 10 as an unaccompanied minor (his mother remained in Angola), and he had lived with Dutch foster parents since 2003. The case caused a public outcry and a political crisis. Public supporters of Mauro—­emphasizing his full integration in Dutch society, his family life with his foster parents, and human rights in general—­strongly condemned the ruling that stipulated that he be deported back to Angola. Against the backdrop of a tightening immigration regime in the Netherlands and in Europe as a whole, the case exemplified a moral petition to the humanity of the nation-­state. The case was an appeal from the Dutch secretary of state for immigration and asylum3 and challenged an earlier ruling that acknowledged Mauro’s right to a residence permit that would allow him to remain in the Netherlands with

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his foster parents. According to the judge at the original hearing in Amsterdam on October 4 in 2010, deporting Mauro to Angola would be a violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Mauro’s case had a tremendous public profile and almost led to the fall of the presiding Dutch cabinet. Because the case manifested civil upheaval, it ruptured political parties and represented a moral crisis in Dutch (immigration) politics. In the end, a student visa was issued to Mauro, a temporary solution many regarded as demonstrating the incapacity (or hypocrisy) of government in dealing with the core moral problem of global migration. In that same year, after a four-­year-­long legal battle, a family court in Zwolle-­Lelystad ruled in March 2011 that the 12-­year-­old boy Rahul, who was adopted in 2002 at the age of 4 by Dutch parents from India, did not have to provide a DNA sample to prove to an Indian couple that he was or was not their legitimate son.4 In 1999, the couple’s infant son had been kidnapped from their home in Chennai, India. Five years later, the kidnappers were arrested and confessed that they had sold the boy to an orphanage in Chennai. Subsequently, the boy was placed for adoption with a Dutch couple through the mediation of a Dutch adoption agency. Rahul’s adoptive parents rejected an earlier request for a DNA sample, which had led to a court appeal by the Indian couple’s Dutch lawyers. The decision of the 2011 family court relied heavily on the statement of Rahul himself, who indicated that he did not want to provide a DNA sample to this end. The court also accepted the report of a psychologist who assessed Rahul and concluded that he was capable of determining what should happen to him. Appealing to Article 3 of the Convention of the Right of the Child (CRC), the judge ruled that it was in the best interest of the child that the court respect his wishes. Although receiving some media attention in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, the ruling about Rahul was generally low profile. The two tales include four different sets of administrative categories into which state actors (but also other public and institutional actors) categorize children who are moving from one country to the other: asylum seekers, adoptees, undocumented people, and victims of trafficking. At its core, Mauro’s case is about “child asylum.” In the Netherlands, children arriving as unaccompanied minors (Alleenstaande Minderjarige Vreemdeling [AMV]) must apply for asylum in the same way as do adult asylum seekers. If their application is successful, they obtain refugee status and are given permanent residence in the Netherlands. If their application is unsuccessful, they



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are sent back to their country of origin. At the time of Mauro’s case, Dutch law permitted that even if a minor was unsuccessful in his or her application for refugee status, if there was no appropriate care in the country of origin, then the minor could obtain a special permit that allowed him or her to remain in the Netherlands until he or she was 18.5 The special procedure for children relates back to the justification that minors are considered vulnerable when it is proven that they were neglected in their country of origin. When these minors turn 18, they are regarded as self-­sufficient and are then sent back to their country of legal citizenship. This happens even if the child’s circumstances have not changed and despite connections that he or she might have made to others in the Netherlands while he or she was legally in the country. Rahul’s story is of international adoption, the regulations of which are stipulated in Dutch international adoption law (Wet Opneming Buitenlandse Kinderen ter Adoptie [WOBKA]). The principles of the Dutch law are tightly aligned with core values of the CRC and the Hague Convention for Intercountry Adoption (HCCH). Both adhere to the so-­called subsidiarity principle, which endorses intercountry adoption only when it has been established that no substitute family, extended family, or other suitable family environment is available in the child’s country of origin. Hence in parallel with the asylum case, international adoption falls within a humanitarian justificatory regime and is framed as a protection measure that morally relies on the right of the child to (family) care. Over time, these tales of child asylum and adoption were intersected by discourses of illegality and trafficking. Mauro’s request for asylum was denied after years of asylum proceedings. His refugee status had not been recognized when he first came to the Netherlands, as it was established that there was not enough evidence that his situation in Angola was unsafe. When he turned 18, his status changed from an asylum seeker to an undocumented migrant. Illegality places subjects like Mauro in a precarious and ambiguous situation. Having lost any claims to citizenship rights, people like Mauro are either directly deported back to their country of origin or are given some form of care and education while they are “put on hold” prior to their inevitable return. In Mauro’s case, the latter applied: he continued to live with his Dutch foster family and attended school. Underpinning Rahul’s adoption story is the discourse of trafficking, which casts a constant shadow on the contemporary apparatus of international

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adoption. As described in the introduction and chapter 1, the 1990s saw the transformation of international adoption from a primarily humanitarian phenomenon to an increasingly attractive technology of reproduction (Castaneda 2002; Dorow 2006; Yngvesson 2002). Family making rather than child protection became the leading force that brought children from the Global South to the Global North. This created situations conducive to child trafficking, and for this reason, the Hague Adoption Convention—­discussed at length in chapter 2—­was intricately linked in both its formation and its practice to the prevention of trafficking (see also Coutin, Maurer, and Yngvesson 2002, 835). The debate on trafficking also sparked discussion about “rights,” “choice,” and “precarity” for the people involved in the circulation of children (Smolin 2006; Bhabha 2004; Triselotis 2000). Such concerns informed the justificatory frameworks that underpinned the aforementioned cases of child migration.

Justification Work The courts used two justificatory frameworks in the cases of Mauro and Rahul. The first related to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)—­namely, the “right to respect for private and family life.”6 Shortened as “family life” in judicial practice, this framework was central to the judgment in Mauro’s first court case. Following reports carried out by behavioral experts, the judge found it probable that after eight years of living together, family life had been established between Mauro and his foster parents. Because Mauro was never granted asylum, however, there was no indication that “interference” of this family life by the state had taken place.7 Despite this, the judge was of the opinion that the state had a “positive obligation” to provide Mauro with a residence permit. Deportation of Mauro to Angola would have meant a violation of Article 8 because of an impaired emotional relationship with his biological mother.8 In addition, the court deemed it necessary to take into account Article 3 of the CRC.9 Broadly, this article articulates that in all actions concerning children, the priority should lie with the “best interest of the child.” The time that the child has resided in a host country should be included as an important aspect of the assessment. The judge was of the opinion that the



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time Mauro had spent as a child in the Netherlands with his Dutch foster parents since 2003 (almost eight years) contributed to strengthening his ties with the host country while weakening his ties with Angola. Nevertheless, these two arguments were then rendered as unfounded by the court of appeal, which pointed to the absence of a “positive obligation” arising from either Article 8 of the ECHR or Article 3 of the CRC. In the end, then, “family life” and “the best interest of the child” did not work in Mauro’s defense. In contrast, “the best interest of the child” did work to the advantage of Rahul’s case and also served the “best interest of the adopting parents.” A common criticism of international adoption (as a form of family making) is that often, the voices and rights of birth parents are invisible or rendered less valuable. It could be argued that the Rahul case confirmed this bias. Here, the judge ruled that the interests of Rahul should be put first in assessing the request of the petitioners. Again, as in Mauro’s case, expert knowledge was decisive in the judgment. The court followed the assessment of one of the two psychologists who were consulted to determine whether Rahul was competent enough to decide if he would provide a DNA sample. The expert indicated in this report that “it is in the interest of the child that he sets the pace for all actions regarding proof of relationship, contact and access arrangements. The child should be the one in charge; because it is only then that [name child] will be able to complete his development properly.”10 The court’s decision in the Rahul case disregarded the interests of the petitioners and the social interest and the criminal investigation in India; instead, it privileged the child’s interests as set out by Article 3 of the CRC. Since it had not been established that the Indian couple were the biological parents of Rahul, the court would neither give a declaratory judgment in respect of biological parenthood nor approve the request of the petitioners to receive information about and photographs of Rahul. Because the case closed without a decisive answer about biological parenthood, family life between Rahul and his adoptive parents was a nonissue. However, the “family life” principle has often been used to protect adoptive parents over biological parents. There have been several cases in the Netherlands where established birth or genetic parents have attempted to reclaim their biological children but were denied this on the basis of the

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adoptive families’ attainment of family life in the course of time.11 The broad principle of the “child’s best interest,” then, mostly accommodates the legal parent and dismisses claims made by biological or genetic parents. In cases of adoption then—­even in situations where criminal activity has been factually established—­the time spent in a family prevails over biological or genetic claims.12 Nurture therefore prevails over nature in the legal space, and the place of a child’s upbringing is weighed with respect to origins. Although a noble principle in light of essentialist and deterministic claims of biology and genetics (claims that social science scholars and, in particular, feminist scholars have strongly refuted in the past), new sites of contestation in the arena of reproductive technologies (including adoption) demand a reexamination of our normative frameworks with respect to nature and nurture and the place of culture in new regimes of genetics (Thompson 2005; Carsten 2007; Dolgin 1997; Finkler 2000). Scholarship is emerging within the so-­called new kinship studies (Carsten 2000, 3; Yanagisako and Delaney 1999; Franklin and McKinnon 2001) that demonstrates the complex reconfigurations of nature and culture in kinship arrangements that are neither “returning” to traditional family norms (as some have argued with respect to the rise of genetics) nor only consolidating choice for alternative arrangements of family life. New assemblages take place that are difficult to place within the nature/culture dichotomy. Hence revisiting existing normative frameworks regarding nature/ culture does not imply a return to biological or genetic determinism. It means instead that the ethical consequences of a normalized justification of nurture over nature (both in society and in law) should be further explored. In the field of reproduction, this involves investigating how these consequences resonate with children’s and birth parents’ rights in addition to adoptive parents’ rights. The nurture over nature ruling is paramount to adoption cases. It protects the adoptive parents, who are usually better off and may also feel vulnerable and want protection. In a psychologists’ reading, the valuation of nurture helps children feel that they are part of their families. The normalized justification of nurture over nature, however, does not apply to every child and can be overturned in nonadoption cases, such as the Mauro case. In the end, Mauro’s long-­term stay with his Dutch foster parents—­who unsuccessfully made attempts to adopt him—­did not qualify as a claim to family life.13 Again, geography plays an important role here. Mauro was physically



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together with his foster parents in the same place, but his proximity to them was not enough to lawfully build up family life. Moreover, despite Mauro’s opinion that his relationship with his biological mother had deteriorated, this biological connection—­and the assumed responsibility of the mother to offer care for her child—­was deemed significant to the court of appeal and provided justification to send Mauro back to Angola. How can we explain the different application of these same principles in these cases?

The Geopolitics of Precariousness The performativity of the “best interest of the child” depends on the performance of childhood itself. To appeal to these principles, childhood status needed to be confirmed, and in order to do this, it was necessary for children and their representatives to give evidence of “vulnerability” and “grievability” (Butler 2004, 2009; Fassin 2007). In both cases, this was primarily performed via expert reports. Rahul’s case was more straightforward in that Rahul was 12 at the time of the hearing, and so he was considered a minor and in need of parental guidance. Although one of the specialist reports indicated that he was at an age where he was mature enough to make his own choices, his development—­according to the experts—­could be seriously impaired by the outcome of the DNA test or by contact with the Indian couple. In sharing the experts’ views, the court added, “It is totally logical that [Rahul] has fears about submitting to a DNA test. In his mind submitting to a DNA test could lead to his return to India or to a criminal conviction of his adoptive parents. Therefore it is also completely logical and only natural that [Rahul] does not want to take a DNA test at this time in his life.”14 The court’s deeming of Rahul’s overall fear and refusal to give a DNA sample as both “natural” and “logical” exemplifies, among other things, the court’s acceptance of the child as still vulnerable and in need of protection. Were Rahul a competent adult, he would not have evoked such a response. Childhood was therefore established, and the moral appeal to protect the child was privileged over a discourse of trafficking that would have protected the rights of the alleged biological parents. The performance of childhood had to be more forceful in Mauro’s case, since he had just turned 18 and was no longer considered a child. But as

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Stuart Aitken (2001b) argues, such performances of childhood and adulthood are “forced exclusions” and erase “unchildlike” children or “childlike” adults. In an attempt to give evidence of a continued vulnerability and therefore continued child status, the psychological assessment used in court included the following: Returning to Angola means that the claimant is separated from his primary caregivers for a second time. This will damage his development and will inevitably lead to a complete break in his development. Without the support of his foster parents, he needs to fall back on his own independence and he will not cope. The plaintiff categorically does not want to return to his biological mother in Angola. The plaintiff is also in a vulnerable stage of development in which identity development still has to evolve. This requires that he feels safe, that there is stability in his life situation, and trust in the people on whom he can rely. An abrupt break in present life will result in a serious disturbance of this maturing process. It is the combination of the loss of his foster parents and the move to an unknown society that brings along an unacceptable and irresponsible risk.15

Expert knowledge based in psychology and psychoanalysis—­termed “psy-disciplines” by Nikolas Rose (1996)—­has had an enormous influence in the fields of education and (mental) health in general (Wells 2011, 19) and also, in particular, in the field of international adoption (Howell 2006, ch. 5). What we see in both Mauro and Rahul’s cases is the extent to which this kind of expert knowledge from the psy-­disciplines is utilized in court justifications and judgments of what is defined as being good or better for the child’s mental and physical well-­being. Although this work of justification appeared convincing in Mauro’s first court case, it was rendered irrelevant in the appeal within the Council of State, where the judge argued that the district court had unduly acted on behalf of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND). With this, the Council of State maintained the rule of law within immigration policy and privileged the interest of the state. Moreover, the court dismissed outcomes in the past that had worked in favor of similar cases because those involved minors who had been residing legally in the Netherlands. In essence, Mauro and Rahul’s cases exemplify instances of child migration and the movement of children’s bodies from the Global South to the



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North. In a structural sense, both are the products of global inequality. If Angola were economically better off, Mauro’s biological mother would probably not have sent him to the Netherlands on his own. If India had better support systems for marginalized parents or caregivers, they could protect children from becoming abandoned or orphaned (or kidnapped into adoption, as alleged in Rahul’s case), and international adoption would not have been necessary. However, structural inequalities are not taken into account in court cases, nor used to appeal to the moral sentiments that dominate public discourse. The geopolitics of being born outside of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-­operation and Development) countries is invisible in jurisprudence. Invisible too are the original and more generalized narratives of refugee or orphaned children that conjured up humanitarian compassion and pity in the first place—­these no longer “work” in the moral imagination of the individuals in the cases of Mauro or Rahul. In both instances, the children’s bodies became individualized and singularized. This singularization process not only turned them into subjects with agency but also made them into Western, liberal, and Dutch subjects. Mauro, who had gone public and appeared on popular talk shows to promote his case, was repeatedly referred to in the media as being thoroughly assimilated in Dutch culture—­playing soccer for his local team and speaking Dutch with a typical southern provincial dialect. When the decision in his case was repealed, he wrote a letter to the secretary of state for immigration and asylum, which was widely published in the media, in which he argued the following: I am thoroughly Westernized and not anymore capable of going to a country like Angola. I have a chance here at a good future and I am able to help the Netherlands by entering the labor market since I nearly finished my degree. I won’t be able to do that in Angola. I barely speak the language anymore and I would need a lot of time to learn it again. The culture is very different than here and the people will notice that I’m different from the average Angolan. If I’m there I would have to start all over again with my life. Only thinking about it gives me the chills. I am afraid I won’t survive there.16

In order for Mauro to appeal to humanitarian compassion, he needed to give evidence of his Dutchness, a personal and public performance that was legitimized in his first court case but delegitimized in the appeal.

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In becoming a Dutch adoptee, Rahul lost his status as “global orphan.” In contrast to migrants, adoptees are generally seen as already assimilated by the process of “kinning” (Howell 2006): the process through which adoptive parents socialize their adoptive child to their Western, usually white middle-­class habitus, as expressed through language, clothes, food, behavior, and so on. Rahul did not need to perform his Dutchness, for his adoption already implied a naturalized adaptation to the adoptive parents’ culture and habitus through attachment and bonding.17 Mauro’s need to perform his Dutchness, in contrast, reveals the differential treatment of family life built up within foster families and within adoptive families. “Clean breaks,” as effected by the decree of legal adoption, produces kinship in a way that foster care can never bring into being. Performing kin, then, was easier for the adoptive family than it was for the foster family, for the first included a notion of ownership that the latter lacked. This creates a paradoxical tension in the moral imagination of child protection. On the one hand, foster families are regarded as morally superior to adoptive families because they remain within the framework of child protection rather than family making. On the other hand, they are morally suspect because of the very same fact—­because they have not completely “kinned” their foster child. The valorization of the “clean break” and the confirmation of legal kin disclose the idea of the child as property (Strathern 2005, 52–­58; Carsten 2007; Yngvesson 2002). Once biological ties are lawfully cut, there is little to no room for a return to earlier kinship relations. Following Barbara Yngvesson, policies that implement a “clean break” turn adoption into a reproductive technology that “acts to ‘free’ a child who is understood to be encumbered by properties that constitute it as belonging to particular persons or a particular place, and whose identity is understood to flow from these properties” (2012, 343). This reproductive technology—­which is also a technology of law—­enables the naturalization of adoptive parenthood and erases or abstracts birth parents from the child’s future legal existence. This property relation is played out most intensely in the matter of citizenship. With a “clean break,” the child has lost all rights to citizen claims in his or her country of origin. In no instance can the adoptee appeal to protection from his or her birth country. On the contrary, in most cases the adoption decree is also irreversible in the country of origin.



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In situations of illegal adoption or trafficking, this results in a profound paradox with respect to not only who can claim kin but also when and where one can claim kin. First, in the case of Rahul, for instance, even if it were established that the Indian couple were the biological parents and therefore that Rahul had been trafficked into adoption, the irreversibility of an adoption decree and the years Rahul built up “family life” with his adoptive parents would prevent him from being returned to his biological parents. Second, with respect to citizenship, adoptees who would like to reunite with their biological parents and who want to bring their parents to the country where they were adopted are not able to do so. From the perspective of citizenship rights, adopted children are denied their rights to choose and make their family. Contrasting this with the child asylum case, it is the absence of a “clean break” but also the absence of kin in their movement to a host country that allows the state to see child asylum seekers as if nonchildren in immigration law. As argued by Sue Ruddick (2007b), children’s rights are imbricated with the rights of their caregivers. Whereas the “alternative caregiver” (the adoptive parent, the gay parent, the single parent) has increasingly gained legitimacy in liberal democratic societies, at the same time, the site of the caregiver has also “become a site of increasing constraint, a target of neoconservative policy that attempts, through legislation, to reinstate the patriarchal nuclear family in preference to, and sometimes in exclusion of, other forms” (628). Unaccompanied children pose a fundamental problem for immigration law because their nonkinned status disrupts the modern fabric of legal citizenship under liberal democracy. In many countries, unaccompanied children are subjected to the same procedures and measures as adults—­a situation that can result in placing children in detention centers or deporting them (O’Connell Davidson 2011, 469). Hence although in the public eye children conjure compassion and pity and generate moral concern for how the nation-­state acts in the name of humanity, it seems, nonetheless, that the law is incapable of bringing together this moral concern with its justificatory practices.

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Scales of Grievability Within Euro-­American contexts, the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of the modern child, a child disconnected from the economic domain and incorporated into the emotional realm of the nuclear family (Zelizer 1985; Fassin 2012). This modern configuration materialized in international humanitarian conventions that increasingly appealed to broader definitions of a universal “childhood.” The state now had a legal obligation to ensure the welfare of its child citizens and so contributed to producing trans/national legal frameworks to safeguard the care and protection of children. In present times, we find in Western legal instruments a variety of measures that explicitly aim to reduce children’s suffering and increase their happiness. However, the two cases presented here reveal that such measures do not work in a straightforward manner as promised by a universal ideal of justice. Moving beyond the conventional explanation that international law has not been sufficiently implemented—­that it concerns a political deficiency that can be resolved by adhering more strictly to the existing legal instruments—­it is helpful to explore the premise on which legal knowledge of child protection is based: the relationship between pity and justice. In Distant Suffering (1999), sociologist Luc Boltanski argues that the relationship between pity and justice is based on the link between human action and time. While the politics of pity takes place in the present and is bound to the suffering of the now, justice occurs retrospectively: “A politics of pity does not ask whether the misery of the unfortunate is justified. . . . For a politics of pity, the urgency of the action needed to be taken to bring an end to the suffering invoked always prevails over considerations of justice. From such a perspective it is only in a world from which suffering has been banished that justice could enforce its rights” (4–­5). The moral crisis in cases like Mauro’s seems to exemplify the incommensurability within law and politics of pity and justice. This incommensurability stems from the infeasibility of reconciling the suffering “global orphan” with the singularized child subject. While the pity and compassion in the first relate to the humanitarian other, the moral indignation in the latter relates to our own citizen subject. Mauro has become one of us, and as Mauro’s defendant in court has put forward in pleading his case, it would be unthinkable for one of us to start anew in a country like Angola.



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Let me clarify this point by making a brief detour. Across the North-­ South divide, we can differentiate between two discursive representations. For example, in the highly mediated and global coverage of the missing British child Madeleine McCann, the child body is individualized and named. Parent groups and bloggers organize events to find Madeleine, and their actions are informed by modern parental anxieties in a society defined by increasing risk.18 Couched in white middle-­class subjectivities, Madeleine’s body has a biography and her case has a narrative—­one that raises fear and moral panic. Hence within Euro-­American contexts, the “missing child” trope embodies singularity and appeals to a moral sensitivity that believes children in the Global North require protection from the perils of modernity. By contrast, images of the “global orphan crisis” embody collectivity and conjure humanitarian empathy. They often depict multiple children at once, children’s bodies that are grouped together and unnamed. The coverage of orphaned children in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, for instance, evoked a humanitarian response and prompted charitable initiatives to bring relief and rescue to these orphans in the name of humanity.19 At odds with the singularized Euro-­American child, the “global orphan” from the South needs to be rescued from disease, poverty, violence, and ultimately, from orphanhood itself. Returning to our case studies, the justificatory frameworks evident in the legal as well as the public discourses seesaw from the kinds of people who are possible in one time and space (the Mauro and Rahul now as singularized subjects in the Netherlands) to kinds of people who are possible in another (the global orphans resident in Angola and India as countries of another time). These frameworks invoke spatiotemporal “distancing” (Fabian 2002) in order to stress the otherness of India and Angola and the incommensurability that the Mauro and Rahul of our time could go back to that other time. As the anthropologist Johannes Fabian argues, “Geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics” (2002, xxxix). Spatiotemporal distancing, then, reinstates the West as the endpoint of progress and modernity and makes grievable the subjects who desire their place in this progressivist narrative. Rahul’s case confirms this incommensurability. Although trafficking was part of the tale, Rahul was not trafficked into a grievable situation. Rather than experience suffering—­the dominant trope of trafficking as displayed

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in child labor or sexual slavery (O’Connell Davidson 2013; Smolin 2004)—­ Rahul found a caring family with whom he bonded. Although this situation explains the extent to which we can sympathize with Rahul and his adoptive parents—­after all, they adopted Rahul with no knowledge that he might have been stolen from his biological parents—­it does not explain how our legal instruments are able to erase or deny the possibility of trafficking. Within international law, the definition of “trafficking” necessarily involves exploitation. Legal scholars have pointed to the ways in which this excludes many forms of trafficking where the child is trafficked into a nonexploitative situation. David Smolin, for instance, aptly describes this problem with United Nation’s approaches to trafficking, which go beyond the sale of children and emphasize “enslavement, sexual exploitation, or exploitative labor” at the point of destination (2004, 281). But what implicit dynamic is this legal idea supporting? I would argue—­along with Smolin—­that lawmakers, judges, and lawyers who invoke “the best interest of the child” base their legal instruments on the idea that the affluence and democratic stability of Western countries provide a healthier home for “global orphans.” It is through the hidden assumption that “they’re better off here anyway” that one can explain the disregard of the biological parents’ suffering. According to Karen Wells, this idea ties in with continuities between “child saving” and “children’s rights” in the governance of childhood, which “coincides with shifts in governance from sovereignty to bio-­power or a politics of life” (2011, 15). Wells continues, “The narrative of children’s lives as gradually improving after the advent of child-­saving/child rights conceals how, in the same times and spaces, race functioned as a caesura in the population so that racialized others were excluded from the child-­saving/child-­rights project” (21). In Mauro and Rahul’s cases, this meant the concealment of Mauro’s biological mother and Rahul’s biological parents. “Child-­ saving/child rights”—­to use Wells’ term—­is predominantly utilized to protect children in their dependent relation to liberal (often white bourgeois) caregivers adoptive parents, and to a lesser extent, foster parents. Geography is key here. Ultimately, in the geopolitics of migration, where one ends up (the Netherlands) is more important than with whom one ends up (a loving family). It is here that we can speak of a postcolonial moment. Conjuring an analogy with Madeleine McCann makes this point even more apparent. For if we were to imagine that Rahul was Madeleine



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McCann and that she had been trafficked into India to live with Indian adoptive parents, the differential power locations of Northern states and the Global South would have become painfully evident. Geography, then, also matters in assessing which children’s bodies deserve what kind of moral concern. These different scales of grievability, however, do not become visible in domestic courts. Nor does “children’s rights”—­as represented by the “child’s best interest”—­seem to capture the postcolonial dimensions of such grievabilities. The biopolitics of children’s rights is based on welfare and health and not on political justice (Wells 2011, 21). Because “children’s rights” does not capture the relational element of being a child and therefore operates independently from the rights of their biological parents, it risks—­in this particular context—­replicating colonial power relations by disenfranchising the parents or caregivers (Ruddick 2007b, 629; Martin 2011). Citizenship is linked to the spatiotemporal arrangement of grievability. Morally, the Dutch state had no option but to provide Mauro with a way to stay in the Netherlands. The humanitarian call to protect the child was morally convincing, but granting him full citizenship would have instigated a precedent in which either (1) the definition of childhood was stretched to include children who were 18  years of age or older or (2) there was acknowledgement that nonchildren (adults) could also be vulnerable and have equal rights to family life and citizenship. It can be argued that Mauro’s childhood was extended by the sort of visa that he was eventually granted by the state—­namely, a student visa. This allowed him access to a limited continuation of his “childhood,” “education,” and family life but not to a future as a citizen subject. His case consolidates the fundamental dilemma in liberal theories of citizenship: one can either be a child or citizen but not both (see also Bhabha 2006, 2009). Grievability does not refer to life that has ceased to exist but alludes to “a presupposition for the life that matters” (Butler 2009, 14). It authenticates the relationship between “oneself as another” (Ricoeur 1992) and ascertains the singularity of that other. While the Westernized and singularized subjects of Mauro and Rahul are grievable, their biological kin in their countries of origin are not. This is not to say that grievability can be reduced to “recognizeability.” Evidently, the question of recognizeability is key to understanding how grievability operates, but what the concept achieves is the extent to which grievability illuminates our politics of compassion

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(Fassin 2012). Whether the consequences of such illuminations should lead us to an ethics of inclusive compassion is another matter. This is dependent on the transformability of our legal conceptualizations and the transgressiveness of our justice systems.

Conclusion In March 2013, the Dutch Department of Security and Justice granted Mauro permanent residency. He was one of the recipients of the so-­called children’s pardon (kinderpardon). This “pardon” was intended for unaccompanied minors who lived in the Netherlands for more than five years but who had not secured residence. It was a transitional arrangement involving approximately 1,540 children. Mauro and his Dutch family received the news with mixed feelings. His foster mother indicated that it was difficult for her to say “thank you,” though she was very grateful for the support of the Dutch society.20 A few years later in 2017, although Mauro was happy he was able to build his life in the Netherlands, he also points out that he does not feel entirely “free”: “I do not want to call it an obligation, but I do think that I must give evidence that I have done something with it [with the permanent residency]. I still see it a bit as ‘give a little, take a little.’ Of course I also do it for myself, but I’m also doing it for others. I try to adapt as much as possible to how life is here. I pay my taxes, I have work, I have a house. I’m trying to be one of you—­that’s actually really it.”21 My goal with this chapter was not to advocate that we should curb our humanitarian compassion or stop the transnational care of children. I have illustrated, however, that the object of humanitarian pity really concerns the child as cut off from (worthy) forms of kin. In international adoption, birth parents are erased in the imaginary of “orphaned” children’s bodies (Fonseca 2011). In the case of child asylum, parents of unaccompanied children are seen as suspect and not worthy of family life. I also did not set out to weaken any claims by scholars to challenge immigration policy. On the contrary, moral crises in society—­such as articulated by the Mauro case—­are effective in shedding light on the perversities of a restrictive policy. However, what I have demonstrated is that the way in which we appeal to “common humanity” is very much shaped by Western conceptions of childhood, kinship, and humanitarianism that communicate



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to us our spatiotemporal parameters for grievability. While singularized subjects (such as the present Mauro and Rahul) are grievable as “one of us,” collective imaginations of “global orphans,” “needy children,” and “victims of trafficking” (such as the original Mauro and Rahul from Angola and India) are grievable only as humanitarianized others. In the era of globalization, human bodies increasingly move across nations in pursuit of labor, family life, or refuge. While humanitarianism offers bodies care and compassion, the legal and institutional instruments underpinning humanitarian practice also produce worthy and unworthy bodies. In this chapter, I have examined the work of justification in humanitarian investments of the moving child body. While the methodological collapse of the adoptee body with the child migrant body opened a productive analytical space to look at the performances of kin and nation in the (non)constitution of the child citizen in globalization, I have also exposed a fundamental inconsistency in contemporary humanitarian reason. I have raised the question of how we can reconcile compassion and justice and, accordingly, how we can better navigate human needs, human desires, and human rights in a global economy of worth. One way would be to acknowledge the extent to which postcolonial routines and modern habits converge with or constitute humanitarian intentions. In the next chapter, I make an attempt at unraveling what this entails not only for the main protagonist of this book, the adoptee, but also for the production of knowledge in an age where “knowing” is increasingly seen as a human right.

5 • ECONOMIES OF RETURN Openness, Knowledge, Relations

To an age that thinks of itself as individualistic, the revelation of relation­ship can come as something of a surprise. —­Marilyn Strathern, Kinship, Law and the Unexpected Would I rather have not been adopted? I don’t know. The question demands that I calculate unquantifiables. How can I weigh the loss of my language and culture against the freedom that America has to offer, the opportunity to have the same rights as a man? How can a person exiled as a child, without a choice, possibly fathom how he would have “turned out” had he stayed in Korea? How many educational opportunities must I mark on my tally sheet before I can say it was worth losing my mother? How can an adoptee weigh her terrible loss against the burden of gratitude she feels for her adoptive country and parents? —­Jane Jeong Trenka, The Language of Blood

In January 2012, the New York Times opened with the heading “With DNA Testing, Suddenly They Are Family” (Swarns 2012). The article describes how adoptees were increasingly turning to DNA testing companies to find out information about their birth parents and to learn about any genetic predispositions for particular diseases. DNA testing companies were particularly targeting adoptees: “There has never been a better time to establish your biological identity” was the creed of a popular adoption website, which represented an overall confidence in DNA technologies to unite blood relatives and produce information. Three years later, in January 2015, the New York Times Magazine devoted a whole section to a generation of 124



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Korean adoptees who were returning to South Korea to live and work there ( Jones 2015). In response, the South Korean state started embracing adoptees as overseas Koreans, organizing so-­called motherland tours; disbursing their travels to, from, and within South Korea; and issuing temporary F4 visas so that they could legally reside and become employed there. Whether domestic or international, stories of searches and returns became commonplace toward the end of the millennium and have progressively occupied a central place in the lives of adoptees. The desire or curiosity to find and learn about inheritance and biological relatives is not new. Yet it was only until quite recently that adoption records in North America and Western Europe remained closed in order to maintain the privacy of biological parents, especially mothers. In the 1980s, an increasing number of people became interested in this matter. Biotechnological developments made it possible for children to be conceived in different ways, including with the help of sperm and egg donors. Social developments too allowed for the formation of LGBT and single-­headed families. Also in this period, adult adoptees in the US started organizing themselves politically and, supported by birth mothers, initiated political protests and legal actions to open sealed adoption records (Carp 2000; Carp and Wegar 2002; Modell 2002).1 The geneticization of society and the diffusion of “the DNA mystique” in popular culture have brought about a heightened sense of genes being central to identity formation (Nelkin and Lindee 1995; Lebner 2000; Finkler et al. 2001). Propelled by this sense of genetic relevance, adoptees were increasingly pressed to find the “missing pieces” that supposedly governed their lives. In the language of rights and international law, the “missing pieces” were translated to the doctrine of “the right to know.” Although anonymity in adoption and donor conceptions remain highly contentious issues in the field of bioethics, from a human rights perspective, the “right to know” has been firmly placed in conventions as well as domestic laws. As described in previous chapters, open adoption is gaining traction in the US and is replacing the practice of secret adoptions (Modell 2002; Howell 2009; Yngvesson 2010). Nonetheless, the translation of this sociolegal development in the arena of transnational adoption is unclear. The right to know is often translated in the international context to include the right to know one’s biological parents and one’s birth culture (heritage) and the right to information (often meaning medical history, a subsidiarity right vis-­à-­vis other

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domestic child citizens). In this chapter, I demonstrate that the practice of agencies and states in implementing and protecting these rights have often conflated the different components. By facilitating so-­called motherland, roots, or return journeys, agencies help adoptees return to their countries of origin, where adoptees hope to find birth parents and information about their genetic history and also connect with their birth culture and heritage. In this chapter, I unpack the framework of the “right to know” that is increasingly embraced in adoption practice and focus particularly on these return journeys that have become a common event in adoptees’ lives. I single one in particular—namely, the story of Tino, a Dutch adoptee who was born in Indonesia.2 Through his narrative, I highlight a number of confrontations—­individual as well as institutional—­in the experience and management of “return.” The right to know is inextricably linked to the question of identity, and in this chapter, I examine how “knowing” affects subjectivity. I propose that in the context of transnational (and transracial) adoption, the practice of “knowing” goes beyond genetics and culture and includes knowledge of exchangeability and subalterity, structures of feeling that are deeply gendered and racialized. Returns, I argue, make visible the transaction of adoption and the exchangeability of the adoptee body in a global North-­South context. This is particularly manifested in claims of dependency and conflicting kinship economies. These instances disrupt the singularization of the adoptee subject and therefore his or her ontological existence. Returns, then, demand a reontologization of the adoptee subject and a reckoning with subalterity. Finally, in this chapter I examine how the imperative of openness affects those who do not necessarily have an interest in searching and those, like Tino, who refuse to know despite their return. This juxtaposition cracks open the question of identity politics inherent in the right to know and inherent in human rights in general. The nature of rights, as it is understood and worked with today, and as we can witness from the dynamics of cross-­ border adoption described in earlier chapters, does not allow for a conception of singularity in the pursuit of justice. Instead, rights are based on individuated and disembodied persons, a modern construction inherent in the concept of legal personhood. How might we get away from individuality and toward a legal conception of life that is singular? How might such forms of life work vis-­à-­vis identity? Can singular life displace adoption’s “tragedy of identity”?



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The Right to Know When we look at international rights regimes, the principle of the right to know is articulated in a number of ways. The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) includes the right of a child “to know his or her parents” (Article 7.1), and when this relationship is severed, the state is obliged to provide assistance and protection to reestablish the child’s identity (Article 8.2). The CRC also has a clear directive that in educating the child, adoptive parents have an important role to socialize the child about his or her own cultural identity, language, values (including national values), and civilizations (Article 29c).3 Nevertheless, the Hague Adoption Convention notes that the identity of the mother and the father may not be disclosed when the laws in the state of origin respect the privacy of the birth parents (Article 16). Although Article 30 stipulates that “authorities are to ensure that information held by them concerning the child’s origin, in particular information concerning the identity of his or her parents, as well as the medical history, is preserved” and, in point 2, that “they shall ensure that the child or his or her representative has access to such information,” this is only applicable “in so far as it is permitted by the law of that State” (30.2). There remains, then, a double standard in the formulations of the right to know. As it stands, it only applies to children born in states that allow access to adoption records. Nonetheless, although implicit, there is a clear directive in these conventions that openness is the way forward, and that states that continue to have closed records are encouraged and assisted to work toward openness. The culture of “openness” can be located differently when comparing the US and the Netherlands. In the US, the culture of openness is articulated through the emergence of “open adoption.” The 1970s witnessed the dissemination of research that gave evidence that psychological problems observed in adoptees were directly related to the laws on anonymity and culture of secrecy. The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s subsequently saw a promotion of the principles of open adoption, and the practice became increasingly common (see Grotevant and McRoy 1998; Yngvesson 1997).4 In open adoptions, birth families are still connected to the adoptee. This can range from a single meeting at the original placement, to occasional contact, to regular visits. Open adoptions are increasingly seen as a progression from the culture of secrecy in closed adoptions, when records were closed to protect

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the anonymity of the birth parents. Albeit slow, there is growing interest in European countries in open adoption (including the Nether­lands). However, more often, these welfare countries have favored long-­term foster placements over (private) adoption, preserving the biological identity of the child. Both variants (open adoption and permanent foster placements), in all their complexity and controversy, signal a move toward openness and ultimately suggest the importance of blood relationships and the idea of identity in Euro-­American societies (Schneider 1968, 24). The rise and prominence of genetics and biotechnology actively reworked this meaning of blood relationships. In his discussion of the politics of life itself, Nikolas Rose describes how the molecularization and informatization of life changed the ways in which subjects relate to their selves and to the notion of rights (2009). The overall geneticization of society also impacted the plight of adoptees. Popular culture and media successfully incorporated stories and started broadcasting programs around ancestry that brought about a public fascination with genetic genealogy. Such fascinations emphasized that knowing will lead to being. In other words, knowledge of the past promises closure or forms of completeness. Representations of so-­called birth searches, motherland visits, or roots/ return journeys have a spectacular appeal in popular media by fetishizing “origins” and sentimentalizing reunions. Couched in the growing Euro-­ American interest in genetic origins (Nash 2002, 2004), adoptees increasingly depended conceptually and commercially on the global “kinning” of genetic connectivity, the resolutely biologistic construal of DNA as the real substance of kinship itself (Faubion and Hamilton 2007, 550). The geneticization of human identity collapses identity—and by proxy, kinship—with biology and advances a discourse of determinism. This development strengthened the directive toward openness in the legal sphere, including the transnational regulation of intercountry adoption. The advocacy of openness suggests a move away from the “choice” paradigm that characterized and informed the demand for children in the wealthy North, as I described at length in chapter 1. Here, “choice” involved the reproductive choice of prospective parents to decide on a certain route in their making of families. Such decisions were not merely personal but were also symptomatic of the cultural and political economy of adoption in a particular location. Adoption as a preferred form of family making over the choice of foster care, for instance, exemplifies not only a personal choice



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but the cultural idea that the legal appropriation inherent to adoption makes for a stronger nuclear family, freed from possible constraints associated with foster care (especially the ongoing connection to birth parents). The move to openness in domestic adoption, as occurs in the US, as well as family preservation in countries such as the Netherlands and Australia, unintentionally pressed prospective parents to international adoption, pushing “choice” to cross national borders. The political economy underpinning the availability of adoptable children from particular sending states to certain receiving states makes these reproductive choices realizable.5 The push to the global arena through the tightening of regulations on reproduction and anonymity in the domestic arena demonstrates the continued desire of prospective parents to cancel out any attachments of the child to birth parents or, as Claudia Castaneda described, attachments to difficult histories of race such as the one in US history (2002, ch. 3). This explains the more recent trends of Americans adopting from African countries even though African American children are available for adoption in the US. While Angelina Jolie was at the forefront of a new wave of Americans adopting from African countries such as Ethiopia, Malawi, and South Africa, African American children were left behind in the domestic system of adoption and foster care. Fear of possible claims from birth parents was complemented by an unpreparedness to be confronted with the fraught histories attached to race relations in the US. Moreover, adopting a child from Ethiopia (rather than the Bronx, for instance) allowed one to do a “humanitarian good” by “saving” the child from a situation of deprivation in the Third World while promoting the idea of multiculturalism and racial harmony (Castaneda 2002; Dorow 2006). Unfettered by attachments, these children become racially “flexible” and readily constructed as rescuable (Dorow 2006). Ethnicity is commodified and removed from its history; it is made available as an aestheticized form and valuable resource (see also Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Some professionals from the adoption agencies I visited struggled to manage these cultural imaginations of “unfettered choices.” Institutional knowledge tells them that children from overseas are not less attached to birth parents or national histories than are their counterparts in the domestic arena. One director of a reputable and well-­established adoption agency in the US indicated that international adoption is very much entangled in the foster care system of the sending country, a fact that the agency’s

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“clients” or board members (usually represented by adoptive parents) often don’t realize: “Just the other day, I was at a board meeting where we were talking about international adoption and foster care, and . . . and somebody said, ‘Well, we don’t want to be in foster care.’ And I was like, ‘Excuse me. We are already in foster care. In Colombia, all the children that are being freed for adoption have been taken from their homes, parental rights terminated. . . . These kids have a huge history already, but you feel comfortable thinking that you don’t have to know it. But you have to help them.”6 Adoption professionals are increasingly promoting the new directive toward openness. Agencies in the US and in the Netherlands have gradually incorporated elements into the adoption process that familiarize prospective parents with the fact that the child has a history before adoption. Adoptive parents are encouraged to write (real or imaginary) letters to birth mothers, acknowledging their existence despite whether they are actually alive or known to the agency. And in the often compulsory information sessions, adoption specialists take great care to debunk the common myth that children come as tabulae rasae. Instead, they arrive “with a ‘backpack’ full of unknown experiences and genes” (Howell 2003, 477). Adoptive families are encouraged to actively engage with the adoptee’s original culture. The core question underlying the direction to openness is whether the “right to know” moves us toward an understanding of international adoption as a transnational form of care rather than as transnational reproduction. Is the goal here to also acknowledge simple adoptions, forms of adoption that were actively pushed aside in favor of full adoptions in the making of the Hague Adoption Convention (see chapter 2). From a human rights and a more prohibitive perspective, one that is committed to preventing cross-­border adoption from becoming a legalized form of child trafficking and baby selling, “open” or “simple” adoptions seem like the most ethical form to move the practice forward. Such a stance has also been taken in the arena of global practices of assisted reproduction, where critical commentators advocate for the removal of donor anonymity on a global scale. Opening the practice of international adoption challenges the commodification of the child, which depended on her being unfettered by attachments and rendered her more as a thing that could be freely circulated as opposed to a child with birth parents, grandparents, siblings, and so on. However, as I will demonstrate in this chapter, the “right to know,” as it is understood, implemented, and supported in contemporary practice and



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cultures of adoption, does not necessarily entertain the idea of openness as we have come to know it in either the cultures of domestic “open adoption” in the North or the “simple adoptions” in the South. Instead, “the right to know” still hinges on liberal “choice” in its containment of the notions of “culture,” “nation,” and “identity.” Nonetheless, returns, or reunions, open up a myriad of things beyond such liberal notions. Following the story of Tino in the next section, we can observe how returns also complicate liberal narratives of choice and freedom. While looking to find narratives of preadoption origins and to discover relations and histories that were legally cut off, Tino became implicated in what seems like incommensurable moral economies of kinship. It is the complexity of kinship economies and the transformation of relationality vis-­à-­vis ontology that makes returns a captivating object of study.

Nice Boy: The Story of Tino The story goes that in 1975, Tino Djumini was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, to a young unmarried woman who surrendered him for adoption. In 1978, when he was 3 years old and had lived in an orphanage for an unclear period of time, he was adopted into a Dutch family of four biological children, and he was renamed Valentijn Van  Dijk—­shortened to “Tijn.” Tijn’s adoptive mother was herself born in Indonesia and was of “Dutch-­ Indisch” (Eurasian) heritage, though she passed as white in daily life. She had always wanted a reconnection to this past, and via Tijn, she had hoped to create one. Tino remembers crying inconsolably in the airplane on his way to the Netherlands, knowing that something was going to dramatically change the course of his life. He also vividly remembers his first days in the Netherlands, where he had to learn to eat with cutlery, try different food, and drink milk. His adoptive family was very well off, and at the outset, they lived a very comfortable life. His father’s sudden bankruptcy and the subsequent divorce of his parents, however, lead Tijn and his mother to move out of the big house and into a small apartment. He always felt out of place and struggled deeply with identity issues. He left his mother’s home when he was 17 and stayed in a youth facility until he reached the legal adult age to live independently. After a short period of studying law and philosophy, he completed—­with distinction—­an arts degree in photography.

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I met Tino in 2003 at one of his first photography exhibitions in Jakarta, Indonesia. The exhibition was called Nice Boy and took place at the Cemara 6 Galeri in Menteng, one of the oldest and most attractive neighbor­hoods in Jakarta, featuring many stately Dutch colonial–­era mansions. The exhibition chronicled family life through the conventional genre of family portraits. The first part of the exhibition displayed photographs of adoptive families—­including his own—­in the Netherlands. The second part contained family portraits of Indonesian families, some taken in the neighborhood where he was born—­families that, as he explains, could have been his were he not adopted. The title of the exhibition, Nice Boy, echoes the description that accompanied his so-­called referral photo (see figure 5.1). It pictures him as a 3-­year-­old boy in an orphanage in Jakarta, probably around 1978. At the back of the picture were the handwritten words: “nice boy.” It was not long after this photo was taken that Tino was adopted by his Dutch adoptive parents. As several scholars working on transnational adoption have indicated, the referral photo is more than merely part of a mundane practice

Figure 5.1. Front side of the referral photo with the caption “Tino 3 years, orphanage

Jakarta” and back side with the caption “nice boy, take on 15/4/78.” Courtesy of Tino Djumini; my translations from Dutch.



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complementing the work of agencies to match children to parents. In the US, where referral photos are made public and “waiting children” are displayed in anticipation of interested prospective parents, they fulfill an important role in their humanitarian appeal to prospective parents, while at the same time they function “to predict the health and psychosocial status of children in the adoption market” (Cartwright 2003, 105; see also chapter 3 of this book). Although this is not a novel practice, what is new is that the portrait, “in place of the body,” becomes the object of scrutiny (Cartwright 2003, 105). Race, gender, age, health, and ability inform the desirability of particular adoptees’ bodies; this information is “squeezed” from the referral photo (Castaneda 2002; Cartwright 2003; Gailey 2010; Nelson 2006; Shiu 2001). Referral photos also help adoptive parents imagine and appropriate their future child, to make him or her part of their lives. In describing the role of the ultrasound in pregnancy, Janelle Taylor (2004) describes how the public fetus is produced by fetishizing the ultrasound images. Referral photos have the performative effect of bonding the future child with the adoptive parents much in the same way as the ultrasound echo does with biological parents. Like the ultrasound, the referral photo establishes the first consumptive relation of the parents to their future child. But what power does the photo have for the adult adoptee? It is not an accident that the referral photo is so central in Tino Djumini’s exhibition. The particular artifact of the referral photo has been used by several other artists in reflecting on their preadoption lives.7 For many adoptees, the referral photo is one of the few pieces of material evidence they have from their lives before they were adopted. For however short that period was, there is a story to be told, which might reveal how the adoptee became adoptable. For some, the insight into the process of becoming adoptable brings to the fore their precarious status as interchangeable: “It could have been someone else who was adopted in this family instead of me.” In her research on adult adoptees from Korea, anthropologist Eleana Kim references this feeling of exchange when she describes a public comment by a Swedish-­Korean adult adoptee who, speaking to an audience of adult adoptees, said, “I have a family in Sweden and a family in Korea. You are my third family. It’s important to take care of each other because we are a family, and I could be you, you could be him, he could be her.” The adoptive family, Kim argues, is “based on a peculiar mix of inalienability and substitutability

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that recalls the ambivalent origins of adoptees who may be viewed either as precious gifts or exchangeable commodities” (2010, 95). Adoptees recognize in each other their common fate—­namely, that their lives had a contingent origin. This very same contingency is evoked when new information regarding the circumstances of birth or adoption is revealed to the adoptee. When adoptees find or are provided with information that deviates from the information documented in their adoption files, the new information can have what Marilyn Strathern calls a “constitutive effect”: “Because of its cultural coupling with identity, kinship knowledge is a particular kind of knowledge; the information (and verification) on which it draws is constitutive in its consequences” (1999, 68). Strathern here alludes to the constitutive effect when an adoptee learns about the existence of his or her biological kin. I would further argue that in the complex globalized legal practice of adoption, such “constitutive knowledge” also operates beyond information on biological kinship and includes all kinds of information (often mediated through documents) relating to the conditions of how one became adoptable. As science studies scholars have argued, information (including scientific information) is neither value neutral nor universally valid, and information alone is not likely to resolve normative and political conflicts ( Jasanoff 1990). In disentangling information, it is important to examine who is disclosing the information, to whom the information is disclosed, what the disclosure is about, and what end this disclosure is supposed to meet (Gupta 2008, 6). While the referral photo acts as evidence of life before adoption, new constitutive information (from birth records, hospital records, midwives’ reports, witnesses) reconstructs the circumstances that allowed one to become adoptable. At one point, for instance, Tino found out that he was two years older than he always believed he was. He explained how this news had an alienating effect: “It was as if I felt like a different person.” Such an alienating feeling can be interpreted as a constitutive shift in Tino’s perception of self. In this case, this realization was accompanied by a feeling of devaluation, as if the two years “not lived” were surplus years and not worthy of documentation.8 In adoption practice, the actual or medically determined ages of children are sometimes “adjusted” to make them legally adoptable in both sending and receiving countries.9 Leaving aside whether this was the case in Tino’s



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situation, such adjustments—­often made from the humanitarian conviction that it was in the best interest of the child—­do more than merely make the child adoptable. As a lived reality for the singularized Western adoptee subject, the knowledge of such adjustments makes one’s ontological constitution precarious. This ontological precarity inhibits adoptees to take returns to their country of origin lightly. In bringing to the fore the context of abandonment, returns evoke the tragedy of identity. Photography, Tino told me, was a safe medium through which he could explore questions about origin, identity, belonging, relating, and place while visiting Indonesia. Adjacent to stories narrated by other adult adoptees, his return to Indonesia and the reunion with his birth mother did not deliver the emotional closure that the trope of reunions in general promises. Instead, returns and reunions are rife with tension, conflict, and struggle. They yield more questions and produce multiple and opposing truths. Tino’s relation to his photography, however, allows him to play with identity, to crack identity, keeping at bay the imperative of knowing inherent to returns.

Situating Returns Tino was adopted in a time when international adoption was not—­as it is today—­incorporated in a global reproductive economy. Humanitarianism was the primary justification for adopting internationally in the 1970s, and it was not unusual for Dutch families to already have several biological children before they embarked upon adoption. The motto “Even if you only save one” (Al redt je er maar één) was a highly mediated message from the well-­known Dutch children’s writer Jan de Hartog, who made several high-­ profile public appearances to advocate for international adoption in the 1970s. Similar to pleas from adoption advocates in the US, Canada, Australia, and other European countries in that same period, humanitarian efforts to save children’s lives led to adoptions of children from war-­torn regions (e.g., baby lifts from Vietnam and South Korea) and adoptions from former colonies (like Indonesia for the Dutch, the Congo for the Belgians, and Haiti for the French). In one of my interviews with him, Tino described the pressure to make something out of his life, the pressure of gratefulness:

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I’ve always felt the pressure of having to be grateful. Grateful for having a second chance. This made me feel like I had to do my extra best at school and to perform better than the other kids. . . . If I had stayed in Indonesia, I don’t know [what] my life would have looked like. But I also couldn’t really ask myself that question. All I knew was that I had to survive in the Netherlands as well . . . just as . . . yes, just as I would have had to in Indonesia. More in the sense of forgetting what was done to me in the past and adapt[ing] as much as possible in order to get an identity again, to become Dutch. I’ve put in a lot of effort to become Dutch. And all this time, I tucked away Indonesia. Because that was too painful.10

As Tino’s experience illustrates, the affective labor performed by adoptees are not limited to their relation with their adoptive parents or families—­it extends to the nation-­state. Many adult adoptees describe the efforts they’ve put in as giving evidence to their Americanness (Eng 2003), their Swedishness (Yngvesson 2012), their Belgianness (De Graeve 2015), or their Dutchness (van  Wichelen 2015). By putting a lot of effort into becoming Dutch, Tino describes the making of a “new identity,” which necessarily required the erasure of a previous identity. The labor involved consists of the capacities to adapt, a form of labor that is not exclusive to adoptees—­one could think of children in migrant families, mixed-­race families, queer families, or families with disabilities—­but in the case of (transnational) adoption, there is a legal forcefulness in their existence that is not evident in other cases. The legal forcefulness can be understood as the way in which legal adoption—­ in the context of cross-­ border adoption—­ forces onto the child not only a new family but also a new nationality. Of course, one can argue that all of us are forced into a nationality through birth, but in transnational adoption, the nationality at birth is legally stripped away to “naturalize” the child into their new nation. The “clean break” as a consequence of legal adoption is central to both erasing and confirming circulation: the unidirectional act conceals one’s preadoptive past while constituting a new (property) relationship with the adoptive parents. As legal anthropologist Barbara Yngvesson so eloquently argues, because of this legal event, adoptee kinship is “always already about the child left behind” (2002, 238–­240). Adoptive kinship involves kinship knowledge in which life is capitalized, circulated, and exchanged.



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Despite Tino’s efforts to assimilate, he always felt out of place. Biology played a major role. He explained how his height, posture, hair, and skin color made him stand out strongly in his family, in the predominantly white environment in which he grew up, and by extension, in Dutch society. It was this feeling of displacement that he tried to capture in the Nice Boy exhibition by displaying family portraits of adoptive families in the Netherlands. Figure 5.2 gives a photographic account of his own adoptive family. Visual interpellation plays a major role in the labor of belonging. Many adoptees are interpellated in white society as coming from somewhere else. Their skin color, their height, their body shape—­that is, their phenotype—­ conjures foreignness and demands that they place themselves in a particular narrative, one that is located outside of Dutch origins. As long as adoptees are young and in close physical proximity to their adoptive parents, they can more readily appeal to their status as being adopted. But once they are on their own, they feel the need to perform the labor of evidencing their national identity. Much like second-­or third-­generation migrants who

Figure 5.2. Tino as an adult with his adoptive parents in the Netherlands. Courtesy of

Tino Djumini.

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might feel Dutch, American, Australian but are still seen as foreign and as not belonging, adoptees are marked by their difference. This seems to manifest itself particularly strongly in European countries, where hyphenated identities are less readily available. Nonetheless, even in countries where such hyphenations have been common practice (such as the US, Canada, and Australia), adoptees do not feel they can occupy this space, for they do not see themselves as being in between two cultures. On the contrary, many have described “feeling white” and have felt uncomfortable with seeing their own racially marked appearance in the mirror (Trenka 2003; Trenka, Oparah, and Shin 2006). On par with migrants, Dutch adoptees were expected to assimilate as much as possible to Dutch society. Many of them were raised in suburban and predominantly white environments, where they were often the only “foreign” body in their neighborhoods and schools. Race was a much eschewed topic in the Netherlands, with its complex colonial history and troubled role in the Second World War (see Essed 1991; Essed and Hoving 2014; De Leeuw and van Wichelen 2014a). The adoptee was to naturally blend in through the power of “kinning” (Howell 2009). There was a widespread belief that socialization (pitted against biological determinism) could overcome any early deprivations and childhood adversities. Moreover, antiracist discourses supported such socialization theories and emphasized the ability of “foreign” bodies to assimilate into Dutch society. Tino’s story illustrates, however, that one can perform and appropriate Dutchness, but one’s appearance will still be marked by racial difference. Among other things, the pain of this displacement and the search for belonging often led adoptees to embark on return journeys. Ironically, in the same period that adoptees who were adopted in the 1970s were starting return visits to their countries of origin, the Netherlands—­following other countries—­moved away from theories of assimilation. The 1990s saw the rise of so-­called color-­blind and multiculturalist approaches. This was particularly true in North America (Quiroz 2007) and the Antipodes (Murphy, Pinto, and Cuthbert 2010). Despite the politicization of adoption in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia—­involving histories of forced removals of children from indigenous families and, in the US, the politics of transracial adoption—­it became more and more acceptable and commonplace to adopt transracially.11 Color-­blind and multiculturalist approaches to society motivated by formal government policies and programs created the conditions for international adoption to grow. These approaches also created the conditions for what sociologist Heather Jacobson



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(2008) calls “culture keeping” in adoption. Here, Jacobson refers to the maternal labor of mostly white mothers and their efforts to socialize and familiarize their adoptive children with the culture of their biological parents / birth countries. Culture keeping as a practice can be traced to Article 16 of the Hague Adoption Convention, in which children are to be given “due consideration to the child’s upbringing, ethnic, religious and cultural background.”12 While emphasizing the multiculturalist valorization of racial diversity (Castaneda 2002), this principle also helped define a culture and practice of knowing and of returns.13 Pointing to the more outward forms of “culture keeping” that attend to tangible artifacts and events rather than “deep” intangible cultural features like values and norms (for instance, by celebrating Chinese New Year or going to the local Chinatown to attend to the “culture” of children adopted from China), many found that “culture keeping” was not protecting adoptees from the subtle, institutionalized, or more blatant forms of racism in western society. In response, adoptive families have started to define themselves as transracial. This has been a popular move especially in the US, where adoption experts often advise families to see themselves as multiracial, and these families are encouraged to interact with migrant populations of the same origin as their adoptive child; thus the child and parents can gain more knowledge about the adoptee’s culture of origin and the child can experience proximity to people of the same racial makeup.14 Many transgressive stories have come out of such cross-­cultural experiences, documenting the challenges to cultures of whiteness as well as the willingness of adoptive parents to adapt to the child rather than the other way around (De Graeve 2015). One could argue that in contrast to a form of a superficial “culture keeping” that keeps culture at the surface, a more profound engagement with race and racial inequality allows for the recognition of pain, discrimination, and racism experienced by adoptees. In the Dutch context, “culture keeping” was equally contested. Reacting against culture keeping and emerging critical voices in the adoption community that claimed adoption was a “colonial drama,” Stephan Sanders (2007), a well-­known columnist and a domestic transracial adoptee, explains that adoptees—­like any other people who are raised in the Netherlands—­make their own choices regarding who they are or want to become. Why, he asks, would he need to go to African dance and not be familiarized instead with the classical music composed by Bach? He compares the adoptee who grows up in a white family with the gay child who grows up in a straight household: he or she too does not get the help needed to deal with his or her sexual identity. The language of “choice” in Sanders’s

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critique of “culture keeping” and “cultural identity” more broadly assumes that racial differences do not have to matter. Moreover, Sanders disparages the pathologization of adoptees, which assumes that every adopted person must suffer psychologically from the fact of their adoption and that (therefore) they will all naturally want to know where they came from. Not everyone wants to “return.” In responding to politicized voices of adoptees advocating rigorous adoption reform or abolition, other adoptees have voiced their relative contentment with their lives and would rather not associate themselves too much with adoption or the country they originate from. As Rehana de Vries, adopted from Bangladesh in 1974, explains, “In the past I had regular contact with colleagues who were also adopted and they were searching for their parents, family members, their ‘roots’ as they so nicely call it now. Their goal is to gain more insight into their personality, often because they ‘miss a part of themselves.’ I can’t find that need in myself. I was grown up here, my personality was formed here, I am who I am and I am complete!” (De Vries in Hoksbergen 2011, 275; my translation). One could argue—­as does anthropologist Signe Howell (2009)—­that the new dominant trend to finding one’s roots is biocentric; it privileges genetics over social parenthood. The increasing biologization of kinship, Howell argues, fuels the general public’s interest in “roots.” While de Vries maintains that the majority of adoptees in Norway do not feel the need to engage with the “roots question,” this position of distantiation has been difficult given the overwhelming public interest in genetic genealogy. Although pitted against each other, both “culture keeping” and “cultural autonomy” are couched in the language of choice. The liberal choice over identity prevails: “Insofar as the child has racial identity (as opposed to a racial make-­up) the child nevertheless exercises a liberal ‘choice,’ such that the child is ultimately self-­racializing” (Castaneda 2002, 91–­92). Adoption is here imagined as the capability of the adoptee’s body to “merge” or “morph” into the adoptive family and adoptive nation: “It is the power to reproduce not only without the constraints of history, but without historical contingency” (Castaneda 2002, 94–­95). Similarly, in culture keeping, history is effectively erased from culture in the sense that culture is merely represented as happy multiculturalism rather than as embodying complicated histories and practice.



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Economies of Return With the help of popular media and his colleagues in the Jakartan photography community, Tino found his biological mother. I met him again in the Netherlands when he had just received the news. Apparently, Tino’s mother had contacted the magazine where an article was published about his adoption. He decided to travel to Indonesia to meet her. He also incorporated her and her family into his photography series, as depicted in figure 5.3. At a later meeting, he described his first double-­ edged encounter: “Who was this woman who claims that I am her son? What is her story?” He maintained that he did not want to carry out a DNA test to confirm his genetic relationship to her. I did not quite understand this refusal, but after he explained the following, it dawned on me what was at stake: In fact, I have made her my mother through my photography. The truth is, of course, very complex. I had no expectations really, but she had very high expectations of me. . . . At one point, she wanted me to live with her and for

Figure 5.3. Tino with his biological family in Indonesia. Courtesy of Tino

Djumini.

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me to pay the yearly rent. I found that strange. In the Netherlands, you leave the house when you get older; you don’t move in with your mother. That’s when I started to get a little suspicious . . . yes . . . it wasn’t my role. I then talked to some of my [Dutch] friends, and they said you don’t even know if she’s your biological mother. The rest of [her] family [was] happy for me to take care of her. . . . eventually, she sent me a letter stating how she thought I was an unfilial child [anak derhaka]. A good son would have cared for [his] mother.15

While agencies and adoptive parents increasingly invest in the cultural backgrounds of adopted children, adoptees are increasingly encouraged to learn about their countries of origin. As long as these interactions remain in the domain of “culture,” moral friction seems to be contained. This changes, however, when money enters the relationship. As soon as birth parents or extended families demand some form of financial support by means of economic remittances, a moral crisis transpires for the concerned individuals in the West. Many adoptees have described the demand of birth parents for money as a turning point in their relations with them. For Tino, accepting a monetarily dependent relationship with a mother who had abandoned him would have confirmed the status of his exchangeability—­his body as transactional commodity to be abandoned when seen as a burden and reappropriated when seen as valuable. His Euro-­American modern and liberal sensibilities saw the need for economic dependency as a violation of his autonomy as well as his ontologized singularity. One would think that Tino’s refusal to perform a DNA test goes against modern sense. As Marilyn Strathern comments, “The more (Euro) Americans learn about the biological facts of procreation, the more they feel informed about the facts of kinship” (2005, 9). But there’s a clear objective to his refusal—­namely, a refusal to relate to and subsequently accept a moral and economic relationship with the proposed mother. This can be seen as an individualistic position. Tino’s friends reveal the imperative of genetic relevance. By questioning the woman’s true biological relationship with Tino, they indicate that before he has the (scientific) knowledge that he is or is not biologically related to her, he is not morally accountable in any way. But even if he were to conduct a DNA test and it was established that she was his biological mother, theorists of reproductive technologies have argued that knowledge about genetic connections gives people a choice,



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not an obligation: people make conscious decisions about whether they establish new social relations with people with whom they have a genetic connection (Strathern 2005, 26). Biotechnology in this sense has merely introduced a molecularized organization of the kinds of separations, cuts, and combinations that have always characterized relations between persons (Strathern 2005, 30). Many adoptees who do locate their biological relatives choose not to form relationships with them, content with only acquiring the knowledge.16 I propose, however, that this decision—­whether or not to relate—­is shaped by a moral economic component undertheorized in the literature of transnational adoption. It concerns a clash of kinship economies that involves not only the confrontation of different kinship systems but also the deep ontological differences in thinking about exchange within the family. Following Polanyi (1957 [1944]), economies that involve the explicit uses of social relations are defined by “thick reciprocity.” Such reciprocity is different from exchanges in markets that are defined by direct expectations of turnover and cost-­benefit calculations. Instead, “thick reciprocity” does not define how obligations should be filled; it is not confined to the relation between the giver and the receiver, and it does not expect immediate return. In other words, we can have different forms of obligations that can be “returned” to many people or to a community, and it might take years for reciprocal gestures to take place (Block 2008). Thick reciprocities are not confined to premodern societies (Mauss 1990); however, they have particular configurations within Euro-­American cultures. Viviana Zelizer (2000), for instance, describes in The Purchase of Intimacy the “connected lives” of American couples, where the blurring of boundaries between economy and intimacy happens on a daily basis. Similarly, Daniel Miller (1997, 2004), in his study of middle-­class mothers in North London, describes how Euro-­ American subjects are entangled within a specific cultural, political, and affective economy formed by modern moralities. These American couples and British middle-­class mothers are entwined in complex expectations of thick reciprocity. Although thick reciprocity does not demand a calculative attitude toward conjugal or familial obligations, it does suggest the careful and inventive management of expectations regarding the economy of family life, household, care, and intimacy. Scholarship on the cultures of remittances in transnational migration has described how migrants remain indebted to their original communities and

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contribute to their economies by sending regular installments of money. Such practices take place within a moral economy of social belonging and can be described as “guilt-­inducing processes” (Hage 2002, 203). While adoptees do experience guilt, and some do arrange for financial assistance to be sent to their biological relatives, they do not necessarily see these payments as remittances. Rather than driven by filial piety, such forms of financial support can more aptly be described as humanitarian assistance born out of postcolonial guilt. One could argue that it can be a form of humanitarianism because for many adoptees, the experience of return does not necessarily translate into social belonging. Adoption displaces kinship economies. While Tino is embedded in the economy of his Dutch adoptive family by means of his upbringing, he is pulled back to the kinship economy of his Javanese birth mother through the authority of genealogy and blood relations. Tino’s refusal to relate can be understood as a refusal to be incorporated into the “thick reciprocities” of Javanese kinship. From Tino’s Dutch point of view, the birth mother’s initial act of abandonment in the past and the legal cut-­off of adoption’s intervention releases him from the filial obligation to take care of her in the present. In fact, his birth mother’s demand for him to live with her and to provide her with financial support turns a humanitarian adoption into a Third World investment, thereby changing the premise of adoption as a form of child welfare into a technique of alternative income. To Euro-­ American sensibilities, the “child as resource” idea evoked by his birth mother goes against the idea of the “child as priceless,” which is upheld in Euro-­American cultural systems. For Tino—­as for many other adoptees—­the encounter with biological kin is not necessarily about “becoming complete”; on the contrary, many describe their returns as opening structures of feeling rather than providing them with emotional closure. It is instead about constructing a preadoptive narrative and going back to the adoptee’s legal abandonment that constituted him or her as adoptable. One explanation for the powerful feelings adoptees have when returning is that the two bodies (the adopted self and the abandoned self) collapse. As Yngvesson argues, recognizing such a dynamic in adoptive kinship “may provide the relational ground for reconceptualizing not only the forms of ‘kinning’ required to make families complete through adoption, but for reconfiguring the family template on which adoptive kinship is based” (2013, 364). This “reconfiguration”



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often involves a deep awareness of postcolonial precarity. Adoptees are confronted with what Yngvesson, quoting Stuart Hall (1997, 50), describes as “the really hard game which the play of difference actually means to us historically” and, quoting Balibar (1991, 44), with inhabiting “the constantly shifting frontier—­irreducible to the frontiers between states—­between two humanities which seem incommensurable, namely the humanity of destitution and that of ‘consumption,’ the humanity of underdevelopment and that of overdevelopment” (see Yngvesson 2010, 150). In The Language of Blood, Jane Jeong Trenka (2003) describes how her return visits have reaffirmed feelings of ambivalence, shame, and unworthiness rather than joy and gratefulness. For her, they relate to the imagination of how her life might have been had she not been adopted to a family in the “wealthy West”: “I have been rescued by adoption; had I stayed in Korea I would have been institutionalized, after which I would have turned into what Asian girls tend to turn into if left to their own devices: a prostitute” (198). Adoptive kinship links economies that occupy different conditions of life. Adoptees’ experiences of return exemplify the complex labor of trying to make sense of and bring together these different regimes of value. As is evident from Trenka’s experience, the postcolonial dimension in adoptive kinship involves the valuation of the singularized life of the adoptee in the Global North and the devaluation of the surplussed child, orphaned or abandoned, in the Global South. Trenka’s assertion that the (orphaned or abandoned) Asian girl cannot escape the trope of the Third World prostitute reveals the extent to which such children’s bodies are rendered as “bare life” (Agamben 1998; see also Kim 2010)—­lives that can only be saved. Therefore, the ultimate “second chance” these children get through adoption relates to the sanctity of “life itself.” This is why the narrative of rescue within frameworks of war, conflict, and famine are so powerful within a humanitarian justification of adoption as well as within a Christian doctrine of salvation. The invocation of “bare life” only works within the humanitarian paradigm of adoption when it is detached from any other relation, whether biological or social. The promise of adoptive kinship, particularly in the transnational context, is premised on the unfettered child. Yngvesson (2002) illustrates how this unidirectional dynamic of legal adoption denies adoptive kinship the merit of exchange or gift, and it is for this reason that

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the globalization of adoption falls within the economy of commodity markets. Moreover, as Carsten notes, “While the underlying premise of a gift economy is the expansion of social relations, the logic of a commodity economy depends on the appropriation of goods” (Carsten 2004, 94). The transsubstantive process of “kinning” (Howell 2009) that takes place in the adoptive family can be regarded as such an appropriation, and the event of “return” can evoke in adoptees the knowledge of such an economic constellation rather than a happy reunion with kin.

Life and Law as Relational When meeting his “biological” mother for the first time, Tino described that this event was not just a private event; it was a thoroughly public one. While the media and the people involved in his search anticipated a happy reunion, it was not uncommon for ordinary people to meddle in his affairs and to comment on the reunion (“You must be happy finally finding your mother!”). The publicness of Tino’s reunion was evident in both Indonesia and in the Netherlands. While the popular magazine Wanita Indonesia documented his story, the documentary Tijn . . . Tino by filmmaker Carina Ellemers (Humanistische omroep 2007) was aired on Dutch national television. Both events evidence the spectrality of reunions, which can be understood in a framework that brings together “heritage” and “heredity.” In this case, the quest regarding heredity involves adoptees working out the consequences of discovering a genetic connection, while the quest regarding heritage amounts to “abstract justifications for ethical behavior” (Strathern 2005, 21): both prompt attitudes thoroughly familiar to Euro-­American ideas of the nuclear family. Although heredity seems like a matter for the private family unit, it becomes public when (biological) knowledge shifts the relational configuration of that family unit. The story becomes about genetic families as well as humanity more generally. At the end of my last meeting with him in 2005, Tino lived on the poorer outskirts of Jakarta. He distanced himself from his adoptive family, and his adoptive mother passed away in the third year he was away. He married an Indonesian woman named Desi (see figure 5.4), and in 2006 they had a son, who they named Kivan. Tino also converted to Islam. Like other Indonesians, he regularly eats with his fingers. But most importantly,



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Figure 5.4. Marriage photo of Tino and his wife, Desi, in Jakarta, Indonesia. Courtesy of Tino Djumini.

he had immersed himself in his local community, living a life entangled with others. One could say that he is living a life that could have been imagined before the intervention of adoption. However, such a reading puts identity and culture into a realm of purity and authenticity and feeds on the spectrality of reunions described earlier. What I’ve tried to illustrate through this chapter is that instead, Tino is living a life that he invented through the experience of adoption. The difference between discovery and invention is not—­as Strathern notes—­just a scientific (or legal) distinction but is axiomatic to a view interested in knowledge about the world that sets up relations between the given and the made (2005, 13). Away from the public gaze, the presumed kin relation comes with unpredicted disclosures. By refusing the kinship test, Tino refuses the intervention of science so as to refuse the responsibility that comes with that knowledge. Refusing this knowledge helps him protect himself from a moral obligation to his proposed mother. Seen from this perspective, the refusal gives him the choice to relate. But it is exactly this notion of “choice” that is troubled in transnational adoption. At the heart of global adoption’s legality stands the paradox of

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choice. The adoptee, as a figuration displaced from his or her origins, both disrupts and confirms the dualisms of choice/nonchoice, personhood/ nonpersonhood, autonomy/nonautonomy, and legitimacy/illegitimacy, for they depend on illiberal subjectivities. As Coutin, Maurer, and Yngvesson argue, “Choice is part of the morality tale that animates Western stories of self and of nation. These stories of self and nation are measured against liberal legalities, yet at the same time these legalities depend on illiberal subjectivities. . . . In liberal views of personhood, rooting is integral to freedom, defined as the power to choose for oneself. Rooting is also the basis for individuation, continuity, and self-­integration (Radin 1996, 76–­77). Persons who are not rooted are, in effect, nonpersons whose ‘choices’ cannot be considered ‘free’” (2002, 825). I would like here to turn to the subject of law, for it is in adoption law that rootedness becomes disturbed. Thrown in a particular transnational context (one in which countries in the Global South are sending their children to receiving countries in the Global North), adoption law exemplifies the dependency of liberal legality (modern legal adoption) on illiberal subjectivities (illegitimate births, nonchoices, and nonpersons). Although international law tries hard to construe choices out of nonchoices by implementing “standards,” “bureaucracies,” “best practices,” and/or “transparency” (see chapter 2), these are all attempts to apply particular understandings of choice within spaces outside of the legitimate sovereign space in which choice, autonomy, personhood, and legitimacy have been given meaning by Western culture. Tino’s “choice,” within a context that does not enact that choice, can be understood as upsetting a particular situated cultural order, one in which his refusal could be understood as betrayal. However, it is the sense of autonomy and personhood attached to this choice that keeps Tino close to a sense of self. Moreover, seen from the liberal view of personhood, his decision to “lay down roots” in Indonesia, to live and work there and start a family, can also be interpreted as trying to create the conditions for ultimate autonomy, a sense of individuation, continuity, and self-­integration. Drawing from the work of Roberto Esposito (2008), we can argue that adoption law is a law of the immune and feeds on what he terms the “immunization paradigm.” This paradigm consists of three dispositifs—­namely, sovereignty, property, and liberty—­which make immunity constitutive of



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liberal and modern political life. As explained by Campbell in his introduction to Biopolitics, For Esposito, immunity is coterminous with community. It does not simply negate communitas by protecting it from what is external, but rather is inscribed in the horizon of the communal munus. . . . Immunity connotes the means by which the individual is defended from the “expropriative effects” of the community, protecting the one who carries it from the risk of contact with those who do not (the risk being precisely the loss of individual identity). The condition of immunity signifies both “not to be and not to have in common.” Seen from this perspective, immunity presupposes community, but also negates it, so that rather than centered simply on reciprocity, community doubles upon itself, protecting itself from a presupposed excess of communal gift-­giving. (2004, x–­xi)

As a modern way of making families, adoption both assumes and contradicts community. While affirming modern relations, at the same time, it also cuts off relations. “Kinning,” therefore, can be seen as an immunization process and understood as a process that both protects and “in some cases negates a commonly held life” (Campbell and Sitze 2013, 30). But it gets more complex when analyzing legal adoption as a humanitarian intervention across sovereign borders. Realized through the legal governance of the Hague Adoption Convention, adoption can be understood as an autoimmunitary form of contemporary biopolitics (Esposito 2008, 147). The liberal subject of law is uniquely immunized from life. It conceives of itself first in terms of individuated persons and only second as a social body. In other words, while individualization secures and preserves life in the logic of immunity, by reducing the adoptable orphan and the salvaged adoptee to their biological existence, it also negates their singularity. As Esposito argues, this immunitary logic can lead to the destruction of the body and the body politic by its negative form of protecting and the negation of life (2008, 56; see also Lemke 2011, 90). But can adoption law work toward a law of the common? In the legal sphere and in the present situation, it seems that such a change could only be described as utopian. It would entail radically reforming adoption practice, encouraging communal forms of fostering and alternative forms of

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parenthood, transgressing citizenship, and configuring life, identity, and personhood to an understanding that is relational. One problem that arises is the place of identity politics in the framework of rights. Does working toward a law of the common mean that life should be thrown back to the “community” as a form of identity politics? Although attuned to the plight of family preservation, especially in light of past wrongs such as the removal of indigenous children from their communities in North America and Australia, or of African American and Latino children in the US, I maintain that family preservation on the basis of identity politics will ultimately lead to the essentialization of culture and identity that goes against the singularization of life. The case of adoption illustrates—­much like instances of communal identities elsewhere—­that violence can be an inherent aspect of communal life and that sometimes it is the very reason these children were abandoned in the first place. Sociologist Yasmeen Arif (2016) argues that both communal (based on the other) as well as individuated immunity (liberal) fail to care for the self. And this is reflected in Euro-­American law, especially in our human rights regimes. The framework of “rights” works only through the claims of a certain identity. You cannot approach law unless you have this marked identity; hence law incorporates as prescription a form of immunity but enacts an identity politics of the communal and therefore immunized forms of life. So how might forms of life work vis-­à-­vis identity? Paul Gilroy (2000) suggests that one way would be to dispense with race. This does not mean that race is not important but that it cannot be based on identity politics: “That depressing pseudo-­political gesture supplies an alibi for narcissistic quiescence and resignation to the world as it is” (2000, 66). Culture keeping in contemporary adoption practice can be seen as embodying such a gesture. So does “happy multiculturalism” in contemporary liberal democracies (Ahmed 2007; Ang 1996). With respect to the story of adoption, the adoptee’s struggle with belonging and identity does not fit neatly into the framework of identity politics as defined by the communal. Instead, the adoptee, in engaging with their “origins,” becomes a hybrid: “Purity becomes impossible, and hybridity ceases to be the exclusive preoccupation of some imaginary postcolonial elite. Instead, it becomes a routine principle of unruly multi-­culture” (Gilroy 2000, 151). For adoptees, as for other hybrids, identity seems to be more aptly described as a provisional place and geared toward “life politics” rather than



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“identity politics.” In relation to the law, such a position refuses disembodiment. As the legal theorist Patrick Hanafin argues, “Within this space of relation above the law what is performed is a right to refuse to be rendered disembodied which is so powerful because not given by some divine power or moral code. This right to refuse disembodiment calls us to think beyond the State and our role in the biopolitical matrix. It is a praxis of politics as relational” (2008, 87). Hanafin goes back to the work of Agamben to illustrate how the state can recognize claims of identity but is incapable of tolerating singularities that form a community regardless of a common identity: “Whatever singularity . . . [that] rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State” (Agamben 1996, 84–­86, in Hanafin 2008, 87). A relational notion of rights would radically alter the legal regimes underpinning adoption, both in the domestic and in the international arena, and push forward the democratic principles based on social justice rather than humanitarianism. It would be a politics of “singularities without identity, without qualities, whos not whats” (Hanafin 2008, 88). Such a praxis would refuse to fix the adoptee to one place through legal decrees and would acknowledge embodiment as part of the politics of life.

Conclusion I started this chapter by outlining some of the social changes pertaining to the meaning and politics of reproduction, particularly in light of new reproductive technologies that have had direct impacts on the practice and politics of adoption. In public life, these changes have, among other things, culminated in a culture and legality of the “right to know.” Birth searches and “return journeys” exemplify this culture in the world of adoption. Through the story of Tino, I traced one such experience with “return.” My analysis proposed that “knowing” supersedes genetic or cultural curiosity and includes knowledge of exchangeability as well as subalterity that are deeply defined by bodily markers of identity and global inequalities. Returns, then, revealed the transaction of adoption, which manifested particularly in claims of dependency and conflicting kinship economies. By disrupting the singularization of the adoptee’s life, “returns” often called for a reontologization of the adoptee subject.

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My aim for this chapter was also to think more critically about the question of identity politics that is inherent in the right to know and that is constitutive of the idea of human rights more broadly. Contrary to the singularity of life, “rights” are based on the notion of the “identity” of individuated and disembodied persons, a modern construction inherent to the concept of legal personhood. Returns in particular made visible how the body occupies a central role in the narrative of origins. For instance, whereas identical markers such as ethnicity and culture are represented by law, racial embodiments that are displaced from certain cultures or ethnicities (as in adoptees’ bodies but also in racialized bodies more generally) pose a particular problem in the liberal imagination of multiculturalism. The legality of “clean breaks” allow the adoptee and the adoptive family to be integrated into the (neo)liberal idea of (happy) multiculturalism. But practices like “culture keeping” in adoption, seen as a response to “clean breaks,” are symptomatic of such a problem too. While immunizing the family unit, the practice reattaches the adoptee to her culture of origin and thereby negates her singularity. How to imagine cross-­border adoption outside of these parameters and legalities was one of the major questions leading the final part of the chapter. Family life that goes against “clean breaks” and against the liberal imperative of the nuclear unit, of course, already exists. One can think of relationships with extended kin, fostering arrangements, cultures of child circulation, queer families, blended families, and as defined more recently, “multispecies families.” They involve the production of unclear families rather than nuclear families. Such family forms are not narrow or wide; instead, they have no clear boundary (Simpson 1994; Segalen 2001).17 In non-­Western, indigenous, and particular Euro-­American cultures, we can observe kin relations that deviate from the nuclear imperative and include multiple-­parenthood and alternative forms of parenting and relating. Stimulating diverse forms of family life would upend the immunitary paradigm and encourage “kinning” as a practice beyond the conventional liberal and modern understandings of family and family life. The idea of “life” as being relational is central to such a change. Instead of starting from the premise of individuals and persons, relational life starts from preindividuated and depersonalized singularities of the world. Although legalities often hold back the potentialities of relational lives, there are alternative avenues of enacting relationality. It might be here that



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one should follow Julie Katherine Gibson-­Graham, who argued that acceptance of how we represent the world will in fact contribute to enacting that world, and by doing this, the discrepancy between epistemology and ontology will collapse (2008; 2014, S149, my emphasis). Hence it is by theorizing and living such a diverse and relational family life—­one that leaves open its potentiality—­that we can imagine and come to know and inhabit different economies of living together.

CONCLUSION Legitimating Life

On a sunny Monday morning in September 2012, I was meeting Iris Vonk, the director of the adoption agency Children’s Alliance, where I had conducted my ethnographic research a few years earlier. We met at a bistro in a small town near Utrecht, where the tranquility of the restaurant’s garden terrace stood in stark contrast to the intense burden of Vonk’s narrative. It was three years after she had resigned from the agency, and she confided in me that it was a struggle to find another suitable position. She was thinking of writing a book about the ordeal she’d been through. Despite the personal and professional grief her resignation had caused, she was still confident about the choices she made. Vonk resigned because she could no longer support the way in which international adoption was being practiced by her own organization. She pointed to the increasing risks of trafficking that were inherent to the current adoption system, a system that was increasingly dependent on market mechanisms of demand and supply. Moreover, when she announced that she wanted to take action against specific irregularities in the adoption process, she felt unsupported and was actively discouraged both by some of her colleagues and by relevant state authorities. The former director played an important role in public discussions on child trafficking scandals that took place in China. Since 2006, the agency had received various news reports about child-­buying practices, and directors of orphanages were reported to have been paying sums of money for the delivery of children. There was also increasing evidence that the 154

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identities and background information of children who were being placed for adoption were being altered to accommodate administrative requirements. Public debate did not erupt, however, until the stories on stolen children in Hunan Province (described in chapter 1) were reported in the Dutch media. Together with two other agencies, Children’s Alliance had placed children from this region with adopting families in the Netherlands. The agency was called to account for what happened and to explain to what extent their staff were involved. Vonk did not eschew responsibility, and despite discouraging messages from the Dutch Justice Department and the China Center for Children’s Welfare and Adoption (CCCWA), the Chinese central authority regulating international adoption, she continued to investigate by calling on the Justice Department and the Permanent Bureau of the Hague Conference (HCCH) to conduct research into the matter. Confronted with their incapacity (and opposition) to conduct such investigations, she felt she could not continue her work as a director. In a public statement announcing her resignation, Iris Vonk articulated, I have long tried to change the system from within and to ensure that within the worldwide [adoption] system the interests of children are prioritized. Upholding the interest of the child means genuinely making the effort to place children with local families. In my commitment to transparent and open procedures and in my pursuit of truth regarding the backgrounds of the adoptees I was not sufficiently supported, even discouraged by the Department of Justice. In international adoption, a Department of Justice should work in the interest of adoptees and children. My experience is that within international law, the rights of children and adoptees are not sufficiently guaranteed; the Hague Convention offers false securities and in the Justice Department, economic, diplomatic, and political interests prevail over the interest of children and adoptees.1

My conclusion starts with this vignette to signal once again the crisis in the legitimation of transnational adoption. While this crisis can be articulated in many different ways, what makes Iris Vonk’s critique of the practice so fundamental to the justification of international adoption is that she suggests our modern institutions and instruments are failing us in securing rights and justice in globalization.

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In this study, I turned to these institutions and instruments and aimed to shed light on the justificatory frameworks underpinning cross-­border adoption through the machineries and rationalities of modern practice. I started from the premise that international adoption should be understood as a project of modernity in which scientific rationales, international cooperation, and humanist moralities combined to lend weight to a modern ontological understanding of Euro-­American kinship. The material presented and the arguments offered in this book suggest that while the modern project continues to exist, the processes of globalization and biotechnologization also contribute to shifting the nature of the project. By way of concluding, I would like to reiterate the dynamics that give evidence of these shifts and to clarify the implications that such developments might have on current and future legitimacies of transnational adoption and adoptive (family) life. To do this, I return to the frameworks I opened with in the introduction: the enactment of rights and the work of legitimation. As I have described in the chapters of this book, the discursive language through which international adoption has been practiced encompassed the language of humanitarianism and rights. The narrative of “rescue” and “saving” characterized the onset of the phenomenon. This was the context of Tino’s story, which I described in chapter 5. It was a context informed by portrayals of the “global orphan,” depicting the collective imagination of mostly African and Asian children in need of rescue. Televised broadcasts of war, famine, poverty, and impact of this suffering on children prompted North Americans, Europeans, and Australians to consider this novel phenomenon of adoption, which makes strangers into one’s own kin. Adoption incentives were initially informed by denominational charity organizations, and Christian discourses of salvation and redemption characterized individual narratives about intercountry adoption. In the postcolonial context, however, there was also the new language of humanitarianism, which aimed to cordon off associations with colonial, missionary, and civilizational intentions. Humanitarian action (both Christian and secular) informed cross-­border adoption practice and signified a politics of redemption and compassion. This humanitarian justification of adoption still prevails today. Fast forward to 2010, and we find a similar rhetoric of international compassion after the Haiti earthquake when, in the midst of all the mayhem, American, Canadian, French, and Dutch authorities airlifted hundreds of children

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from foster homes to adoptive parents in their respective countries. However, fast forward again to 2015, when following the earthquake in Nepal, the idea of airlifting children to adoptive homes was not pursued. As I explained in chapter 1, there was a crucial difference in the humanitarianism during the time that Tino was adopted compared to that of more recent iterations. Various NGOs and international human rights organizations criticized the Haiti airlifts. These organizations especially singled out private American Christian groups whose members traveled to Haiti to “save” as many children as possible, regardless of whether the children had parents or relatives on the island. Instead, they advocated a human rights perspective that privileged local solutions, especially in times of turmoil. American, Canadian, and Dutch authorities had to legitimate their actions and did so by indicating that they had only airlifted children who were already in the adoption process. This justification refers back to the legal, bureaucratic, and biomedical apparatus of global adoption today and explains to a certain extent why transnational adoption was not seen as a virtuous option following the earthquake in Nepal. In the four and a half decades between the start of international adoption in the 1970s and the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, the phenomenon of international adoption had become professionalized and incorporated into the protection regimes of international law. International adoption became a matter of child protection and, by extension, of human rights. As I explained in chapter 2, the right to life and the right to family life served as the pillars of global children’s rights protected by the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) and now also represented in private international law. The consolidation of the Hague Adoption Convention in 1993 shifted the legitimation work of international adoption from a politics of compassion to a matter of global governance. But something else was happening in the interim. The advancement of assisted reproductive technologies led not only to a growing reproductive market in semen, eggs, and reproductive services; it medicalized infertility as well. With reproductive technologies, family making not only became more and more attainable but also—­quite paradoxically—­renaturalized the idea of reproduction and, by extension, the idea of a medicalized right to procreate. At the time that Tino was adopted, the majority of adopters already had biological children. In those days, infertility was not the main driver of international adoption. Today, however, the vast majority of

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adopters consider adoption only after failed experiences with reproductive technologies. Adoption is now firmly entangled in reproductive services: it has become the object of procreative consciousness and aspirational parenthood. Adoption today, then, can be regarded as a reproductive technology in itself. While it is law and not biotechnology that has created the phenomenon of adoption, reproductive technologies have changed the motivations for and experiences of adopting. I argued in chapter 1 that following failed attempts with assisted reproduction, projections of hope and a reproductive future continued to be imagined in the “adoption clinic.” The futures generated by reproductive technologies, though, not only created hopeful anticipation for that which might come but also induced anxiety about what might not come or what might come in different ways than anticipated. A whole apparatus was put in place to contain and manage this anxiety. The adoption clinic was also turned into a clinic proper and became subjected to the similar processes of biomedicalization that characterized practices in assisted reproduction. In chapter 3, I described the medicalization and biomedicalization of adoption. Increasingly, medical doctors were involved in the adoption process as well as in postadoption screenings and interventions. Adoption medicine became an established field. The increased medicalization of adoption satisfied adoptive parents’ demands for more attention to the specific medical problems of their adopted children, and it addressed the growing number of placements of “special needs” children resulting from a worldwide decline in healthy adoptable children. It also fulfilled a human rights claim to health. As I have indicated in the chapter, through biomorality and an ethics of care, this rights claim linked medicine to humanitarianism. There was not, therefore, a neat shift from humanitarianism to human rights. In contemporary adoption practice, the two seemed to work together, alternate with each other, or be conveniently collapsed. What was apparent was that human rights and humanitarianism were increasingly called on to defend or critique the practice. There is growing unease with the modern project of adoption. This book aimed to capture the factors that have contributed to this unease. The role of money was one of them. Postcolonial and imperial relations were another. The formation of adoption markets in the global arena occurred through a number of reasons: the professionalization of agencies and increased costs

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associated with adoption, competition between agencies and states on a global scale, the augmented efficiency and standardization of bureaucracy and systems of communication, growing consumption for reproductive services, and the normalization of processes (medical and racial) that necessarily commodified the practice and the child. As I showed in the chapters of this book, the growing influence of market dynamics in global adoption engendered both lively practice and contentious debates. While having to participate and compete in a globalized reproductive economy, institutions simultaneously fought against the idea of baby markets. This tension can be witnessed in the institution brokering the adoption agreement but was also evident in legal and medical institutions. In chapter 2, for instance, this puzzling situation was characterized by the functions of the Hague Adoption Convention. While the treaty enabled and facilitated adoption across borders, its principles and operations also restricted the practice. As I argued, a double movement can be observed in the operation of the convention, and regimes of transparency kept this double movement in place. It secured the distinction between “child” and “commodity” by holding on to humanitarianism in facilitating reproductive purposes. The valuation of children through the biomedicalization of adoption also characterized this paradox of the humanitarian market. The increasing role of biomedicine in the humanitarian field distanced humanitarianism from politics, privileging the politics of “life itself.” A new moral economy was reshaping the practice and evoked a constant slippage between the figuration of the global orphan and the figuration of the international adoptee. This slippage, I argued in chapter 2, was symptomatic for the postcolonial dynamics in cross-­border adoption. This was further analyzed in chapter 4, where I illustrated the extent to which geography played a major role in legitimating adoption. In the geopolitics of adoption, where one ends up is more important than with whom one ends up. Children’s rights as represented by the Hague Adoption Convention encapsulated the postcolonial dimensions of such biopolitics. Based on welfare and health rather than political justice, it risked reifying colonial power relations by legally decoupling children from their birth parents, countries, and communities. Legal adoption is a modern project. But what happens when a modern project travels? Through the study of international adoption—­as a situated production of globality—­I made an attempt at unraveling some of the modern stories we take for granted. This does not mean, however,

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that “globalization” is a new story we should take for granted. Understanding international adoption as a novel instance of globalization conceals the operation of power that accompanies narratives of progress. It is important, therefore, not to overemphasize globalization and to thereby forget the “international” or the “colonial.” We need to acknowledge the extent to which postcolonial routines, modern habits, and international politics converge with or constitute humanitarian intentions and conceptualizations of justice. My point here is that often, the “global dynamics” in international adoption relate to processes of marketization and take advantage of inequalities. Nonetheless, the practices of legitimation and justification engaged in by adoption institutions are largely oriented toward the international (as opposed to the global). So while push and pull factors, demand and supply dynamics, and competition between agencies set the stage for “global adoption” in the 1990s, the conventions, principles of subsidiarity, and the language of human rights pushed the “international” at around the same time. As I described in chapter 2, for instance, the legitimating force that the Hague Adoption Convention brought to the practice of adoption showed how complying with the Hague assumed a commitment to best practice and legitimized adoption through the standardization of laws and legal expectations around the adoption process. Here, institutional ethics concealed the role of politics in the brokerage of adoptions for the bureaucracies involved and obscured the cultural, sociopolitical histories and global inequalities that allowed children to become available for adoption. Such legitimation practices—­as I suggest throughout this book—­have depoliticized adoption, specifically in relation to the politics of value. But depoliticization, as a consequence of justificatory regimes, does not mean that politics do not play a role. Depoliticization, or an “antipolitics,” is a political practice in itself. While globalization intensifies the marketization of reproductive life, internationalization—­represented most vividly by international law—­seeks to govern reproductive life globally. As I showed in chapters 2 and 5, this has political implications within and between nation-­states. Depoliticization, integral to the project of global governance, and managed here through the Hague Adoption Convention, obscures political, social, and cultural histories of child welfare, foster care, child circulation, and different knowledge practices of kinship and reproduction. Working toward universal standards of regulation and “best

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practice,” it is the “international” element, more so than the “global” element, that allows for colonial processes of universalization to continue. The argument that colonial processes continue to shape the practice of international adoption is a complicated one. While my analysis of how the global gets produced in the case of international adoption clearly points to incongruent positions between the Global North and the Global South, I have also presented evidence that this division is unhinged. More adoptions are occurring within so-­called origin countries, suggesting the changing of policy around child welfare and the presence of a rising affluent class. China is a good example, where the one-­child policy was recently relaxed. Toward the end of 2015, the one-­child rule changed to a two-­child policy. While fewer children are being abandoned, more prosperous families are starting to adopt locally. We also witness cross-­border adoptions rising between countries in the Global North. The US is one of those nations that send primarily African American children to Canada and European countries. Finally, because of the growing movement of people across borders, well-­established migrants too have started to adopt internationally, often involving children from their birth countries and within their own races or ethnicities. While these instances blur the common lines between North-­ South and East-­West adoptions, they are often still affected by fraught relations of power—­informed by complex and uneven histories of class, religion, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. As the Comaroffs (2012) so eloquently argued, the “‘Global South’ bespeaks a relation, not a thing in or for itself.” It assumes a position vis-­à-­vis Euro-­America. The situations in China and the US, as sketched previously, both present a miniature of the North-­South dynamics of global adoption. As the Comaroffs summarize, “There is much South in the North, much North in the South, and more of both to come in the future” (127). My point, however, was also that even though cross-­border adoption should be regarded as different from domestic adoption and fostering—­particularly when it comes to modern laws and regulations—­we can witness outside of these legalities nonmodern ways of family life and kinship fostered by single-­parent families, extended families, LGBTIQ families, “blended” families, multispecies families, and adoptive families that challenge Euro-­ American notions of the nuclear family unit. Although this book might be read as antiadoption, this was not my intent. My aim was to examine international adoption as an institutional

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practice and as the realization of a modern project. As modern subjects, we are all implicated by the technologies, cultures, and habits that mobilize the project of adoption. I have discussed various regimes of justifications that are just as prevalent outside as inside the international adoption world. Nevertheless, my argument that the legitimation work in international adoption leads to an overall depoliticization of the phenomenon does bring me to the normative position that a return to a more political approach to adoption would be desirable. But by politics, I do not mean to suggest a legal reform or prohibition of international adoption. My plea would instead be geared toward the doing and desiring of kinship otherwise. It is only in such new and old modes of relating and kinning that we can witness genuine difference in family life. The relationship among the life sciences, law, and markets in the globalization of adoption illustrates how we legitimate life in late capitalism. With the globalization of reproductive technologies and new reproductive phenomena like cross-­border surrogacy, such legitimation work becomes more pressing. Moreover, this work rearranges the nature of kinship and can contribute to new understandings of kinship knowledge. I have shown that the globalization of legal adoption introduced Euro-­American kinship knowledge to other parts of the world. International conventions have defined the family, the child, the parent, child welfare, and “best interests” as conforming to Western and liberal justifications of family life. However, I have also shown that the globalization of adoption can contribute to disrupting this modern ontology, be it through institutional or individual confrontations with alternative kinship systems and different (legal) conceptions of family and parenthood. Scholars have speculated that there are two scenarios for the future of international adoption. One is that the phenomenon will continue to exist with several adaptations. Here, the humanitarian impulse continues to exert its powers, and the adoption lobby will have exercised its influences so that legitimacy is attached to the continued necessity of helping children in need. This scenario relies on a cosmopolitan and universal worldview and the conviction that international law is effective in eradicating abuse. It also relies on a continued effort in effectuating transparency. Adaptations will be made to the legal, bureaucratic, and medical systems to further the regime of transparency and to distance the project from reproductive markets.

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In the second scenario, international adoption ceases to exist. Arguments similar to the ones laid out by Iris Vonk at the start of this chapter will take the lead and dismantle the institution. The culprit is globalization. From this perspective, reproductive markets have moved into adoption practice and allowed (post)colonial habits to be repeated. The practice will be regarded as a neocolonial mistake—­a modern experiment in family making that consolidated a number of modern ideologies such as humanitarianism, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism. But the dismantling of the institution reflects the ultimate belief in the universalism and justness of modern science and international law. The child does not become conflated with a thing, and humanitarianism is protected from commodification. With Legitimating Life, I have aimed to show that we are actually already living these scenarios. The legitimation work performed by institutions carries forward these scenarios and seems to sustain values and practices of modern social and political life. It is in situations of crisis that existing justifications are put to work and crystalized; here, new justifications can be differentiated. Justifications less visible to our liberal and humanist sensibilities and less receptive to modern susceptibilities are attached, instead, to different ontologies. Adoption as a practice involving the detachment and reattachment of children cannot be approached without these relations. Neither can the children and families involved in adoption be studied without considering their relations to the apparatus that brings them into being. In a transnational space, these attachments give rise to the “international adoptee” and the “global adoptive family.” Global adoption enacts the adoptee as much as it enacts a modern form of reproduction. This means that the nature of global adoption is brought into being through its apparatuses and practices. The important question for this book, then, was not so much whether international adoption should or should not cease to exist but rather what its apparatuses and practices tell us about what society, family, and the child is or ought to be in contemporary social arrangements.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The labor of writing is often relegated to the author herself. But as most writing projects go, I owe a huge debt to people in the field, to various institutions, to different communities of colleagues, and to family members and friends who have endured my impatience and frustrations along the way. First and foremost, the research conducted for this book relied on the generosity and time of many Dutch and American people in the adoption field, including professionals and social workers of agencies, medical practitioners, adoptive parents, adoptees, and activists. For reasons of research anonymity, I am not able to name those who gave me their precious time and shared their knowledge of the field and the practice, but I would like to thank them here for their participation and cooperation. For a variety of reasons, the arena of international adoption has been fraught with tension. For many interviewees and informants, the study represented a site in which important insights and opinions could be voiced without being usurped or framed by the media. I much appreciated the frankness of people in our numerous conversations on the practice of global adoption today; I hope I have been able to do them justice by presenting them in this way. A special gratitude goes to Tino Djumini, whose story and photography of his own adoption piqued my interest while I was conducting research in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 2003. I thank him for letting me reproduce his photographs and for sharing his story so intimately with me. This book took 10 years to complete and passed through many institutions. I would like to acknowledge the generous funding this project received in its many guises. It started off with a Rubicon grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO; project no.  446-­06-­025), which was complemented by an internal Research Seed Grant from the University of Western Sydney (project no. 20191.80816). Still, it would not have seen the light of day were it not for the funding I received from the Australian Research Council for Early Career Researchers (DECRA; project no. DE140100348). I am very grateful for the opportunities that these 165

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Acknowledgments

sources of funding created. In a “post-­truth” era, when academic institutions and scientific knowledge are under attack, it is important that we recognize and support the significance and integrity of our research councils. Parts of this manuscript have appeared in extended or shorter forms elsewhere. Chapter 2 includes material from a forthcoming article in Law & Society Review; parts of chapter 3 appeared in Medical Anthropology 33(2): 109–­127; sections of chapter 4 were published in Social and Cultural Geography 16(5): 552–­566; and finally, chapter 5 exists in a shorter version for the Journal for Intercultural Studies (forthcoming). I thank the journals for giving me permission to reproduce some of the material here and the anonymous reviewers who helped me improve my writing and strengthen my arguments. I am much obliged to the Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS) at Yale University and the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University for providing me with the intellectual space during my postdoctoral fellowships to think through the complex issues I address in this book. Having experienced academia in different parts of the world, there is something about the culture of US private universities that is irresistible. My take is that despite their neoliberal flaws, such institutions see as their most important asset their academic capital. Critical thought and academic excellence, then, are invaluable and core to their business. It was a privilege to work in an environment that so values and supports intellectual vigor. My thanks go to Jeffrey Alexander and Phil Smith for inviting me to CCS. In particular, I thank Ron Eyerman for having been an invaluable mentor and friend. I still miss our weekly intellectual nourishments at Sally’s. Thanks to Matt Norton, Liz Breese, Kirsten Kraus, Alison Gerber, Joe Klett and Jensen Sass, who provided feedback to this project in its early stages. More important, I also thank them for their help in navigating life outside of academia: for bringing my partner and me to the hospital in the midst of New Haven winter and morning traffic to allow Luc’s arrival to the world (Matt and Emmy), for bringing us back home safely and feeding us sushi (Liz and Emmy), for lending us her car in critical times (Kirsten), for teaching us cool parenthood (Alison and Jun), for prepping our Australian futures (Jensen and Lucy), and for rekindling companionship at Berkeley (Joe and Gabriela). In writing this book, I drew on the weekly seminars at the Pembroke Center. I’m grateful for Elizabeth Weed and Kay Warren for giving me the opportunity to research and teach at Brown and for their unflinching

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willingness to provide me with reference letters throughout my period on the job market. The Pembroke lectures by Jean Comaroff, Didier Fassin, and Adriana Petryna were key to shaping the theoretical framework of this book. Jessaca Leinaweaver has been an invaluable colleague and an important interlocutor, and I thank her for all her assistance in getting this book published. It was a joy to spend a year with fellow postdocs Dave Machledt and Anita Starosta, and I’m indebted to Sherine Hamdy and Saida Hodzic for their support and collegiality. My move to “the other side of the world” brought me to the well-­run and ambitious Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney. I thank Ien Ang, Tony Bennett, Katherine Gibson, Kay Anderson, and Kerry Robinson for their kind mentorship during my years there, and I much appreciated the warm collegiality of Greg Noble, Megan Watkins, George Morgan, Cristina Rocha, Amanda Third, Allison Weir, Nicholas Kompridis, Magdalena Zolkos, Emilian Kavalski, Julie Thorpe, and Emma Waterton. I’m especially grateful for the ongoing friendships with Brett Neilson (and Lisa Magnani), Ned Rossiter (and Maren Koehler), and Jessica White (and Ihab Shalbak). My most recent institutional move to the University of Sydney would not have been possible without the help and support of Catherine Waldby. She has been an incredible mentor and a great help in the final stages of this book. Mike Michael too has been very important in helping me get “the bloody thing” done and has been of great assistance in helping me navigate the mazes of the University of Sydney. More recently, the support of Warwick Anderson was very instrumental both with regards to the book and to strengthening of the Biopolitics of Science Research Network that I am convening at the university. I thank Catriona Elder, Robert van Krieken, Michael Humphrey, Danielle Celermajer, and Amanda Elliott for a warm welcome to the sociology department. Special appreciation goes to Melinda Cooper, Dinesh Wadiwel, Nadine Ehlers, and Sujatha Fernandes for their camaraderie and for making the department such an enjoyable place. I thank Lenore Manderson for including my book in her new book series, for her audacity, for her relentless support, and for her meticulous reading of the entire manuscript. I very much appreciated the time and generous comments from the reviewers. Their suggestions have certainly tightened the argument. Kimberly Guinta has been a wonderful editor. I thank her for hard work and for seeing this book to a successful production and

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publication. My research assistants Emma Shinozaki-­Langridge and Zsuzsanna Ihar were of invaluable assistance to the project. From afar, I thank the support of family and friends in the Netherlands—­ my mother, Magda van  Wichelen-­ Weenas; my brother, Stieve van Wichelen, and his wife, Rizy Hya; Irene Hya and Nus Sipasulta; and my dear in-laws, Corry and Pierre de Leeuw, Peter de Leeuw, Paul and Tessy de Leeuw, and Carla and Will Verkerk for their continued interest. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Nies Medema and Douwe van den Berg for engaging closely with me on the topic of adoption, as well as Soeren Senn, Beatriz Minda, David Bernet, and Ruth Olshan, who during our visits to Berlin or Switzerland never failed to ask how the project was going. From different locations and histories, I much appreciated the continuing friendships with Marijn de Langen, Eric Schulte, Tamara Erkelens, Maria Voskuilen, Marjolein Wielaert, and Els Van Kampen. It is such a delight to still be in touch with my former PhD supervisors Pamela Pattynama, Frances Gouda, and Dubravka Zarkov, who continue to support my work. I thank Bregje van Eekelen for her inquisitiveness and incisive comments. The input and ideas of Shifra Kisch were vital to the birth of this project. I am so grateful for her unyielding enthusiasm but especially for the deep friendship we continue to have across continents. The home front had to endure many years of chagrin and discontent about the (non)book. We were lucky to have moved to a neighborhood with a genuine old-­fashioned sense of community. And I thank “Starkey Street” for letting the children roam the streets and for sharing our care collectively—­thereby creating thinking spaces throughout the busy years of raising little ones. Special thanks to Nalan Ozacardi, Leonore Glansbeek, and Louise Willems for their help in the economy of childcare. Most of all, I thank my partner, Marc, and our children, Luc and Nils. They forfeited beach days and movie nights so that I could work on my book, and many times I wish my attention could have been more with you guys than with my writing. Thanks, Luc and Nils, for giving me a life full of messy love and chaotic fun. Marc, thanks for putting up with me, for being there, for your kindness and your patience, for doing all of this together.

NOTES

Introduction 1.  

See Emma Griffiths, “Tony Abbott Announces New Measures to Simplify Adoption within a Year,” ABC News, 19 December 2013, http://​www​.abc​.net​.au/​news/​2013​-12​ -19/​tony​-abbott​-vows​-measures​-easier​-adoption/​5167098. 2.   See “Advies: Nederland moet stoppen met adopteren kinderen uit buitenland,” de Volkskrant, 2 November 2016, http://www.volkskrant.nl/binnenland/advies-nederland -moet-stoppen-met-adopteren-kinderen-uit-buitenland~a4407173/. 3.   See Alstein and Simon 1991. For further historical accounts of international adoption, see, for instance, Herman 2008 for the US; Cuthbert and Spark 2009 and Murphy, Quartly, and Cuthbert 2009 for Australia; and Hoksbergen 2011 for the Netherlands. 4.   For a critical account of human rights, see Asad 2000; Hopgood 2013; Douzinas 2007; Cheah 1997, 2006; and Moyn 2010. 5.   See Bergquist 2009 and Fronek 2012 for an account of the operation baby lift in Vietnam. See Selman 2015 for an overview of adoptions from Asia in the 21st century and Bergquist 2007 and E. Kim 2011 for adoptions from South Korea in particular. 6.   For adoption statistics, see Selman 2006, 2009, 2012. 7.  Adoptions carried out by celebrities are not a new phenomenon. Mia Farrow started adopting children from Vietnam and Korea as early as the 1970s. This was true also for the well-­known Dutch writer Jan de Hartog, who started a whole campaign in the Nether­lands to promote humanitarian adoption. The difference between celebrity adoptions in the 1970s and the 1990s is not only that the phenomenon was much more accepted in popular culture but also that in the meantime, intercountry adoption was regulated through the Hague Adoption Convention. Clear laws and rules existed when Angelina Jolie and Madonna started adopting from Africa, which explains some of the criticism voiced toward their actions. 8.   See also Turner 2007 for a critique of their work. 9.   The initial design was to conduct intensive ethnographies at one Dutch and one American agency, but instead of pursuing a strict comparative study, I have opted—­for intellectual and methodological purposes, but also for reasons of time constraints—­to limit the ethnographic fieldwork to one location. This enabled me to include the broader network of this single adoption agency, consisting of the national adoption foundation that caters to compulsory adoption courses, child welfare agencies that cater to home studies, medical clinics that perform adoption screenings, and state authorities that regulate adoption and authorize formal approvals.

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Notes to Pages 33–24

10.   To

protect the privacy of institutions and informants, I have used pseudonyms throughout the book. This concerns agencies, organizations, and state institutions as well as individuals. The pseudonym I used for the Dutch adoption where I conducted my empirical fieldwork—­ Children’s Alliance—­ should not be confused with the US-­based agency of the same name. I have not conducted research there, and there is no link whatsoever with the Dutch agency. At times, despite having pseudonyms, some individuals with a high public profile will be identifiable in this study. These particular individuals, however, have indicated to me during the interviews that they do not mind this disclosure, for they are aware of their public personas. 11.   In the Netherlands, I included agencies that relied more or primarily on volunteer work or catered specifically to adoptions from particular sending countries. In the US, I visited a range of agencies: (1) an agency in Manhattan for both domestic and international adoption, with a considerable amount of full-­time paid professional staff and equipped with a clinic for expectant mothers and an extensive postadoption section with a psychologist in house; (2) an international adoption agency in New Jersey, a subbranch of a national agency that has a long history and a reputation for professionalism in international adoption, especially from Asia; (3) a Christian adoption agency, placing both domestically and internationally; and (4) a Lutheran Christian agency, also placing domestically and internationally, with a more regional reach. 12.   For reasons of privacy, I have omitted the separate figures of these interviews. Giving these would make it possible to identify the respondents because of the small number. 13.   I attended the 37th annual adoption conference in New Jersey, called “Let’s Talk Adoption,” in 2007 (coordinated by Concerned Persons for Adoption and cosponsored by the New Jersey Interagency Adoption Council and Rutgers University School of Social Work), intended primarily for people in the US adoption industry and for (prospective) adoptive parents and their children. In Europe I participated in the 2008 Euradopt meeting in Venice, Italy, which is an association founded in 1993 (following the Hague Adoption Convention) of adoption organizations in 12 Western European countries. In the Netherlands I attended numerous events organized by Children’s Alliance but also events organized by adoptive parents’ associations, adoptee organizations, and public events about adoption research and topics.

Chapter 1  The Ethical Market 1.  

Such standards, for instance, included a minimum amount of adoptions per year, the financial capacity to run a transparent organization and to annually account for it through industrial fiscal reports, the professional skills to counsel adoptive parents, and so on. 2.   See, for instance, the Kalsbeek report (Kalsbeek 2008). This is also reflected in the biannual meetings of Euradopt, a European gathering of adoption agencies and relevant institutions to discuss developments in the adoption world.

3.   Interview

Notes to Pages 25–44

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with the director of a renowned US adoption agency, 1 October 2012. Adoption in Guatemala has been known to be particularly troublesome for the US, with many scandals portrayed in the media of child trafficking and illegal adoptions. 4.   Whether or not the Hague Adoption Convention actually stipulates intercountry adoption as a last resort is discussed in chapter 2. 5.   See Hoksbergen 2011. 6.   Interview with a social worker from a US international adoption agency, 26 March 2008, my emphasis. 7.   Information letter in welcome package. 8.  Interview with a child psychologist of a renowned US adoption agency, 24 March 2008. 9.   Against perspectivism, which argues that there are different perspectives to one reality, “ontological politics” multiplies reality and gains traction by considering the “real” as not something that is given but something that needs to be approached as a construct—­the performative outcome of struggles, contestations, and negotiations. 10.   See also Simpson 2013 for an account of the “potential” in assisted reproductive technologies. 11.   This means that the couple is open toward traveling to the birth country for a visit, usually with the child. 12.   These also include people who were so-­called secondary infertile, who were successful in conceiving one child but unsuccessful in conceiving another child. 13.   See also Leinaweaver 2015 for an account of generational factors in US and Spanish adoptions. 14.   Field notes, research diary, Tuesday, 22 April 2008. 15.  See Netwerk, “Adopties uit China,” aired 11 March 2008. 16.   As of October 2015, China has abandoned its one-­child policy. After 35 years, it now allows two children per couple. See Tom Phillips, “China Ends One-­Child Policy after 35 Years,” The Guardian, 29 October 2015, http://​www​.theguardian​.com/​world/​2015/​ oct/​29/​china​-abandons​-one​-child​-policy. 17.   The meeting also became a place to discuss previous scandals, especially the highly mediated adoption scandal from the province Hunan of the year before. In that particular case, around 110 children were reported to have been stolen from their birth parents. The rumor went that the children were subsequently sold to an orphanage that had sent some of their children to the Netherlands. 18.   Field notes, research diary, 26 June 2008. 19.   Field notes. 20.   Evidently, the situation in China that led to the abandonment of children was far more complex than the justificatory framework of this particular agency lets us believe. The ideal for many Chinese people is not to have a boy but to have a boy and a girl. But these hopes are intervened by the Chinese state’s one-­child policy. For a more nuanced explanation of reproductive choices in China under the one-­child policy, see Kay Johnson 2004. 21.   Marc Lacey, “Haiti Charges Americans with Child Abduction,” New York Times, 4 February 2010, https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2010/​02/​05/​world/​americas/​05orphans​

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Notes to Pages 44–46

.html. This was not the only incident; see Rotabi and Bergquist 2010 for an elaboration on all the incidences reported during that time. 22.   Ten countries were involved in expediting adoption procedures from Haiti, among them Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the US. These eight countries had adoption arrangements with Haiti prior to the earthquake. The other two—­Italy and Spain—­also expedited adoptions from Haiti, but these two countries had officially suspended adoptions from Haiti since 2007 and were therefore different from the other eight. For further details, see the report written for the International Social Service by Dambach and Baglietto 2010. 23.   In the Netherlands, the then minister for justice, Ernst Hirsch Ballin—­who also spoke on behalf of the minister for youth and family, André Rouvoet—­wrote a formal proposal to parliament to proceed with an airlift from Haiti, bringing children who were in the adoption process to the Netherlands. Three categories were distinguished. The first involved a group of 56 children for which the Haitian judge had already formalized their adoptions. The adoptions were already completed and the adoptive parents were waiting for formal exit visas so that they could pick them up and bring them to the Netherlands. The second group involved 44 children who were already matched to Dutch parents by Dutch adoption agencies but whose cases had not obtained the adoption decrees from Haitian courts yet. Finally, the third group consisted of 9 children who were not yet matched but were living in the same facility as the children of the other two groups. Haitian authorities had already assigned these children to Dutch agencies, and they were in the process of being matched to Dutch adopters. 24.   Approximately 1,150 children were evacuated from Haiti for the purposes of adoption (Thompson 2010a). See also James C. McKinley Jr. and Sean D. Hamill, “53 Haitian Orphans Are Airlifted to U.S.,” New York Times, 19 January 2010, https://​www​.nytimes​ .com/​2010/​01/​20/​world/​americas/​20orphans​.html. 25.   See Ginger Thompson, “Questions Surface after Haitian Airlift,” New York Times, 23 February, 2010, http://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2010/​02/​24/​world/​americas/​24orphans​ .html?​_r​=0​ . 26.   As Fassin argues in the case of Haiti, this has a particular resonance in the American and the French context, where colonial relations and a history of slavery marked the relationship between these countries and Haiti. See Fassin 2013 for an elaboration of this argument. 27.   The so-­called Operation Babylift took place in Vietnam at the end of the war in April 1975, when approximately 10,000 children were airlifted from Vietnam to the US, Australia, France, and Canada and adopted by families there. 28.   Obviously, these two desires (humanitarian and reproductive) also collapsed during the events of the earthquake. This was especially evident in the rescue of children who were not yet matched to parents but were assigned by Haitian authorities to a country only. Also, Spain and Italy had suspended adoptions from Haiti since 2007, but they too airlifted children to their countries in the aftermath of the quake.



Notes to Pages 50–59

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Chapter 2  Double Movements 1.  

The HCCH did put in place an earlier convention, the 1965 Hague Adoption Convention that regulated cross-­border adoption within Europe. Similarly, a multilateral agreement, called the Inter-­American Convention on Conflict of Laws Concerning the Adoption of Minors, which was signed in 1984, regulated cross-­border adoption between states in the Americas. The 1993 Hague Adoption Convention aspired to be a global instrument in private international law, complementing or replacing regional agreements. 2.   The discussions preceding the 1993 Hague Adoption Convention did not tackle as such the translatability of domestic adoptions to other countries or the adoption of children by prospective parents with different nationalities. Instead, it specifically targeted the migration of children from the Global South to the Global North for the purpose of adoption (for a discussion, see Van Loon 1990). 3.   This preliminary document was circulated to the members of the 16th meeting, which led to the creation of the convention. The meetings preceding the convention distinguished themselves from earlier meetings on adoption in that the previous meetings focused on international adoptions among European states. 4.   This is especially true for the 1990s, when certain sending countries (in particular, China) cooperated well within the bureaucratic structures of the Hague Adoption Convention, making it easier to adopt. 5.   The UNCRC was signed on 20 November 1989 and came into force on 2 September 1990. 6.   Articles 4, 5, 8, 14, and 29 of the CRC all refer to forms of alternative care in conjunction with ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Article 29, for instance, stipulates that the education of the child should include (among other things) “respect for the child’s parents, his or her own cultural identity, language and values, for the national values of the country in which the child is living, the country from which he or she may originate, and for civilizations different from his or her own.” The African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child was established to complement the CRC by including sociocultural and economic realities distinct to Africa and included a special reference to the care of children by extended families, for instance. 7.   Here, Van Loon references the work of Maev O’Collins 1984. 8.   As worded in Article 2, line 2 of the conventions, “The Convention covers only adoptions which create a permanent parent-­child relationship.” 9.   See the Hague Conference on Private International Law 2008 (hereafter Guide to Good Practice, vol.  1); and the Hague Conference on Private International Law 2013 (hereafter Guide to Good Practice, vol. 2). 10.   Point 56 of the Guide to Good Practice, vol. 1, referring to Article 26(2) of the 1993 Hague Adoption Convention. See also point 494. 11.   See point 559. 12.   The second volume of the Guide to Good Practice emphasizes similar suggestions regarding the upgrade from simple to full adoptions by stressing the necessity to inform prospective adoptive parents of the requirements for conversion.

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Notes to Pages 59–79

See point 560, Guide to Good Practice, vol. 1. association presently has member organizations in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. Agencies aligned with Euradopt meet once every two years and discuss pertinent matters of adoption practices. 15.  See Guide to Good Practice, vol. 1, 3.6, note 134. 16.   See note 524. 17.   The US was very late ratifying the Hague Adoption Convention. While the Netherlands, for instance, were among the first to sign and ratify it in 1998, the US took 10 more years to come to terms with the international convention. This is also so the case with the CRC, which the US still has not ratified. 18.   Interview with an adoption professional at a denominational adoption agency in the US, audio recording, 30 January 2008. 19.   Interview with a representative of an adoption agency in Connecticut, US, audio recording, 30 January 2008. 20.   Interview with US medical practitioner specialized in adoption, audio recording, 4 October 2012. 21.   Other reasons for the dwindling numbers of adoptable children are the loosening of the one-­child policy in China, the increasing use of contraception and occurrence of abortion, the growing acceptance of single motherhood, the increase of domestic adoption in the country of origin, better foster care that caters to long-­term placements, and more generally, the decline in mortality and rise of living standards that reduce the number of orphans (see Mignot 2015; Selman 2014). 22.   Interview with Dutch adoption professional of Children’s Alliance, audio recording, 17 April 2008. 23.   See here the Dutch national inquiry on adoption, the so-­called Kalsbeek report (Kalsbeek 2008). 24.   Interview with the director of Children’s Alliance, audio recording, 21 April 2008. 25.   Interview with a director of a reputable adoption agency in New York, audio recording, 1 October 2012. 26.   Interview with Dutch adoption professional of Children’s Alliance, audio recording, 7 September 2012. 27.   Interview with Dutch adoption professional. 28.   It is important to note that this is also true with the dynamics of domestic adoption. See, for instance, Patton 2000. 29.   See also Shamir 2008, 14. 30.   This was apparent in the recent debate on commercial and cross-­border surrogacy. See van Wichelen 2016 for an elaboration on the debate on surrogacy and law. 13.  

14.   This

Chapter 3  Valuing Bodies 1.  

A minimal medical screening is compulsory by law in most receiving states. In the United States, the visa health exam was established to protect the American public and



Notes to Pages 81–83

175

to exclude those who would become public charges (Nicholson 2002). Similarly, in the Netherlands, the Department of Justice defines “acceptable” children as those who are not suffering from dangerous contagious or physical or mental illnesses. Thus the minimal requirements are aimed at protecting the general public and do not necessarily show concern for the child’s health. Medical exams and screenings beyond these mandated examinations are conducted either as part of the placement policies of adoption agencies or at the discretion of adoptive parents seeking medical advice and treatment for their children before or after placement. Most screenings are not covered by health insurance, and in certain countries—­for example, the United States—­they are provided by private clinics. Parents too are indirectly screened for physical and mental health problems. This is not conducted by medical practitioners, but prospective adopters need to document their health history as part of their application, and this can include medical records. 2.   There is disagreement about the reasons for the decline. Some argue that economic and social improvements in the sending countries such as economic growth, improvements in the child welfare system, increased numbers of domestic adoptions, and improvements in foster care have contributed to the decreasing numbers of internationally adoptable children (Fonseca 2006; Johnson 2004; Leinaweaver 2008; Selman 2010). Others attribute the decreases to nationalist measures on the part of sending countries who respond to overseas abuse of “their” children by imposing stricter adoption rules and to the increasing bureaucratization of international adoption by international conventions that make it more difficult for children to become available for adoption (Bartholet 2007). 3.   To give an indication of the variety in decreases, compared with 2004, the number of adoptions in 2013 for Italy was only 17 percent; in Canada it was only 36 percent. In contrast, it dropped 79 percent in Spain and 80 percent in Norway (see Mignot 2015, 2). 4.  The Guide to Good Practice established by the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-­operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (hereinafter referred to as the Hague Adoption Convention) defines “special needs” children as “those who may be: 1) suffering from a behavior disorder or trauma, 2) physically or mentally disabled, 3) older children (usually above 7 years of age), or 4) part of a sibling group” (HCCH Guide to Good Practice, vol. 1, art 7.3.1). The Hague Adoption Convention is available at http://​hcch​.e​-vision​.nl/​index​_en​.php​?act​=​conventions​.pdf​&​cid​=​ 69, and the Guide to Good Practice is available at http://​www​.hcch​.net/​index​_en​.php​ ?act​=​publications​.listing​&​sub​=​4. 5.   The Dutch studies relied mostly on self-­reporting and parental reporting and concluded that international adoptees experienced more behavioral and emotional problems than their nonadopted peers (Hoksbergen 1997, 33). Moreover, these problems seemed to be gender specific and related to the adoptees’ gendered identification with their appearance (43). The Swedish study conducted by Hjern et al. (2002), which was based on data from national registers, concluded that “intercountry adoptees are three to four times more likely to have serious mental health problems such as suicide, suicide attempts, and psychiatric admissions” (446).

176

Notes to Pages 84–96

6.  Miller’s book includes generally accepted protocols for preadoptive screenings, postadoptive screenings, and medical treatment, similar to the guidelines set out in the second readily available resource, the American Academy of Pediatrics’s Red Book (AAP 2003), which outlines procedures for disease testing and immunization for internationally adopted children (Welsh et al. 2007, 293). Similar protocols can be found in the Netherlands, where the resource currently used by pediatricians to evaluate, screen, and treat internationally adopted children is the Workbook on Imported Diseases in Children (Werkboek Importziekten bij Kinderen; 2000). The chapter on international adoption is informed (among others) by the work of Femmie Juffer and Renee Hoksbergen, two leading adoption experts in the Netherlands who are often cited by representatives of Dutch adoption agencies. 7.   The ecological niche theory stems from the work of developmental psychologists Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky and is rooted in an alternative evolutionary theory that emphasizes that children’s development must be examined in relation to their environment. For a thorough discussion of this theory, see Castaneda (2002, 72–­75). 8.  This maxim originated from Johnson et al.’s (1992) study of children adopted from Romania, which examined 65 children who had been referred to an international adoption clinic. The children’s ages at the time of their adoption ranged from 6 weeks to 73 months, and approximately two-­thirds had spent their entire lives in institutional care. Johnson et al. noted that these children lost approximately one month of linear growth for every three months they spent in the orphanage. Moreover, only 15 percent of the children were judged to be developmentally normal and physically healthy at the time of adoption, while 50 percent had intestinal parasites or evidence of a hepatitis B infection, for example. 9.   Csordas explains how evidence is different from “data”: the latter “have nothing to prove in themselves” but can be used to prove something (2004, 475). 10.   The rationale for the maximum age lies in research indicating that it is harder for older children to attach to their adoptive parents. 11.   For an account of visual representations of fetal alcohol syndrome, see Cartwright 2003. The term “intersexed condition” refers to a congenital ambiguity of sex, which can be related to chromosomal, morphological, genital, and/or gonadal anomalies. 12.  For example, some parents might regard hepatitis B as acceptable even though they have indicated that they want a child who is “as healthy as possible” (zo gezond mogelijk). The social worker would then inform them that hepatitis B is a serious condition that does not really fall under the category “as healthy as possible.” Through such negotiations, prospective parents are informally classified as those who would accept “real” special needs (echte SN) and those who have a “weak” special needs profile (magere SN). Such classifications are important not only for the matching process but also for the length of the waiting period. The medical preferences are crucial information for social workers, who usually adhere to them. The discussions I observed during consultation meetings included the actual age of children to vaccination requirements (e.g., for TB immunizations), congenital malformations, developmental delays, malnourishment, physical disabilities, and the completion of certain tests (e.g., for HIV or hepatitis A and B). 13.   See also Leinaweaver 2009 for an illustration of how biomedical measures are used to assess children’s natal families as “inappropriate” and are then employed as justifications for removing children from their families.



Notes to Pages 99–109

177

14.  

My focus here and the focus of the pediatricians I talked with was on early puberty, which did not have a physical cause like a tumor in the brain. For an overview of scientific literature that shows the correlation between international adoption and early puberty, see Mul, Oostdijk, and Drop 2002; Parent et al. 2003; and Teilmann et al. 2009. For a social science perspective, see Roberts 2015. 15.   The standard treatment for precocious puberty are medicines called GnRH analogs. They work by blocking the hormones coming from the pituitary gland that trigger puberty. Children who require these treatments get them via injections or implants. See R. Morgan Griffin, “How Doctors Diagnose and Treat Precocious Puberty,” WebMD, reviewed 27 January 2017, http://​www​.webmd​.com/​children/​features/​diagnosis​-treatment​#1. 16.   See Roberts 2015 for a review of this literature and for a fascinating feminist science studies perspective on puberty. 17.   Foster children are also framed differently when compared to the mediated figure of the “global orphan.” While orphans conjure the image of “bare life,” children in foster care are framed not as orphans but as victims of domestic abuse (Kim 2011, 262).

Chapter 4  Grievable Lives 1.  

The issue of trafficking mostly concerns practices coined as “child laundering”: the (illegal) buying of children and the bureaucratic processes through which they become legally adoptable in adoption (Leifsen 2008; Smolin 2006). Studies of the rights of trafficked children with respect to legal status and citizenship have been scarce (with the exception of Bhabha 2004; O’Connell Davidson 2011). 2.  See Butler 2004, xiv–­ xv; and Fassin 2007 for a discussion on the concept of “grievability.” 3.   The Dutch secretary of state for immigration and asylum at that time was Minister Gerd Leers, who is a member of the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA). He appealed the first court decision by stating that Mauro still had a mother in Angola and that a return would enable him to pick up his family life there. The Council of State approved of this justification. According to news coverage, Mauro’s contact with his mother was sparse, and he had not spoken with her for the last two years at the time of the appeal. 4.  Court Zwolle-­ Lelystad (Netherlands), 4 March 2011, LJN BP6936, available at http://​jure​.nl/​170085​%20/​%20fa​%20rk​%2010​-1401. The name Rahul is a pseudonym given by the Dutch television program Netwerk, which broadcasted the story about the court case in June 2010. According to coverage in India, the boy’s original name was Satheesh Kumar until he was renamed Rohit Shivam Bissesar by his Dutch adoptive parents, who are from an ethnic Hindu background. See Jaya Menon, “A Chennai Slum Dweller’s Fight for Her Dutch Son,” The Times of India, 28 May 2010, http://​ timesofindia​.indiatimes​.com/​city/​chennai/​A​-Chennai​-slum​-dwellers​-fight​-for​-her​ -Dutch​-son/​articleshow/​5983143​.cms. 5.   This special permit for unaccompanied minors (called an AMV permit) has been abolished since June 1, 2013, which signals a significant turn in the policies regarding the treatment of child migrants.

178 6.  

Notes to Pages 110–116

This article states that (1) everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, his or her home, and his or her correspondence and that (2) there shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety, or the economic well-­being of the country; for the prevention of disorder or crime; for the protection of health or morals; or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. 7.   “Interference” is here a technical term designed to probe the extent to which the principle of Article 8—­the right to respect for private and family life—­could be applied. In this case, the judge decided that Article 8 could not be invoked because Mauro was not granted asylum in the first place. 8.   Ironically, the reason that his “family life” with his foster parents would be impeded was not allowed to be a ground for advocacy. 9.   This article states that (1) in all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities, or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration; that (2) states’ parties undertake to ensure the child such protection and care as is necessary for his or her well-­being, taking into account the rights and duties of his or her parents, legal guardians, or other individuals legally responsible for him or her, and, to this end, shall take all appropriate legislative and administrative measures; and that (3) states’ parties shall ensure that the institutions, services, and facilities responsible for the care or protection of children shall conform with the standards established by competent authorities, particularly in the areas of safety, health, the number and suitability of their staff, as well as competent supervision. 10.   Zwolle-­Lelystad, 4. 11.   See the “Baby Donna” case and the “Baby Jayden” case in Hoksbergen 2011, 445–­448. 12.   This also mirrors the outcome of the highly profiled “Baby Veronica” case in the US. See Dan Frosch and Timothy Williams, “Justices Say Law Doesn’t Require Child to Be Returned to Her Indian Father,” New York Times, 25 June 2013, http://​www​.nytimes​.com/​ 2013/​06/​26/​us/​justices​-order​-return​-of​-indian​-child​-to​-adoptive​-parents​.html?​_r​=​0. 13.   In 2007 and 2008, Mauro’s foster parents filed twice for an adoption procedure. They indicated that Mauro’s mother had given permission. Nonetheless, the adoption request was rejected because of his illegal status and the weak legal evidence of the mother’s relinquishment of parentage. 14.   Zwolle-­Lelystad, 4, my emphasis. 15.   Court’s-Gravenhage (Netherlands), 4 October 2010, AWB 10/3789 (beroep), AWB 09/42885 (voorlopige voorziening), https://​jure​.nl/​ECLI:​NL:​RBSGR:​2010:​BU3196. 16.   See a PDF of the original letter in Coen Brandhorst, “Uitgewezen Mauro schreef brief aan minister Leers,” Het Parool, 22 October 2011, https://​www​.parool​.nl/​ binnenland/​uitgewezen​-mauro​-schreef​-brief​-aan​-minister​-leers​~a2982593/. 17.   It helps that he is still a child, which—­in a spatial sense—­also means that he is usually accompanied by his parents. Once he’s on his own, he might still have to prove his Dutchness, as people wouldn’t assume he is Dutch without knowing he is adopted or hearing him speak, much like Mauro. But the performance is less expected once people obtain the knowledge that he is adopted.



Notes to Pages 119–130

179

18.  

The news about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann from a hotel in Portugal in 2007 led to an enormous media frenzy both inside and outside the UK. See Greer, Ferrell, and Jewkes 2008 for an account of the media events around Madeleine. 19.   The l’Arche de Zoé case is also a good illustration of an attempt to “rescue orphans” from deprived places. In 2007, this charity group, which advocates for awareness about the conflict in Darfur and its effect on its children, obtained extensive media coverage with the arrest of members who were accused of abducting 103 African children. See also Mezmur 2008. 20.   Mauro’s foster mother made clear that “without their assistance, Mauro would have been in Angola now and our family would have been torn apart. If Minister Leers had recognized back then that Mauro belonged in the Netherlands and had not come up with that weird study visa, we would have been able to express our happiness more spontaneously.” See Pim van den Dool, “Mauro heeft verblijfsvergunning en mag definitief in Nederland blijven,” nrc​.nl, 30 March 2013, https://​www​.nrc​.nl/​nieuws/​2013/​03/​ 30/​mauro​-heeft​-verblijfsvergunning​-en​-mag​-definitief​-in​-nederland​-blijven​-a1435999. 21.   See “Mauro: ‘Ik had eerder teruggestuurd moeten worden,’” De Monitor, 22 January 2017, https://​demonitor​.kro​-ncrv​.nl/​artikelen/​mauro​-ik​-had​-eerder​-teruggestuurd​ -moeten​-worden, translations mine.

Chapter 5  Economies of Return 1.   It was also around this time that some adoptions were being debated as legally questionable. Young and disenfranchised mothers whose babies were taken away from them started to speak out, stating that it had never been their choice. 2.   In contrast to the rest of the manuscript, and with permission from Tino Djumini, I have not used a pseudonym to replace his name. 3.   This was not practiced until recently, however, and reflects a recent change in attitude. 4.   In the US, the 1970s witnessed the dissemination of research that gave evidence that psychological problems observed in adoptees were directly related to the laws on anonymity and culture of secrecy. The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s saw a promotion of the principles of open adoption, and the practice became increasingly common. See Grotevant and McRoy 1998. 5.   In fact, we can witness this same dynamic more recently with commercial surrogacy and commercialized third-­party conceptions. The creed of “choice” underpins the circulation of oocytes, sperm, and gametes particularly through the promise of anonymity. Anonymity assures unconstrained forms of family-­making, since genetic relations are cut off by the legal contract that protects the sperm or egg donor. The right to know, and the move to disallow anonymity in donor conceptions (a move increasingly supported in North America and Western Europe), contradict cultures that value choice and regards technology as enabling and pushes people to rekindle this choice across borders. 6.   Interview with the director of a renowned US adoption agency, audio recording, 1 October 2012.

180

Notes to Pages 133–155

7.  

See the creative work of Mihee Nathalie Lemoine or the documentaries by Leanne Borshay. 8.   So in fact, Tino was born in 1973 and adopted in 1978 at the age of five. 9.   For instance, while some US states allow the adoption of children as old as 12 years (India), 13 years (China), or 15 years (Colombia), in the Netherlands, the maximum age of children to be adopted internationally is 6 years (with the exception of sibling adoptions). See also chapter 3. 10.   Interview with Tino Djumini, Jakarta, 28 June 2005, transcription. 11.   For an account of forced removals in Australia, see Van Krieken 1999 and Cuthbert and Quartly 2013; in Canada, see Strong-­Boag 2006; in the US, see Fessler 2006; in the UK, see Keating 2009. For an account of the politics of transracial adoption in the US, see Patton 2000 and Rothman 2004. 12.   See the full text of the 1993 Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-­operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, available at https://​www​.hcch​.net/​ en/​instruments/​conventions/​full​-text/​?cid​=​69. 13.   A range of activities evolved around “culture keeping” in adoption, ranging from Chinese New Year celebrations and language courses to “roots” or “motherland” visits and birth searches. Although often underfunded, postadoption services included the organization of such cultural visits, and in some instances, agencies also assisted in finding biological relatives. More often, however, third-­party services were involved to assist with birth searches, particularly the media. As such, television programs such as Spoorloos (KRO) in the Netherlands or I Miss That Person (KBS Global) in South Korea have become popular mediums through which to find birth parents and extended family. 14.   The film Adopted (Lee 2006) gives evidence of the turn in adoptive families that adaptation has to come from both sides. It is not only adoptees that need to adapt to the milieu of their adoptive parents; adoptive parents too need to adapt to the cultural background from which their adopted children came from. 15.   Interview with Tino Djumini. The trope of the “unfilial child,” anak derhaka in Malay or Indonesian, is dominant in public discourse and used to refer to the child who turns against his or her family as well as his or her nation. 16.   Scholars in the so-­called new kinship studies have analyzed people’s urges to seek out relatives beyond the nuclear family in order to recover information about themselves and their medical prospects (Dolgin 2000; Finkler 2000). Many are simply searching to gain (medical or genetic) information and give little regard to the possibilities of starting up relationships with these extended relatives. This creates genetic families whose members are first and foremost linked through the information their bodies hold about one another, and genetic ties can therefore be disarticulated and severed from social ones. 17.   See, for instance, Leinaweaver 2008; Carsten 2004; and Kirksey 2014.

Conclusion 1.  

Report available at http://​poundpuplegacy​.org/​files/​Reactie​%20Ina​%20HR​%20 Hut​%20ivm​%20AO​%206​%20okt​%202009​.pdf.

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INDEX Page numbers followed by f and t refer to figures and tables, respectively. abandonment, 41, 161; and filial obligations, 144; reasons for, 53, 150, 171n21 Abbott, Tony, 1 accountability, 27, 30, 31, 64, 69; transparency as, 72 action: modes of, 12; social, 11 actors: institutional, 21, 22; market, 31; social, 11; state, 108 adaptability, 88 adjustment, 83–­84 adoptability, 18, 80, 82; as disease, 89; norms of, 96; scale of, 86 adoptees: and anonymity, 127; assessment of, 82; as assimilated, 116; vs. asylum seekers, 106–­107; and DNA tests, 124; evaluation of, 102; vs. global orphan, 101, 159; global vs. domestic, 87; health of, 82–­83, 99–­101, 175n5; and identity, 150; interpellations of, 137; medicalization of, 100; pathologization of, 140; as rescued, 10, 44–­45, 46, 119, 145, 156. See also children adopters: agency accommodation of, 29; age restrictions, 36; as consumers, 24; as desperate, 32. See also parents: adoptive adoption: and assisted reproduction, 6; closed, 127–­128; commercial, 75; costs of, 24, 158–­159; direct, 60; domestic, 70, 161; fees for, 26; vs. foster care, 128–­129; full, 57–­60, 130; independent, 52, 65, 67–­68; as intervention, 84, 87, 101; justifications of, 18; as legal technology, 6–­7,

116; legitimation of, 20; limping, 56; local, 48; marketization of, 22; medicalization of, 18, 80, 88–­89, 158; motivations for, 158; open, 58, 125, 127; permanent, 58; private, 64–­65, 67–­68; as reproductive right, 6; scientific, 86; simple, 57–­60, 130; transracial, 138–­140 adoption, global: and biogenetic parents, 122; vs. child asylum, 106; as child protection, 109, 157; and choice, 147–­148; and commodification, 146; decrease in, 4, 81, 175nn2–­3; vs. domestic adoption, 8, 49, 57, 129–­130; and ecological niche, 87; economy of, 98, 159; and enactment, 163; as fair trade, 47; as family making, 111; future of, 162–­163; and globalization, 159–­160; history of, 2–­4, 50; and humanitarianism, 28–­29, 102, 149, 156; as intervention, 88, 91, 102; justifications of, 12–­13, 17, 47, 80, 145, 156; as last resort, 25, 28, 109; legitimacy of, 102, 104; mediatized, 27; motivations for, 2–­4, 6, 33–­35, 88; open, 8, 19; and openness, 127–­129; politics of, 10, 76, 159; professionalization of, 157; as reproductive form, 28–­29; rise of, 2–­4, 81; and transparency, 62–­64 adoption capacity, 69, 71 adoption covenant, 23 adoption lobby, 27 adoption medicine, 17–­18, 79–­80, 82–­ 84, 88, 90–­91, 102–­104, 158 adoption practice, 33 199

200

Index

adoption triangle, 80 advocacy, 90–­91 Africa, 69, 129. See also individual countries African Americans, 129, 161 African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, 57, 173n6 Agamben, Giorgio, 9, 151 agencies, 20–­21, 23–­25; and bureaucracy, 65–­67; challenges to, 61; and competition, 23, 24, 98; costs to, 63; funding of, 64; and openness, 130; and state, 27–­28. See also institutions; organizations agency, sense of, 92, 101 Ahmed, Sara, 37 Aitken, Stuart, 114 Almeling, Rene, 92, 93, 101 anonymity, 125, 127–­128, 129, 130, 179n3 anthropology of the contemporary, 13–­14 anticapitalism, 98 anticonsumerism, 17, 22 antipolitics, 76, 160 aporia, of adoption, 39, 47, 48–­49 Arif, Yasmeen, 150 ARTs. See reproductive technologies: artificial (ARTs) asylum, 18, 106, 108, 117, 122 attachments, 11, 163 Australia, 1, 8; and family preservation, 129, 150; and indigenous population, 138, 150 autonomy, 73, 78, 93; and choice, 148; cultural, 140 bare life, 101–­102, 145–­146, 177n17 belonging, 137–­138, 144, 150–­151 best interest: of adopters, 111; of children, 18, 45, 60, 110–­113, 120 best practices, 26, 76, 160–­161 biodesire, 22–­23, 32–­33, 48, 49; and humanitarianism, 46–­47; and

kinning, 46. See also reproductive desire bioethics, 6 biolegitimacy, 10–­11, 37–­38 biological parents. See parents: biogenetic biomedicalization, 36, 80–­81, 99, 158; of adoption, 101; consequences of, 103 biomedicine, 17–­18, 91, 101; and legitimacy, 99 biomorality, 90–­91 biopolitics, 6, 9, 106, 159; autoimmunitary, 149; of children’s rights, 121 biopower, 32, 49 bioscience, and legitimacy, 18 biotechnology, 4–­5, 7, 143 birth parents. See parents: biogenetic blood relationships. See relationships: biogenetic body, 36, 87; acceptability of, 96; adoptee, 80, 100–­101, 103, 133; and biomedicalization, 101; child, 84, 104; child, as evidence, 92; foreign, 138; maternal, 21; transformable, 98, 100–­101; worthy vs. unworthy, 123 Boltanski, Luc, 9, 11–­13, 118 Brazil, 60 Briggs, Laura, 9 Brown, Wendy, 31, 76 bureaucracy, 65–­67, 159; and health, 96; and transparency, 72 Campbell, Timothy, 149 capitalism, 54, 75, 98; corporate, 27 care: forms of, 56–­57, 130; imperative to, 90–­91. See also politics: of care Carsten, Janet, 146 Castaneda, Claudia, 129 catch-­up theory, 18, 80, 84, 86, 100, 104 categorization, of children, 108–­109 CCAA. See China Center for Children’s Welfare and Adoption (CCCWA) CCCWA. See China Center for Children’s Welfare and Adoption (CCCWA)

Index 201 celebrities, 3, 27, 169n7 child-­buying, 42–­43, 154–­155 childhood: geographies of, 105–­107; medicalization of, 100; performance of, 113–­114; progression of, 84; universal, 118 child laundering, 72–­73, 177n1 child protection, 1–­2, 29, 52, 70; as motivation, 88, 110; and postcolonialism, 120 children: abandonment of, 41, 43, 53, 150, 171n21; adoptable, 4, 66, 69, 79, 88, 174n21; ages of, 92, 134–­135, 176n10, 180n8; assessment of, 92; availability of, 69, 174n21; as clients, 38; commodification of, 22, 23–­24, 54, 77, 130, 142, 159; health of, 18, 179n3; indigenous, removal of, 10, 138, 150; missing, 119; as paid for, 41; as property, 116; with special needs, 41, 79, 82, 93, 97–­98, 158; supply and demand, 54; value of, 47, 80; as vulnerable, 113. See also adoptees; moving child Children’s Alliance (Netherlands), 15, 23–­24, 28; and Chinese trafficking, 39–­43, 155; and special needs, 94–­95t child-­saving, 120 child-­stealing, 39–­43, 108 child welfare, 2, 161; adoption as form of, 29; and global adoption, 71 China, 39–­42, 69, 87, 154–­155, 161, 171n21 China Center for Children’s Welfare and Adoption (CCCWA), 40, 97, 155 choice, 73–­74, 78, 103, 128–­129, 131, 139–­140; and identity, 140; vs. obligation, 142–­143; paradox of, 147–­148 Christianity, 5, 43–­44, 145, 156, 157; narratives of, 35 citizenship, 106–­107, 121; and countries of origin, 116 classification: medical, 80, 97; of people, 102; racial, 98 clean break, 116–­117, 136, 152 closure, lack of, 135, 144

Colen, Shellee, 60 colonialism, 121, 159, 161, 172n27 Comaroff, Jean, 161 Comaroff, John L., 161 commodification, 91–­92, 97–­98, 159 commodities, 54 commodity economy, 146 compassion, 18, 46, 115, 121–­123. See also politics: of compassion compatibility, 56, 57 compensation, 30 competition, 21, 23, 24, 74, 159 Competition Authority (Netherlands), 23 connections, 16 conservatism, 10, 33; social, 31 constituencies, interests of, 29 constitutive effect, 134 consumerism, 17, 22, 27, 31, 51, 75 contextualization, 96–­97 control, 30–­31; loss of, 38 Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC), 157 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), 56–­57, 110–­111, 127, 173n6 Cooper, Melinda, 31 coordination, 13 corporatization, 26 cosmopolitanism, 90 Council of Child Protection (Netherlands), 33–­34 countermovements, 51, 74 countries of origin, 2, 17, 142; and child welfare, 71; and domestic adoption, 4, 161; non-­Hague, 75–­76; otherness of, 119; sensitivity to, 35 Coutin, Susan Bibler, 9, 148 CRC. See Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) crisis situations, 39, 43, 163 Csordas, Thomas, 88 culture, 84, 86; of consumerism, 30–­31; and nature, 14 culture keeping, 139–­140, 150, 152, 180n12

202

Index

demedicalization, 97 dependency, 19 depoliticization, 27, 49, 52, 76, 160 deportation, 18 determinism, 112, 128, 138 development, 84, 86–­87, 88 developmentalism, 91 disclosure, 63, 134 diseases, 81, 98 disembodiment, 151 distanciation, 140 DNA tests, 106, 108, 113, 124, 141, 142, 147 double movement, 51–­52, 54, 159. See also under Hague Adoption Convention ECHR. See European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) ecological niche, 86–­87, 176n7 economies: ethico-­moral, 9; of kinship, 19, 131, 143–­146, 151; moral, 19, 96; racial, 98; reproductive, 8, 32, 77; somatic, 18, 80, 98, 103 economism, 98 economization: of adoption, 48; of life, 21, 74; of reproduction, 74 Egypt, 57 enactments, 7–­8 entitlement, 30 environment, 86, 89 epigenetics, 89, 101 Esposito, Roberto, 148–­149 essentialization, 150 ethics in the making, 6, 9 ethics: of adoption, 7, 68; of care, 158; and consent, 73; cosmopolitan, 91; and divided interests, 29; and institutions, 25, 160; and markets, 30; and money, 26–­27; professional, 20, 23, 35; of reproduction, 74; somatic, 91–­98; and transparency, 72; of treatment, 100. See also bioethics Ethiopia, 69–­70 ethnography, multisited, 15–­16

Euradopt, 62 Europe: and ethics, 24; and independent adoption, 67–­68; and open adoption, 128; and race, 138 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), 108, 110–­111 exchangeability, 19, 142, 151 exchanges, 143 exploitation, 120 Fabian, Johannes, 119 families, 29–­30, 57; biogenetic, 7, 146; nuclear, 61, 146, 152; unclear, 152 family citizenship, 33, 37 family life, 110–­113, 117, 178; forms of, 152, 161; worthiness for, 122 family making, 3, 6–­7, 38, 149, 157; and law, 75; as motivation, 110; rights to, 117 family preservation, 8, 150 family values, 31, 33 Fassin, Didier, 10–­11, 48 favelas, 60 Feldman, Gregory, 16 fertility tourism, 32 Fonseca, Claudia, 60 fostering, 57, 60, 103, 107–­108, 128, 177n17; vs. adoption, 116 Foucault, Michel, 9 frameworks: biopolitical, 9–­10; of internationalism, 27; justificatory, 9, 12, 47, 110, 119, 156; moral, 41, 43; normative, of nature/culture, 112; ontological, 104 Franklin, Sarah, 37 geneticization, 7, 128 genetics, 10, 112, 140 geography, 16, 105–­107, 112–­113, 120–­ 121, 159 geopolitics, 159 Gesell, Arnold, 86 Gibson-­Graham, Julie Katherine, 153 Gilroy, Paul, 150 globalism, 48

Index 203 globalization, 2, 4–­5, 8–­9, 159–­160, 163; of adoption, 162–­163; and commodification, 146; justice in, 18; and mobility, 123; of reproduction, 21, 74 Global North, 4, 9, 18, 60, 148, 161; as “better off,” 47; forms of adoption, 58; and Hague Adoption Convention, 78; and power, 121; and singularity, 119, 145; and trafficking, 110 global orphan, 91, 101, 104, 156, 159; vs. child subject, 118–­119; and collectivity, 119; vs. foster children, 177n17; grievability of, 123 Global South, 18, 148, 161; availability of children, 4, 9; and choice, 73; and global orphan, 119; and power, 121; as relation, 161; and simple adoption, 58; and surplussed children, 145; and trafficking, 110 governance, 29, 63, 120; of children, 105; global, 74, 78 Great Transformation, The (Polanyi), 54 grievability, 18, 107, 113, 119–­122 Guatemala, 10, 25, 75–­76, 171n4 Guide to Good Practice, 53, 58–­60, 64–­65 guilt, postcolonial, 144 Hacking, Ian, 102 Hague Adoption Convention, 17, 20, 44, 50–­53, 78, 130, 157, 159; accreditation by, 25; Article 16, 139; Article 26, 59; Article 27, 59; as countermovement, 54; and depoliticization, 160; as double movement, 55, 76; enactment of, 52; and ethics, 62–­63; and human rights, 56; as insufficient, 67, 68; and law, 75; and local adoption, 60; principles of, 28, 56–­57, 58; and private adoption, 64–­65; and private international law, 55; and right to know, 127; and trafficking, 110; and transparency, 62–­64, 71–­73 Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH), 44, 53, 58

Hague Convention for Intercountry Adoption, 109 Haiti, 43–­47, 156–­157, 172nn23–­25, 172n27, 172n29 Hanafin, Patrick, 151 Handbook of International Adoption Medicine (Miller), 84, 85f Harvey, Penny, 63–­64 HCCH. See Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) health, 80–­83, 87–­89, 90–­93, 96–­97, 103, 114. See also under adoptees; children heredity, 146 heritage, 125–­126, 146 Herman, Ellen, 86 hope, 33, 36–­37, 158. See also politics: of hope hormonal treatments, 89–­90, 99–­100 Howell, Signe, 140 humanitarianism, 2–­3, 10, 17–­18, 156–­ 157; and biogenetic families, 144; and biomedicine, 101–­102, 158; celebrity, 27; corporatization of, 26; in crises, 44; and domestic adoption, 70; and exception-­making, 45; failure of, 39; as ideology, 17, 48, 52; inconsistency in, 123; instrumentalization of, 26; and justification, 27, 135, 156–­157; new, 26–­28, 101–­102 humanity, 48 humanization, 30 Hutchinson, Sally, 37 identity, 126; biological, 128; racial, 140; tragedy of, 135 identity politics, 126, 150–­151, 152 imaginaries: global, 4; multicultural, 98 immunity: and community, 50, 148; individuated, 150; logic of, 149; and singularity, 152 immutability, 104 India, 108, 111, 115 individualization, 104, 149 inequality: class, 60; global, 6, 27, 45, 74, 115, 160; structural, 115

204

Index

infertility, 4, 6; as illness, 36; meanings of, 22; medicalization of, 21, 157–­158; as motivation, 34–­35; as public, 36; social, 22; as uncontrollable, 31 infertility exile, 32 information, 134 informed consent, 73 Inhorn, Marcia C., 32 institutions, 7, 9, 12–­13, 19, 21–­22, 103; bypassing, 48; ethical, 25; and globalization, 155–­156; professional, 25; semigovernmental, 26; in sending countries, 66; volunteer, 25. See also agencies; organizations interchangeability, 133 interference, 110, 178nn6–­7 internationalism, 2 internationalization, 160 interpellations, 93, 137–­138 intervention, 87–­89, 102; adoption as, 144, 147; biomedical, 88, 101; scientific, 147 intimacy: of approach, 29–­30; as made public, 38 in vitro fertilization (IVF), 6, 21 Islam, 57 IVF. See in vitro fertilization (IVF) Jacobson, Heather, 138–139 Juffer, Femmie, 83, 87, 88 justice, 121, 159–­160; humanitarian, 102; and pity, 107, 118 Justice Department (Netherlands), 40, 155 justifications, 5–­6, 81, 98, 101, 112–­113, 163; biomedical, 104; enactment of, 12; humanitarian, 39; and institutions, 17; legal, 114, 157; ontological, 43, 48; regimes of, 9, 11–­12, 90, 160 justification work, 9, 23, 110, 114 kefala, 57 kidnapping. See child-­stealing Kim, Eleana, 133–­134 kinning, 88, 103–­104, 116, 128; and commodification, 146; and foster families, 116

kinship, 7, 46, 78, 112, 156; adoptive, 136, 144–­146; biologization of, 140; and citizenship, 107; and commodification, 98; by design, 86; and economy, in law, 75; performance of, 116; reconfiguration of, 103 kinship tests. See DNA tests knowledge: constitutive, 134; epigenetic, 89; Euro-­American forms of, 107; institutional, 26, 82, 129–­130; kinship, 52, 61, 162; in psy-­disciplines, 114 Kopytoff, Igor, 75 Korean War, 3 Latour, Bruno, 14 law: adoption, 148–­151; conflict of, 51; contract, 75; cross-­cultural, 73; family, 75; international, 17, 50–­52, 160; performativity of, 18; private international, 52–­56, 77; public international, 55 legalities, 60, 67; biopolitical, 106; Euro-­ American, 13–­14; liberal, 148 legalization, and market, 74 legitimacy, 12, 78, 102, 162; of adoption, 31, 80, 101; of alternate caregivers, 117; economy of, 8; enactments of, 77; moral, 81; of research, 88 legitimation: crisis of, 39, 41, 48, 155; of life, 23 legitimation work, 6, 7–­9, 10–­11, 13, 92, 99, 163; in crises, 39; and depoliticization, 162; and Hague Adoption Convention, 71; and professionalism, 17, 22 legitimization: of global adoption, 52, 91; of inequality, 27 Lemke, Thomas, 76–­77 licensing, 25 life: control over, 9, 10–­11, 32, 93; negation of, 149; relational, 33, 152–­153; sanctity of, 145. See also politics: of life “Making Up People” (Hacking), 102 maladjustment, 83

Index 205 malleability, 84, 87 manipulability, 4 Marcus, George, 15 market, 74–­77; model of, 31; reproductive, 3, 74, 75–­76, 157, 162–­163 market dynamics, 159 marketization, 31, 51, 54, 98, 160 market mechanisms, 23–­24, 51, 65–­66; and Hague Adoption Convention, 73 Marsiglio, William, 37 Maurer, Bill, 9, 148 Mauro case, 106, 107–­116, 122, 177n3, 178n13 medicalization, 79–­83, 92–­93, 99–­100, 157–­158; of adoption, 103; as regulating, 96. See also biomedicalization middle class, 29, 30–­31, 60. See also under subjectivities migration, 105–­108 Migration Apparatus, The (Feldman), 16 Miller, Daniel, 143 Miller, Laurie, 84 Ministry of Justice (Netherlands), 29 modernism, 48 modernity, 2, 13–­14, 17, 156 Mol, Annemarie, 33 money, 70–­71, 158–­159; and biodesire, 38–­39; claims to, by families, 142; concerns about, 25; and ethics, 26–­ 27; role of, 25. See also resources moral imperatives, 27, 101, 102 morality: and biomedicine, 101; and economy, 31, 159; and health, 83 moralization, 30 moral technologies, 81, 91, 102 moving child, 105–­106, 123 multiculturalism, 98, 138–­139, 140, 150, 152 mutability, 104 Nader, Laura, 12 narratives: colonial, 35; justificatory, 18; preadoptive, 144; rescue, 35, 47, 156 nature, 4, 14; vs. culture, 112; vs. nurture, 112 “needs to be met,” 77–­78

negotiation, 82, 96–­97 Negri, Antonio, 32, 49 neoliberalism, 17, 27, 31, 36 Nepal, 157 Netherlands, 1–­2, 15–­16, 23–­24, 29; adoption cases, 106, 107–­116; and adoption research, 87–­90; and asylum, 108–­109; and Chinese trafficking, 39–­43, 154–­155; developmental standards, 99–­100; and Hague Adoption Convention, 61–­62, 67–­68; and Haitian adoptions, 44, 46, 172n24; and independent adoption, 68; and race, 138 neuroscience, 84 neutrality, 76 New Approach (Netherlands), 23 NGOs. See organizations: nongovernmental (NGOs) Niewöhner, Jörg, 89 nonchoice, 148 nonconsumerism, 30 objectification, 91–­93 obligations, 143, 147 one-­child policy (China), 39, 41, 161 On Justifications (Boltanski and Thévenot), 11–­12 ontological choreography, 13, 33, 99 ontology, 22; modern, 2, 162 openness, 19, 127–­129 organizations: intergovernmental, 53; nongovernmental (NGOs), 26; nonprofit, 28. See also agencies; institutions orphanages, 40, 43, 87, 154 orphans, 2, 47, 87. See also global orphan otherness, 119, 139 outcomes, 82, 83, 88, 103 outsourcing, 29 ownership, 37, 116 parenthood: adoptive, 116; aspirational, 4, 37, 158; as right, 37; social, 140

206

Index

parents: adoptive, 29, 44–­46, 60, 90, 116, 136, 172n24, 180n13; adoptive vs. biogenetic, 60, 103, 111; biogenetic, 19, 73, 95t, 96, 111, 129. See also adopters partial mediation. See adoption: independent Patrizio, Pasquale, 32 Permanent Bureau, 53, 61–­62, 67–­68, 77 personhood, 73, 126, 152; and choice, 148 perspectivism, 171n10 Polanyi, Karl, 51, 54, 143 politics: of care, 91; of compassion, 121–­ 122, 156; of hope, 33, 36–­37, 48–­49; of life, 10, 27, 102, 150–­151; ontological, 32–­39, 171n10; of pity, 118; as relational, 151 postcolonialism, 49, 52, 101, 120–­121, 145, 156, 159–­160. See also guilt, postcolonial potentiality, 33 pragmatism, 35 preadoption, 82, 91, 144 privilege, 30 procreative consciousness, 37–­38 professionalism, 16, 25, 48, 64; performance of, 38–­39 professionalization, 20–­21, 26–­27, 158; paradoxes of, 30 puberty, 89–­90, 99–­100, 177nn14–­15 Purchase of Intimacy, The (Zelizer), 143 race, 3, 120, 129, 137–­140, 150, 152; as reproductive technology, 98 Rahul case, 106, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114–­ 116, 119–­120 recognizability, 121–­122 Reeves, Madeleine, 63–­64 referral photos, 132–­133 relatedness, 46 relationality, 152–­153 relations, 16, 19, 33 relationships, 149; biogenetic, 128; parent-­child, 57–­58, 60, 141–­142 religion, 5, 35. See also individual religions remittances, 142, 143–­144

reontologization, 126, 151 reproduction: assisted, 21–­22, 130; feminist approach, 32; marketization of, 22; renaturalized, 3–­4, 157; social, 1; stratified, 60 reproductive choice, 7, 24, 29, 103 reproductive desire, 6, 48; biological, 36; foregrounding of, 35; as hope, 33; naturalization of, 22, 36. See also biodesire reproductive services, 4, 159; commercial, 74–­75 reproductive technologies, 103, 112; adoption as, 116, 158; artificial (ARTs), 6–­7, 13, 75; assisted, 3–­4, 35–­37, 157–­158; and morality, 93; normalization of, 21; rise of, 21 resources, 20–­21, 25–­26 responsibility: family, 31; and markets, 30; and transparency, 72 return journeys, 19, 126, 131, 135, 138, 141–­146, 151–­152; as unwanted, 140 reunions, 135, 146 rights: of adoptive parents, 112; of biogenetic parents, 112, 113; children’s, 2–­3, 120–­121, 157, 159; claims to, 37–­38; consumer, 24; enactment of, 5, 7–­8; and hope, 33; human, 2–­3, 5, 55, 130, 150, 152, 157, 158; nature of, 126; parental, 103; procreative, 3–­4, 22; as unmet, 77 right to a child, 22 right to family, 18, 80, 90, 157 right to health, 18, 80, 90, 91, 158 right to know, 18–­19, 125–­126, 127–­131, 151–­152 right to life, 10, 157 right to procreate, 38, 157–­158 risk, 17, 31, 82–­83, 88, 93, 103, 149; somatic, 89 Romania, 87 rooting, 148 roots questions, 19, 140 Rose, Nikolas, 128

Index 207 Ruddick, Sue, 117 Ruppert, Evelyn, 63–­64 Russia, 87 Sanders, Stephan, 139 screenings: of adopters, 33–­34, 175; of children, 36, 79, 80, 91, 92–­93, 174–­175n1 self-­racializing, 140 sending countries. See countries of origin singularity, 119, 121, 126; of life, 152; negation of, 149; ontologized, 142 singularization, 115, 118–­119, 123, 150, 151 Smolin, David, 120 snatching, 97–­98 socialization, 138 social justice, 6, 78, 151 socioeconomics, 51, 53 solidarity: cosmopolitan, 2–­3; global, 45 South Korea, 125 spatiotemporality, 99, 106, 107, 119, 121 special needs, 94–­95t; as desirable, 97; standardization of, 96. See also under children standardization, 91–­92, 93, 96–­97 Storrow, Richard, 32 Strathern, Marilyn, 71, 134, 142, 147 subalterity, 126, 151 subjectivities: illiberal, 148; middle class, 24, 30, 33, 91 subsidiarity, 1–­2, 17, 28, 52, 57, 109; in Hague Adoption Convention vs. CRC, 70; and non-­Hague countries, 69–­70; and transparency, 66 technoscience, 99, 101 Thévenot, Laurent, 9, 11–­12 thick reciprocity, 143, 144 Thompson, Charis, 13 Timmermans, Stefan, 92, 93, 101 Tobin, John, 77 trafficking, 10, 18, 25, 119–­120, 154–­ 155, 177n1; in China, 17, 39–­43; and Hague Adoption Convention, 51, 66; in Haiti, 45–­46; in Indonesia,

109–­110; informing children of, 40–­ 41, 42, 43 transformation: of adoption, 59; of body, 80 transparency, 11, 17, 52, 62–­64, 66, 71–­ 74, 162; insufficient, 67, 68 transparency devices, 52, 63–­64, 72, 78 transparency regimes, 71, 72–­73 trust, 65–­66 Turner, Chad, 57 unaccompanied minors, 107, 108, 117, 122, 178n5 United States: and adoption controversies, 66; and commercialization, 74–­75; and ethics, 24; and family, 31; and Hague Adoption Convention, 53, 61–­62, 65–­67, 174n17; and Haitian adoptions, 44–­45; and open adoption, 127–­128; and private adoption, 65; as sending country, 161 unpredictability, 64, 69–­70 value: of children, 18, 96; of life, 7, 10, 32, 47; politics of, 76, 160 van Beers, Britta, 75 van IJzendoorn, Marinus H., 87, 88 Van Loon, Hans, 53–­54, 55, 58 Vietnam War, 3, 172n28 visualization, 92–­93 volunteers, 20, 26; concerns about, 25 vulnerability, 113 waiting lists, 38 Watt, Horatia Muir, 54–­55 welfare states, 24, 50, 58, 128 Wells, Karen, 120 whiteness, cultures of, 139 World War II, 2 worth: of life, 7, 10; orders of, 9, 11 worthiness, of applicants, 38 Yngvesson, Barbara, 9, 116, 136, 144–­145, 148 Zelizer, Viviana, 143

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sonja van  Wichelen is a senior research fellow with the Department

of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney in Australia and director of the Biopolitics of Science Research Network. Her research broadly engages with the body, law, and science in the age of globalization and the effects that changes in these areas have on our understanding of citizen­ship. She is the author of Religion, Gender and Politics in Indonesia: Disputing the Muslim Body (2010) and coeditor of Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory and Practice (2009). She is currently coauthoring a book entitled Biolegalities: A Critical Intervention.