Adoption, Blood Kinship, Stigma, and the Adoption Reform Movement: A Historical Perspective
Author(s)
Carp, E. Wayne
Abstract
This is a review essay on a book by Katarina Wegar, Adoption, Identity, and Kinship: The Debate over Sealed Birth Records (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). The historical, psychological, sociocultural, and gender aspects of the debate about the adoption search movement (i.e., the opening of sealed adoption records) are examined. Wegar views adoption and adoptees as socially and culturally constructed categories that reflect a family ideology placing adoptive bonds below biological ones and that are structured by race, class, and a number of other principles. She criticizes the adoption search movement for perpetuating the traditional view of adoptive bonds as inferior. Whereas the intellectual validity of Wegar’s criticism is acknowledged, its practical value is doubted in light of the focus on adoptees’ rights in adoption search debates and legal actions; not the perpetuation of the stigma, but the granting of identity revelation rights is the main purpose of the open-records movement. The universal “psychological need” cited as the primary reason for search efforts is also reviewed critically, quoting studies that indicate that non-searchers do not appear to be characterized by more negative self-concepts than searchers.
