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‘Giving Children a Better Life?’ Reconsidering Social Reproduction, Humanitarianism and Development in Intercountry Adoption

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Abstract

This article takes a political economy approach to intercountry adoption (ICA) as a global system to consider how children’s well-being is often at the center of essential development questions in sometimes contradictory ways that are masked by the depoliticizing sentimentality applied to children. A reconsideration of ICA as social reproduction rather than child rescue also decenters development studies’ tendency to reduce development to problems in the global South. Instead, I highlight how ICA as an ostensibly humanitarian intervention also has much to do with crises of social reproduction in the global North. It is therefore important for development studies to critically question underlying assumptions and practices in discourses about ‘giving children a better life’.

Abstract

Cet article aborde l’adoption internationale (AI) – considérée comme un système mondial – dans une approche d’économie politique pour examiner en quoi le bien-être des enfants est souvent placé au cœur des questions-clés de développement de manières parfois contradictoires et masquées par la sentimentalité dépolitisante appliquée aux enfants. De plus, envisager l′adoption internationale dans le cadre de la reproduction sociale plutôt que du secours aux enfants déplace de sa position centrale la tendance des études de développement à réduire le développement à des problèmes touchant les pays du Sud. Comme je le souligne, l′adoption internationale, cette intervention soi-disant humanitaire, est étroitement liée aux crises de la reproduction sociale dans les pays du Nord. Il est donc important que les études de développement remettent en question les hypothèses et pratiques sous-jacentes aux discours sur le thème « offrir une vie meilleure aux enfants ».

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Notes

  1. I use the terms global North/South interchangeably with developed/developing countries.

  2. Unpublished figures courtesy of Peter Selman.

  3. Ugandan adoption law requires a 3-year residency period. However, increasing numbers of foreign adoptive parents have discovered a loophole in guardianship laws, enabling them to remove children from Uganda. They then apply for permanent adoption once they reach their home country. This has led to a tripling of ICAs in the past few years (edition.cnn.com/2013/02/27/world/africa/wus-uganda-adoptions).

  4. Manifest Destiny refers to the expansionist period in nineteenth-century America, wherein American settlers thought it their destiny to claim all the territory from coast to coast and remake it in their virtuous self-image.

  5. International adoptees report feeling this pressure while reconciling the ‘good fortune’ of their adoption with their abandonment by and loss of connection with biological family and native culture. Cf. Knowlton, Linda G. 2012. Somewhere Between, the United States.

  6. Personal communication from various delegates in attendance, who wish to remain anonymous.

  7. China’s One-Child Policy spurred ICA, along with selective abortion and infanticide of girls. China’s boy–girl ratio is consequently one of the most imbalanced in the world (populationmatters.org/2012/newswatch/china-boygirl-ratio-improves-worlds-worst/). Cultural factors similarly influence India’s uneven sex ratio. Cf. Srinivasan (this volume) and ‘India’s 60 million women that never were’ (www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/07/201372814110570679.html).

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  1. International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, the Netherlands

    Kristen Cheney

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Cheney, K. ‘Giving Children a Better Life?’ Reconsidering Social Reproduction, Humanitarianism and Development in Intercountry Adoption. Eur J Dev Res 26, 247–263 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2013.64

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