Intercountry adoption: Privilege, rights and social justice

Abstract

Intercountry adoption tends to be understood in parts – the individual child, the needs of adoptive parents, the legality of its processes, and perceived red tape. Mostly, however, the focus is the facilitation of placing a child with a prospective adoptive family, and the elimination of perceived barriers between the adoptive parents and the desired child. By failing fully to consider the whole picture concerning intercountry adoption, important issues are obscured and disempowered people remain disempowered. Resources are consequently directed toward specific, enabling aspects of intercountry adoption, a need constructed by influential voices particularly where the market approach dominates.1 In that process, other considerations such as the moral or material circumstances that lead to intercountry adoption and the disempowered first parents, families and communities tend to be ignored in public commentary in the media and in adoptive parent group blogs and chatrooms.