In Somebody's Children, Laura Briggs examines the social and cultural forces - poverty, racism, economic inequality, and political violence - that have shaped trans-racial and transnational adoption in the U.S. during the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing particularly on the experiences of those who have lost their children to adoption, Briggs analyzes the circumstances under which African American and Native mothers in the United States and indigenous and poor women in Latin America have felt pressed to give up their children for adoption or have lost them involuntarily. The dramatic expansion of trans-racial and transnational adoption since the 1950s, Briggs argues, was the result of specific and profound political and social changes, including the large-scale removal of Native children from their parents, the condemnation of single African American motherhood in the context of the Civil Rights struggle, and the largely invented "crack babies" scare that inaugurated the dramatic withdrawal of benefits to poor mothers in the United States. In Guatemala, El Salvador, and Argentina, governments disappeared children during the Cold War and the subsequently imposed neoliberal economic regimes--all with U.S. support--making the circulation of children across national borders easy and often profitable. Concluding with an assessment of present-day controversies surrounding gay and lesbian adoptions and the struggles of immigrants fearful of losing their children to foster care in the current crackdown, Briggs challenges celebratory or otherwise simplistic accounts of trans-racial and transnational adoption by revealing some of their unacknowledged causes and costs.

Today all politics are reproductive politics, argues esteemed feminist critic Laura Briggs. From longer work hours to the election of Donald Trump, our current political crisis is above all about reproduction. Households are where we face our economic realities as social safety nets get cut and wages decline. Briggs brilliantly outlines how politicians’ racist accounts of reproduction—stories of Black “welfare queens” and Latina “breeding machines"—were the leading wedge in the government and business disinvestment in families. With decreasing wages, rising McJobs, and no resources for family care, our households have grown ever more precarious over the past forty years in sharply race-and class-stratified ways. This crisis, argues Briggs, fuels all others—from immigration to gay marriage, anti-feminism to the rise of the Tea Party.

It took the death of tiny baby Rose for a young man to demonstrate that every single life has value, even those of fragile, disabled children. She seemed insignificant but her life mattered, and sharing her story means she will never be forgotten. Hundreds of children have received love, hope and opportunity because of Rose's short life, and that number grows daily. China's Oasis is the story about International China Concern and David Gotts who started it at the age of 22. ICC provides love hope and opportunity for China's abandoned and disabled children. They operate orphanages in three locations in China: Changsha, Hengyang, and Sanmenxia; supported by eight National Offices around the world. Over three hundred children have received full time, life-changing care, and the same number again have been adopted. We hold many firsts for NGO work in China. This books shows that ordinary people can do extraordinary things through faith and love.

In 1961, the U.S. government established the first formalized provisions for intercountry adoption just as it was expanding America's involvement with Vietnam. Adoption became an increasingly important portal of entry into American society for Vietnamese and Amerasian children, raising questions about the United States' obligations to refugees and the nature of the family during an era of heightened anxiety about U.S. global interventions. Whether adopting or favoring the migration of multiracial individuals, Americans believed their norms and material comforts would salve the wounds of a divisive war. However, Vietnamese migrants challenged these efforts of reconciliation.

As Allison Varzally details in this book, a desire to redeem defeat in Vietnam, faith in the nuclear family, and commitment to capitalism guided American efforts on behalf of Vietnamese youths. By tracing the stories of Vietnamese migrants, however, Varzally reveals that while many had accepted separations as a painful strategy for survival in the midst of war, most sought, and some eventually found, reunion with their kin. This book makes clear the role of adult adoptees in Vietnamese and American debates about the forms, privileges, and duties of families, and places Vietnamese children at the center of American and Vietnamese efforts to assign responsibility and find peace in the aftermath of conflict.

"Essential reading." —NPR “Books We Love”

“Dares to imagine a different world where Americans treat adoption like the justice issue it is.” ―Washington Post

“Impressively reported...[Sisson] uses her deep well of knowledge to make the case that adoption is no solution for Americans’ reduced access to abortion.” ―San Francisco Chronicle

A powerful decade-long study of adoption in the age of Roe, revealing the grief of the American mothers for whom the choice to parent was never real

Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the abortion debate, but little attention has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish infants for private adoption. Relinquished reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for those for whom abortion is inaccessible, or for whom parenthood is untenable. The stories of relinquishing mothers are stories about our country's refusal to care for families at the most basic level, and to instead embrace an individual, private solution to a large-scale, social problem.

With the recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization revoking abortion protections, we are in a political moment in which adoption is, increasingly, being revealed as an institution devoted to separating families and policing parenthood under the guise of feel-good family-building. Rooted in a long-term study, Relinquished features the in-depth testimonies of American mothers who placed their children for domestic adoption. The voices of these women are powerful and heartrending; they deserve to be heard.