| Over the past fifteen years, international adoption in the United States has entered a new era. The number of international adoptions in the U.S. has dropped significantly since its peak in 2004, against the backdrop of allegations of fraud and corruption in a number of "sending nations." While international adoption has always functioned as a demand-driven reproductive market, shifts in diplomatic relations and public opinion have reshaped the supply of children available for international adoption. This project explores the ways that the most recent cohort of international adoptive mothers has negotiated the massive political and bureaucratic changes to international adoption. I conducted 43 open-ended ethnographic interviews with mothers (and a few fathers) who adopted children internationally since 2004. Overall, the mothers I interviewed came to see themselves as consumers within a complex reproductive marketplace. As they came face-to-face with the commercial aspects of international adoption as an institution as well as with allegations and evidence of fraud in their own adoption processes, these mothers were forced to reconsider a straightforward vision of international adoption as a benevolent way to "grow" their families by "saving" children from abroad. At the same time, these mothers navigated the intersection of race and ability/disability in their decision-making surrounding adoption, suggesting an opening to think about shifts in our cultural understanding of altruism, carework, race, kinship, and what makes a "healthy" baby in the new economy. |
