Social Factors Affecting Transnational Adoption

The Gale encyclopedia of Children's Health defines adoption as “a practice in which an adult assumes the role of parent for a child who is not the adult's biological offspring” (GECH 2016, 60). Common practice since ancient times, adoption continues to represent a widespread phenomenon across modern society as a whole. For a variety of reasons – from war/violence, to socio-economic factors, to social pressures – biological parents may choose, or in many cases, find themselves forced, to surrender their offspring for adoption. Comparatively, adoptive parents, for an equally plentiful number of , may elect to adopt a child as an alternative to the traditional avenue of biological reproduction. While adoption has long occupied a central role in …show more content…
Such factors, while not all encompassing, stand as critical for a better understanding of the nature of transnational adoption. Push factors that affect transnational adoption include those of war/violence, health issues, child or population policy, preference for sons, and economic or political insecurity (Quiroz 2007). On the opposite end of the equation, pull factors that influence parents into adopting internationally include infertility, childbirth complications, the increased incidence of same-sex couples wishing to adopt, and the overall decline in the availability of domestic Caucasian infants for adoption due to the legalization of abortion and the increased availability of contraception (Quiroz 2007). For all the actors involved in the movement of children across borders, every action taken, regardless of course, often relates back to the notion of “what is best for the welfare of the child”. Biological parents, influenced by the aforementioned push factors, relinquish their care of a child based largely on the view that transnational adoption serves as a means for their children to gain access to education and services not available in their country of origin (Younes & Klein 2012). Moreover, adoptive parents, in addition to the pull factors involved, largely view transnational adoption as an act of benevolence, where they provide a safe …show more content…
By the 1950s, the dearth in the quantity of healthy Caucasian infants available for adoption led adoptive parents to turn increasingly to international horizons (GECH 2015). Such a shift led fundamentally to the institutionalization of transnational adoption as a practice, most notably with the adoption of Korean orphans following the Korean War. Scholars of adoption often view these beginnings of international adoption as a consolidation of both overarching humanitarian imperatives and the strong desire for children by adoptive families (Leinaweaver 2014). Through this inception, transnational adoption has become both a worldwide humanitarian endeavour as well as a complicated exchange of life; one that harbours cultural, socio-economic, and political connotations. While comprising only around 5 percent of the migrant population of the USA, the number of transnational adoptees in the US rose from 6,472 in 1992 to 22,728 in 2005 (Quiroz 2007). Furthermore, the total number of children adopted internationally in the US between 1999 and 2010 numbers 224,615, and transnational adoptees now account for 85 percent of transracial adoptions within the country (Younes & Klein 2012). While the number of international adoptions has begun to decline in recent years – adoptions were down 9 percent in the US in 2014 to number at 6,441, and down in Canada as well – the global influence of transnational adoption, which reached it's US