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Feminism and transnational adoption: Poverty, precarity, and the politics of

raising (other people's?) children
Laura Briggs
Feminist Theory 2012 13: 81
DOI: 10.1177/1464700111430177

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Interchanges
Feminist Theory
13(1) 81100
Feminism and transnational ! The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1464700111430177
and the politics of raising fty.sagepub.com

(other peoples?) children

Laura Briggs
University of Massachusetts, USA

This article developed out of a conversation at a conference in Rio de Janeiro,

Brazil, the Encontro Circulacao de Criancas (The Circulation of Children),
which explored questions related to international adoption and other kinds of
informal and formal circulation of children, with a particular attention to how
birth mothers lose those children.1 There, a very interesting conversation erupted
(in Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French) after a young (male) scholar from
Scandinavia asked: but why have the feminists had nothing to say about adop-
tion? The debate that followed had a peculiar doubleness about it as we strug-
gled to characterise the position of the feminists. On the one hand, at least half
the people at the adoption conference were in fact feminist scholars, but on the
other, we recognised that there was a certain justice in the question we were
hard-pressed to say how we were speaking as feminists on adoption questions.
Feminist silence around adoption is puzzling, given the centrality of other repro-
ductive rights issues from abortion to unwanted sterilisation to transnational
feminist preoccupations with stratied reproduction to feminists in diverse
places.
In part, this may be a symptom of a general neglect of children and childhood
within feminist theory, one that has only recently been addressed. As Erica Burman
and Jackie Stacey argue in Introduction to the recent Feminist Theory special issue
on childhood (2010), feminists have spent so much energy separating ourselves
from the normalising conjoining of woman-as-mother-with-child that it has been
dicult to nd strategies to write as a feminist about children. Burman and Stacey
point out that the normative feminist silence about childhood is changing; feminists
from Lauren Berlant in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (1997) to
Kathryn Bond Stockton in The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth

Corresponding author:
Laura Briggs, Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts, Bartlett 208, Amherst, MA
01003, USA
Email: ljbriggs@wost.umass.edu

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82 Feminist Theory 13(1)

Century (2009) have begun to look at the gure of the child, children, and child-
hoods, as well as the limitations of and political investments in the notion of the
child. As Karen Dubinsky (2010) argues, childhood has a geographical dimension
as well, imagined as the superiority of the Global North countries to those in the
Global South, with their more limited opportunities for a period of innocent or
idyllic childhood. Or, on the contrary, as the critique would have it, childhood is a
period of repression and silencing (especially in schools), of pain, futility, and
responding to violence and indierence (including in the context of sexual abuse).
Yet feminist silence on adoption is much more than a lacuna in thinking about
children; it is also part of a struggle to theorise poverty and precarity and the
stratication of reproduction including the birthing and raising of children and
inequalities associated with race, labour, and sexuality in a transnational context.
Adoption takes place almost exclusively in one direction, from poor countries to
wealthy ones, or within nations, from impoverished or otherwise vulnerable women
and girls to wealthier, more secure ones. Adoptees do not long remain children, and
the web of intimate but unequal relationships in which adoption is embedded
implicates them and their kin throughout the life course.
In some cases, national and international level feminist groups have supported
the needs and demands of impoverished mothers, as we hear about in the context
of Brazil in Andrea Cardarellos contribution here. We can think of other exam-
ples; in the United States, when the National Organization for Women and the
Feminist Majority Foundation lobbied vigorously against the 1996 welfare
reform measures that removed most federal supports from impoverished mothers,
and the ensuing Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) legislation
which made it dramatically easier for them to lose their children (Scales, 1996;
Smith, 2007). Smaller, less well-known groups or those not usually considered
in the history of feminism also organised to defend the rights of birth mothers.
In Wake Up Little Susie and Beggars and Choosers (1992, 2002), historian Rickie
Solinger related the history of Concerned United Birthmothers (CUB), a group
founded in the 1970s by women who, as teens or young adults, had been com-
pelled to hide their pregnancies and relinquish their babies. At about the same
time, the National Association of Black Social Workers, in the context of wide-
spread demonisation of unmarried Black mothers notably by the Moynihan
Report, took a stand to combat what some were calling the browning of child
welfare, as more and more Black children were being taken into foster care.
Where do Black children belong, the group asked. In Black families, in
their myriad forms, from extended families to single mothers, they answered
(Briggs, 2009).
Just as often, however, as we hear in Claudia Fonsecas contribution here, fem-
inists have failed to rally to the cause of birth mothers. For example, Solingers
sympathetic account of CUB merited a startlingly hostile response from Carol Joe
in Womens Review of Books that seemed to endorse the taking of children by the
foster care system or the social workers whom CUB had characterised as coercive,
by suggesting that the best interests of children might be irreconcilably dierent

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Briggs 83

from the needs and desires of their birth mothers: An eective adoption system is
an essential part of a good society, wrote Joe:

Adoption by its very nature typically brings some combination of pain and loss as well
as joy and peace to all involved in the adoption triangle of birthmother, child and
adoptive parents. What is best for the adoptive child may not be best for the birth-
mother and vice versa. Diering at times, irreconcilable interests are at play
in adoption. (Joe, 19: 2001)

Similarly, a well-known feminist adoption advocate, Elizabeth Bartholet, has

gone much further than Joe, actively promoting policies that make it easier for
white families to adopt children of colour and hence, at the same time, make it
easier for birth mothers who want to raise their children to lose them. In the 1990s,
her advocacy of the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act and the Inter-Ethnic Placement
Act put her at odds with the earlier work of the National Association of Black
Social Workers. More recently, Bartholet has positioned herself similarly in a
transnational arena. In the context of her Harvard Child Advocacy Program
(CAP), she is advocating legislation to overturn US participation in the Hague
Convention on Intercountry Adoption, specically arguing against limitations on
adoption from Guatemala (CAP, n.d.; see also Oreskovic and Maskew, 2008;
Bartholet, 2010) a stance that puts her in direct conict with feminists in
Guatemala, notably in Sobrevivientes, where women who lost their children to
kidnapping and international adoptions held a hunger strike to demand them
back, along with greater enforcement of Hague norms (Fundacion
Sobrevivientes, n.d.).
In signicant part, this is a feminism that champions the interests of women and
families of a specic class, and to some extent but not exclusively, those of white
mothers (and fathers). It reects the process Shellee Colen called stratied repro-
duction in her account of immigrant nannies in New York City the process of
transferring childrearing labour from middle class US women to Black and brown
women from outside the US, many of whom have left children in home countries,
as international systems of wealth and poverty make them unable to rear their own
children. Transnational adoption, like transnational gestational surrogacy, simi-
larly operates in the space of international inequalities of access to resources and
profoundly dierent economies of age and reproduction. These women, together
with gay and lesbian adopters, have found in feminism a paradigm and a language
to think about adoption as a reproductive right.
In response to our discussion in Brazil and these broad trends, I asked several
scholars of adoption who were present to sketch the problem from their diverse
perspectives, and lay out some ideas for a transnational feminist research agenda
on adoption. In response, Andrea Cardarello writes about the diculty of tting
the Mothers of the Courthouse Square movement in Brazil into the context of the
Latin American feminist tradition of mothers speaking against the state on behalf
of their children since in this movement of impoverished mothers, many were

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84 Feminist Theory 13(1)

informal foster parents of their children, and hence not, by many peoples deni-
tions, mothers at all. Diana Marre situates the problem of feminist adoption
research in the middle of what we might call the second generation of feminisms
reproductive crises: feminists in Spain may have won the ght for entry into good,
well-paying jobs but only at the considerable cost of remaining childless, or delay-
ing childbirth until the period of reduced fertility. Chantal Collard sketches out a
research problem for feminists related to adoption: how do we think about the
complex and unpredictable ways that a project of the US anti-feminist, anti-
abortion Christian Right, the sharing of extra frozen embryos (snowakes),
gets taken up by women who want to get pregnant? How do donors and recipients
discourses about embryos exceed and evade the anti-abortion intent of the agency?
More broadly, her piece raises the complex issue of how to gure out the relation-
ships and dierences between blood kin and kinship by law and adoption is a
frozen embryo (snowake) related to a woman whose money caused it to be
produced even if the ovum was donated by someone else, as long as she gestated
its sibling? If an embryo is adopted, can a woman give birth to an adopted child?
Finally, Barbara Yngvesson extends Collards questions about reproductive col-
laboration, rather than reproductive stratication, in her inquiry into transnational
open adoptions, and asks whether they provide an opportunity for a kind of
maternal, feminist solidarity.

Why havent Brazilian feminists rallied around the cause

of birth mothers?
Claudia Fonseca
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil

Researchers argue forcefully that no one in Brazil was much concerned about child
placements before the rise of international adoptions during the late 1970s and
1980s (Abreu, 2002). In this unregulated climate, a birth mother often took an
active role in deciding which couple would adopt her child. A series of laws,
starting in the 1960s, outlined principles of plenary adoption, but the process
was decentralised, often in the hands of hospital personnel or society ladies
who doubled as charity workers. Only after newspapers began to carry stories
on the adoption of Brazilian children by foreigners presented as an aront to
national honour did the countrys power-holders resolve to tighten controls,
centralising procedures in the juvenile courts. The inuential judiciary was, at
the time, overwhelmingly male and, as some observers would suggest (Abreu,
2002), their attentions were originally focussed not so much on the best interests
of the child as on the need to exact respect from foreign adopters. Ironically, in
centralising adoption procedures within the courts, the judicial services not only
eliminated abuse by foreign adopters, but also severely curtailed birth mothers
participation in decisions concerning their childrens fate. While introducing
reforms such as the irrevocable and all-inclusive integration of the child into his

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Briggs 85

or her adoptive family, plenary adoption eectively banished the birth mother from
all decision-making processes, precluding any possibility of information about or
contact with her child.
Brazilian feminists were, at the time, by no means idle. However, their energies
were being channelled elsewhere. Bolstered to a great extent by overseas support
groups such as the Ford Foundation, they had forged a stronghold for human rights
during the military dictatorship (196478). After the return to democracy, members
of this movement, well articulated within international networks, gained political
clout within the new democratic processes. They were able to bring to public atten-
tion pressing issues concerning reproductive health, domestic violence, and unequal
wages. Although a strong conservative lobby in Congress prevented them from
successfully revising restrictive laws on abortion, feminists played a central role in
promoting public health policies that, alongside making birth control safe and acces-
sible, brought dramatic decreases in the rates of maternal and infant mortality.
Feminists in Brazil have generally worked on universalist premises that promote
the rights of all women, regardless of class, colour, age, etc. However, they have not
been indierent to the tremendous inequality that creates a chasm between the
daily lives of the overwhelmingly white upper classes and the generally darker-
skinned poor. Ever since the democratic reopening, feminist associations such
as SOS Mulher have developed projects designed to combat domestic violence.
At a time when North Americans were chanting My body, my right! Brazilian
feminists were intoning Quem ama nao mata (Love does not kill). Directed away
from abortion issues by a strong Catholic lobby, Brazilians rallied around the issue
of violence against women, a subject about which there was easier unanimity.
Although this movement took much of its inspiration from the highly publicised
case of a white socialite killed by her well-o lover (Grossi, 1993), most outreach
projects were geared to lower-income women who did not always respond posi-
tively to the kind of feminist rhetoric that was deployed. The evident paternalism of
programmes involving the rote application of idealised middle class values inspired
a great deal of self-reection among feminist scholars and their activist counter-
parts (Bonetti, 2001) fuelling debates that would nd an echo in the NorthSouth
conicts voiced during the UN World Conferences on Women in Vienna, Cairo,
Beijing and Durban.
In Brazil, where feminists and childrens rights activists have carved out separate
niches, debates about the adoption of children have been relegated to the eld of
child welfare. Birth mothers, basically ignored by feminists, have thus become
adjuncts to the best interests of the child. Certainly, there has been ample self-
reection in the eld of child welfare, with the major professional groups jurists,
psychologists and social workers each airing their particular views. Birth parents
were to either give their consent or be stripped of parental authority before their
children could become available for adoption. The worry that poor families might
lose their children because of sheer class prejudice took legislative form in the 1990
Childrens Code, in a clause stating that no parents could be deprived of their
children simply because of poverty. Nonetheless, the government was slow in

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86 Feminist Theory 13(1)

enacting measures that would provide poverty-stricken families with viable alter-
natives, other than adoption, to assure their childrens well-being. In the past few
years, renewed emphasis on the principle of family preservation (convivencia famil-
iar), as well as unied and amplied subventions to lower-income mothers, appear
to have brought timid advances.
Yet there is an increasingly clamorous lobby of potential adopters who openly
express their impatience with what they see as palliative measures measures that
simply delay the inevitable, obliging children to deal for years with inadequate homes
and incompetent parents, until they nally become available for adoption. The
Adoption Bill, passed in July of 2009 by the Brazilian Congress, like its North
American counterpart, foresees a relatively short period for children in publicly
funded shelters, after which time they can be declared available for adoption.
Nowhere does one encounter innovations that might appeal to birth parents, such
as introducing variants of open adoption or developing services aimed at facilitating
communication and possible contact between the adoptee and his or her birth family.
A number of hypotheses come to mind that might explain why the mothers
cause has never come to public attention. First, feminists (as well as jurists and
legislators) are much more likely to be (or count among their friends) adoptive
mothers than birth mothers. This identication is bolstered by a second pertinent
trend the tendency to rely on simplied technical knowledge produced largely by
psychologists to justify class-bound beliefs about family and motherhood (for crit-
ical reviews, see Eyer, 1992; Davis, 1999). Interestingly enough, thanks to the
eorts of gay rights activists, discussions on reproductive rights have recently
been broadened to contemplate the parenthood of same-sex couples. Hence, in
some instances, conventional family norms have been adjusted to permit a
childs legal adoption by a homosexual couple (Zambrano et al., 2007).
Nonetheless, there has been no public discussion that might challenge the total
exclusion of birth parents from information or decision-making processes sur-
rounding their childs adoption. In this forum, class aliation appears to be a
greater obstacle than sexual orientation.
Nowhere in these debates does one nd the birth mothers collective voice. Just as
in the case of under-age children, there may be well-intentioned tutelary forces trying
to protect the interests of this vulnerable (i.e. poverty-stricken) category. And some
birth parents make it to court to protest against their childs adoption by another
family. However, there has been nothing comparable to the birth mother movements
found in North America, in which beginning in the 1970s women who lost their
children in adoption banded together to exert political pressure to change laws, open
registers, and guarantee some rights to information and/or contact with their o-
spring (Solinger, 2002; Carp, 2004). In Brazil, there has never been a durable move-
ment of birth parents, with or without feminists. The one eeting movement, formed
at the end of the 1990s in protest against a particularly abusive judge, petered out
after a year and a half (Cardarello, 2009). Women who lose their children to adop-
tion are, with very few exceptions, miserably poor; many are aicted with ill health;
their lack of literacy skills hampers their ability to defend themselves in court.

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Briggs 87

A far cry from the neoliberal citizens ready to rally around a common cause envi-
sioned in contemporary theories of participatory democracy, birth mothers in coun-
tries such as Brazil will have to be met with new circumstances before they nd an
outlet for their collective voice.

Beyond the nuclear family: The Movement of the

Mothers of the Courthouse Square
Andrea Cardarello
Universite de Montreal, Canada

Between 1992 and 1998, approximately 480 children were adopted in Itagua (a
ctitious name), a town in the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil. About 200 of them were
adopted internationally. A single judge and a single state prosecutor authorised all
these adoptions. In 1998 some twenty lower-class families formed The Movement
of the Mothers of the Courthouse Square to demand a review of the judicial pro-
cedures that had resulted in their childrens adoptions.
After reading about these events in a Brazilian magazine, I went to Sao Paulo in
October 2000 to carry out eldwork among the families who participated in the
Movement (Cardarello, 2009). The groups name, The Movement of the Mothers
of the Courthouse Square, alludes to the Madres de Plaza de Mayo movement in
Argentina and was inspired by the tried-and-true formulas adopted by those
Argentinean protesters, as well as the powerful symbol of motherhood. This
name, however, does not accurately reect the composition of this Brazilian asso-
ciation. Indeed, not only mothers participated in the Movement; grandparents,
aunts and uncles had also joined it. The presence of other relatives showed that
the best description of the Movement was that it was composed of extended fam-
ilies of lower-class origin.
Another signicant component of the Movement was the famlias de criacao.
Kinship studies carried out among the lower classes of Brazil have brought out the
importance of famlias de criacao, a kinship system that corresponds to fosterage
(Goody, 1971; Cardoso, 1984; Lallemand, 1993; Fonseca, 2002b). It is not uncom-
mon for children to circulate between dierent family milieus (the homes of grand-
mothers, other relatives, close friends, or neighbours), a practice that makes several
adults responsible for raising the child. These children may speak of having two or
more mothers, even when their biological mothers have maintained a relationship
with them. Usually, there is no secret of origins in these arrangements: without
any intervention from the courts, agencies, social workers or psychologists, parents
place their children in families that they know. That said, some of the Itagua
children placed for adoption by the judicial system had been living with grandpar-
ents or other extended family members, while others were living with famlias de
criacao who were not necessarily biologically related to them.
Despite the dominant discourse prioritising blood ties, criacao families have a
rmly rooted place within the system. In the Movement, no one contested the

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88 Feminist Theory 13(1)

criacao mothers and fathers right to declare themselves the parents of children
who had been removed and placed in adoptions, whether they had been raising the
children for a few months or for six or seven years. It is relevant that the
Movements rst president was a mae de criacao (foster mother) with no biological
relationship to her child. Nevertheless, biological mothers occupy a privileged
status in the kinship representations of the lower classes, as in Brazilian society
as a whole the two family members asked to testify at the Senate hearings were
both biological mothers.
Given the characteristics of the Movement and the kinship congurations of
lower-class families in Brazil, from the time I started my research I resisted focus-
sing my attention on the literature about motherhood and social movements. The
plenary adoptions imposed in these cases not only cut all ties between children and
biological mothers, they also removed them from an extended kin network, includ-
ing biological fathers, criacao parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and grand-
parents biological and de criacao.2 I hoped that discussing not only mothers but
families would contribute to bringing the existence and the importance of extended
kinship networks barely mentioned in records of the procedures of termination of
parental authority or in the literature on adoption out of the shadows.
In the late 1990s, the Human Rights Commission of the Legislative Assembly of
Sao Paulo and a parliamentary inquiry commission of the Federal Senate produced
two reports denouncing procedural irregularities in the adoptions of the children of
the families protesting. According to these reports, in more than one case, allega-
tions of child abuse and abandonment that were the basis for the process of the
termination of parental rights had never been proven. Moreover, after the children
had been taken from their families, several family members went to the court to
search for them or to obtain information. Although the courts thus had personal
contact information for these families, they did not have a baili summon them to
court to defend themselves but instead published a public notice summons (edital)
in a legal gazette, as if the families addresses were unknown. When families were
aware the process of the termination of parental rights had begun, the court refused
to provide the families with any information whatsoever; they were simply advised
to nd a lawyer. The cost of a private lawyer was, of course, prohibitive and no one
at the court informed the parents that they were eligible for legal aid.
An analysis of the les and interviews with the families reveals that the families
in these cases were accused of lacking the means (falta de condicoes) to bring up
their children. In court, they were told they had to full certain conditions such as
getting a job or moving to a dwelling with more than one room, and were some-
times misled into believing that, if they complied, their children would be returned
to them. The court set unrealistic deadlines to meet these conditions a few days, in
some cases. Moreover, according to the testimony in the report by the Legislative
Assembly, some better-o members of these families went to court to declare their
willingness to look after the children, but this fact was never recorded and is absent
from the case les. In spite of the inquiries and the creation of the Movement by the
families of origin and the media attention that ensued, the judge responsible was

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Briggs 89

acquitted of all accusations of irregularities by the Court of Justice of Sao Paulo at

the end of 2001.
Methodologically, this research suggests several things for adoption studies and
for feminist scholarship. The strong presence of families de criacao compelled me to
refer to families of origin rather than birth families. By using the term families of
origin, I could include families with no biological links as was the case of some
families de criacao together with birth families. However, it is important to stress
that birth parents are the ones who are summoned in the procedures of termination
of parental authority. When de criacao parents were able to nd out what was
happening, they tried to contact the childrens biological parents in their endeavour
to keep the children.
The silence in scholarship regarding birth families or families of origin (see
Volkman, 2005) may well be due to who is writing it. Biological parents (and
members of other types of families of origin) are mostly absent as scholars in
kinship studies. Generally undereducated and poor, they are not well-represented
among academics. Thus, adoption studies would benet from a reexive analysis of
the research carried out by adoptee scholars, as well as work by those who have
even less connection to the classic triad used in adoption studies (biological par-
ents/adoptive parents/adopted children), who could present points of view from
countries of origin of transnationally adopted children. Such a project implies
extending our concept of family beyond the notion of nuclear family, which is
taken for granted in many kinship studies.

Gender, feminism and mothering in Spain

Diana Marre
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain

Spain has the highest adoption rate in the European Union, and the second highest
in the world, behind the United States. The most common explanation for this
hinges on Spains low birth rate it has declined from the highest in the EU in 1978
(2.8 children per woman) to the lowest in 1995 (1.17). These dramatic demographic
shifts are often attributed to feminisms legislative successes the legalisation of
abortion, contraception, voluntary sterilisation, and divorce since 1978. In this
piece, I will argue that the sharply declining birth rate should, on the contrary, be
attributed to the nature of womens unequal and discriminatory incorporation into
the Spanish labour market. Yet while feminists cannot be blamed for this shift, they
have only unevenly taken it on as an issue.3
As Valiente points out, economic and familial equality between men and women
have not been amongst the highest priorities of the Spanish feminist movement:

First, because in post-authoritarian Spain, feminists have been overwhelmed by the

number of other demands that they have had to advance and that had already been
achieved in other Western countries. Second, because between the late 1930s and 1975,

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90 Feminist Theory 13(1)

the existence of a right-wing authoritarian regime contributed to moving Spanish

feminists away from issues such as motherhood and child care later on. (Valiente,
2003: 288)

In Spain, women and young people have the highest rate of unemployment, the
worst type of jobs and the lowest salaries, with young women facing a double
disadvantage. The average dierence in salary between men and women at the
same jobs is around twenty-six per cent. Young women have much higher rates
of unemployment (El Periodico, 24 July 2009). One study pointed out that sixty
per cent of Spanish women think they need to leave the paid labour force either
temporarily or permanently when they have children, a number that increases to
seventy per cent among women between the ages of thirty and thirty-nine
(Delgado, 2007).
In short, the conditions under which women are incorporated in the labour
market demand that they delay maternity, thus producing a structural infertility,
which is resolved through assisted reproduction or transnational adoption. The
demand for assisted reproductive technology (ART) treatments has tripled in the
past ve years amongst women described as economically independent, with a
medium/high income rate and with a stable professional life (El Periodico,
5 August 2009). International adoption is likewise part of a strategy of delaying
childbearing until women are established in their careers. Unfortunately, there do
not seem to be other options on the feminist and/or labour movement agenda.
While in other countries feminist movements have fought for womens right to
motherhood, this has not been the case in Spain. Valiente (2003: 288) attributes
this to the fact that:

After almost forty years [under Franco] of being literally bombarded with the idea of
mothering and caring as the most important task in womens lives, the last thing
Spanish feminists wanted to do after the dictatorship was to pay a lot of attention
to the issues of motherhood and child rearing. Womens liberation was understood as
opening the range of concerns that dene womens lives, such as waged work, political
participation, or control of their bodies. This denition carefully eludes the place of
motherhood and child care in the life of the newly liberated Spanish women.

Even though from 1994 onwards there has been an increase in paid housekeeping
alongside the increase in womens access to the job market (El Pas, 13 March
2006), many Spanish women cannot aord the costs associated with pregnancy,
giving birth, and caring for children until they can go to school. The option of
constituting a family after a certain age became available in Spain not only because
of ART, but also as a consequence of social and economic inequalities in impov-
erished countries that provided housekeepers and nannies through international
immigration and children through transnational adoptions. The externalisation of
certain reproductive functions has increased the stratication of reproduction.

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Briggs 91

This externalisation is created through adoption from countries in Eastern

Europe, Latin America, Asia or Africa. Reproductive stratication often follows
the same routes previously marked out by the dislocation of certain productive
functions oshore production and oshore reproduction are mirrors of each
other. However, in contrast to workers in other kinds of labour, birth mothers
do not earn wages as a result of transnational adoption; while a great deal of
money changes hands, it ends up in the pocket of a large chain of professionals,
technicians, intermediates, administrators, and the governments of sending and
receiving countries. Birth mothers are in fact often stigmatised as they defy a cul-
tural taboo surrounded by silence: mothers must not give their children away.
While Ragone and Twine (2000) illustrate how surrogate maternity can produce
alliances between women (as well as introduce hierarchies amongst them), Spains
transnational adoption has not yet produced or promoted any alliance between
mothers. Birth mothers still constitute an absence in these debates. If any triad is
being formed in Spain, it is constituted by adoptive families, their children and the
professionals intervening in the dierent adoption processes. Spanish women and
the feminist movement have been unable to focus on their own mothering and have
yet to show any interest in this silence.

Snowflakes
Chantal Collard
Concordia University, Canada

While feminists have amply debated the right to be a mother or not in the context
of abortion, there is now an expanded interest in other kinds of reproductive rights
questions, such as those in which adoption and Assisted Human Reproduction
(AHR) techniques are embedded. These questions extend from surrogacy to
more traditional adoption. AHR techniques in recent years have complicated
this question even further through the popularisation of ova donation, surrogacy
and embryo adoption. In all these cases, reproductive rights are complex and mul-
tiple, as they involve at least two and up to three individual womens repro-
ductive rights. Such cases are crucial for feminists because they force us to look not
only at reproductive justice for women but also at reproductive justice between
women. In my earlier work on international adoption from Haiti, I found
Colens framework (1995) of stratied reproduction useful, as it focuses on how
one womans possession of reproductive choice might actually exploit another
womans reproductive vulnerability.
My current work is on embryo adoption in California at Nightlight Christian
Adoptions, a non-prot agency that provides domestic and international adoptions
as well as embryo adoption. This research oers intriguing contrasts with a strat-
ied reproduction framework, as is shows women and families collaborating in an
open adoption process with respect to embryos, and trying to make the best of it.
The Snowakes programme allows married couples and single women

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92 Feminist Theory 13(1)

(although not LGBT couples) to adopt embryos, and works with couples from all
religious backgrounds.
Considering genetic/placing mothers, my research has documented their per-
sonal struggle with fertility issues and the costs and pain associated with the use
of AHR techniques to achieve a pregnancy. It has also showed how these women
have coped with a new type of iatrogenic reproductive crisis: what to do with
extra embryos created through IVF and cryo-preserved? Once women have
completed their families, or are too old to carry another pregnancy and raise
another child (or children, as multiples are quite common in this procedure), the
time and monetary costs of their embryo creation through IVF often lead to a
realisation that they cannot destroy nor easily donate their embryos for scientic
research. Hence, the decision to have their own embryos adopted out of the
family is hardly easy or guilt free, nor motivated solely by a concern for pro-
life politics. This study shows how placing mothers have kinned (Howell, 2006)
with their embryos, whether or not these have been created with their own
gamete or with an ovum donation, once they have carried in their womb a
child coming from the same batch of embryos. Even placing mothers who
used a donor egg felt that the gift of their donor required them not to waste
their surplus embryos by keeping them in storage, donating them to science or
destroying them, and that they have to pass on the gift to other women battling
with fertility issues.
On the side of adoptive families, while infertility is one of the reasons they
turn to embryo adoption as a last resort when other reproductive technology
avenues are either closed or unimaginable, quite a few couples decided not to
use sperm or ovum donation when one partner had fertility issues, and opted
instead for embryo adoption. They stressed that they wanted to have children,
but they did not want to go outside of the marriage by using gamete donation
and stressed how important it was for them to be on equal footing vis-a-vis
the child (It is either going to be from both of us or from neither of us).
Because mothers gestate and deliver their adopted embryos as opposed to
traditional domestic or international adoption the procedure has been called
by some researchers adoption in utero. Indeed adoptive mothers expressed
how important and joyful (and sometimes painful) the experience of the preg-
nancy was for them and how much they enjoy having children, so much so
that all of them were more than willing to make professional sacrices to
accommodate having a family.
Finally, almost all the participants in the research expressed how they were able
to cope with this delicate and dicult situation with the help of the agency, and
other women who had gone through the process themselves and were acting as
resources, to nd some peace with their grief, accommodate the wishes of the other
family and even support them in their journey through email, photos, phone calls
and even face to face encounters, while keeping their personal boundaries. Even if
it was not always easy, these women and their husbands were concerned with
ethics, fairness and safety for themselves and the children involved.

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Briggs 93

Reflections on feminism, adoption, and globalised

motherhood
Barbara Yngvesson
Hampshire College, Massachusetts, USA

The policy to seek adoptive families, either domestically or abroad, as a solution to

poverty distracts us from the thousands of families and populations who exist in a
state of abandonment. We must privilege a politics that gives resources to the poor
before developing policies to seek substitute families for poor children. (Guillermo
Davalos, Bolivian lawyer and activist, 1995, cited in Yngvesson, 2010, p. 39)

During the past decade and a half, I have been studying adoption practices involv-
ing some form of ongoing contact between adoptive children and their families
(particularly the adoptive mother), and the childs birth parent(s), birth siblings,
and extended family. I began the research focussing on birth and adoptive mothers
in the United States in the early 1990s, in the context of my own eorts to maintain
an open adoption with the birth family of my adopted son (Yngvesson, 1997).
I expanded the focus to transnational adoptees who returned to their nations of
origin as adults in the late 1990s and early 2000s and who sought to maintain
ongoing relations with their birth families after a successful search brought them
into renewed contact after periods of separation ranging from twelve to twenty
years (Yngvesson, 2010).
My interest in this issue also intersects with concerns of feminist scholarship
and activism in the area of reproductive politics (Ginsburg and Rapp, 1995;
Petchesky, 1995), specically in the context of considerations of stratied
reproduction (Colen, 1995) and its implication for womens lives. There is a
signicant, and growing, adoption literature touching on these themes (work
published in English includes Kligman, 1995; Fonseca, 2002a, 2005, 2009;
Johnson, 2002, 2004; Roberts, 2002; Yngvesson, 2002; Marre and Briggs,
2009). This literature stands in stark contrast to the central concerns of
most adoption professionals, which focus on keeping adoptions clean (no
money should be exchanged for the child), moving children expeditiously
from orphanage or foster family to a permanent adoptive family, and balanc-
ing the tensions of nding families for children rather than children for fam-
ilies. While adoption organisations have increasingly become engaged in
promoting heritage tours to countries that send children into adoption and
facilitating searches for birth kin in transnational adoptions, their central
role is in arranging for the placement of a child in a permanent family, a
goal that is endorsed by the 1993 Hague Convention on Intercountry
Adoption and by laws in sending and receiving States.
My focus in this article is on omissions and blind spots implicit in the concept of
family permanence, when the permanent family with resources to adopt a child is
compared to what is often a motherchild dyad in a population that is living in a

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94 Feminist Theory 13(1)

state of abandonment as the epigraph with which I opened suggests. Likewise,

I question the concept of child abandonment that underpins a childs need for a
permanent family. These blind spots become apparent in lms and memoirs by
adult adoptees who have made contact with their birth families, as well as in
research on adoption, the global circulation of women as domestic workers,
and practices of fosterage among the urban poor (Aronson, 1997; Liem,
2000; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Parrenas, 2001; Yngvesson, 2005, 2010; van
Walsum, 2009; Villalta, 2009). This literature points to the strategies used by
poor women and women of colour to support their families, the unavoidable sep-
arations these strategies involve, and how ocial understandings of child aban-
donment may work in tension with these strategies, encouraging the production of
legal orphans who can be used to complete families in adopting nations
(Yngvesson, 2004).
In the course of my research, I spoke with directors of childrens homes in India,
Chile, Colombia, and elsewhere in Latin America, all of whom provided accounts
of parents who made use of institutional care to help support a child, but were
unwilling to give up their rights to the child so it could be placed with an adoptive
family. While some of these directors were supportive of the dilemmas faced by
poor parents, all were critical of such parents use of childrens homes for extended
periods of support in raising their children. Liem (2000) and Stryker (2011) describe
related situations in which adopting families presume or are told their child is an
orphan, only to discover later that the child has a living parent or parents, con-
sidered by the child to be its mother or father (and see Aronson, 1997). Clearly this
is a complex issue, raising serious questions about what constitutes parental care.
But it lends weight to Elise Prebins suggestion (2009) that the term abandonment
skews understandings of the range of circumstances that may lead parents to sep-
arate from their children, and (by implication) biases assumptions about the pos-
sibility of reuniting parent and child, a possibility that is ocially cut o by the
childs legal adoption.4
Prebins framing of abandonment as separation is relevant in the context of
my research on adult transnational adoptees who have successfully reunited with
their families of origin and sought to maintain ongoing relations with them
(Yngvesson, 2010). As in other accounts of abandonment and subsequent reunion
reported by adopted adults (Aronson, 1997; Liem, 2000), adoption was precipi-
tated by the death or illness of a parent, or the illness of the adopted child, whose
capacity for survival was thought to be greater were he or she placed with parents
in the United States or Western Europe. In reuniting with their birth families, many
of which remained impoverished, adult adoptees in some of these cases began
sending regular remittances to help provide for them. Here, the resources that
might have prevented the childs abandonment are supplied retroactively by the
abandoned child.
What does a childs abandonment and its orphan status mean when there
is a family left behind? What implications do histories such as these have for

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Briggs 95

Euro-American families that can only be considered complete if their connection

to the shadow families that made them possible must be cut o with the adoption
of the child? Likewise, what are the implications for the adopted child, whose pre-
adoptive past has been cancelled so that she or he can realise the full and har-
monious development of his or her personality (Hague Convention, 1993:
Preamble). Finally, what are the implications of child abandonments such as
these for a feminist approach to adoption?
These are complex issues for feminists, touching as they do on issues that
divide scholars and activists regarding the nature of motherchild relations,
and how natural or unnatural it is for mothers to separate from their children
(Sanger, 1996; and see ODonovan, 2002 on the distinction between maternity
and motherhood in France). Fonsecas research, along with other work such as
my own on the relationships that develop between adopted adults and the parents
from whom they were separated as children, suggests a rethinking of adoption
policy, situating it in the context of the needs of women and children and moving
it away from the more conventional juxtaposition of children who need a family
or of a family that needs children. Poor women in so-called developing nations
should not be pressured to give away their priceless children, a practice that
has disturbing connections to the compensation of other poor women for incu-
bating or caring for the children of auent families in the overdeveloped world
(Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila, 1997; Hochschild, 2000; Parrenas, 2001;
Gentleman, 2008). Together, these practices highlight the operation of a system
of stratied reproduction, with its commodication of reproductive labour, that
itself reproduces stratication by reecting, reinforcing, and intensifying the
inequalities on which it is based (Colen, 1995: 78). While we should not
assume that children are necessarily better o with their birth mothers and
acknowledge the needs of some women to separate from their children, feminists
would surely agree that the inequities produced by stratied reproduction are
problematic.
The complex relationships that unfold among adult transnational adoptees,
their birth parents, and their adoptive parents illuminate these inequities, as
the adoptee, with his or her freedom of movement and access to resources,
becomes a support for the family left behind and a link between his or her
two families. One young woman I interviewed, who reconnected with her birth
family some twenty years after her adoption and has maintained an ongoing
relationship with birth parents, siblings, and extended kin over the past decade,
describes the adoption as no longer existing for her, and the key relationship
as a constellation of two mothers. While this way of reconguring adoptive
kinship is unique to the particulars of this situation, it points to alternative
constellations of motherhood and family that may take shape in the interstices
of adoption law and to the contradictions of adoption policy that requires
some women to abandon their children, so that other women can have a
family.

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96 Feminist Theory 13(1)

Some theoretical musings

Laura Briggs
University of Massachusetts, USA

These pieces make real contributions to sketching feminist issues related to trans-
national adoption. Specically, I would like to address three key theoretical issues
they raise. First, Cardarello asks us to notice how the Mothers of the Courthouse
Square in Brazil (like Sobreviventes in Guatemala, which began as a movement
against child sexual abuse and has become a mothers protest against illicit adop-
tion and kidnapping) are consciously echoing the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. The
latter group, and to a lesser extent, the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, which split o
from the Madres, have inspired extensive feminist scholarship about women,
mothers, and human rights protest in Argentina. Throughout Latin America, the
Madres motivated others to demand that repressive governments return their forc-
ibly disappeared children and relatives. In Mexico, Guatemala, and elsewhere, this
tradition has been taken up by the movement against femicide, which, under the
umbrella of being mothers, has demanded an end to the murder of women by
calling on police and civil society actors. There is a surprising gap, though why
have we not theorised these political ways of being mothers in relation to
reproduction?
Second, to repeat the question of anti-sterilisation movements in the 1970s,
Fonseca invites us to ask, why is abortion the reproductive rights issue, to the
exclusion of supporting the eorts of women to become, or remain, mothers?
Or, to pose the question in Yngvessons or Collards terms, how do we tentatively
describe alliances between adoptive and birth families and embryo-producing and
embryo-implanting women or couples, in the context of a globally stratied repro-
duction, on the one hand, and the sharply ideological pro-natalism of evangelical
Christianity, on the other? Control over ones body may be the indispensible right,
the right that makes all other rights possible, as Solinger has argued (2002), but
control over ones life and labour is hardly insignicant and control over chil-
dren, including newborns (and embryos?), is certainly life and labour. Feminists
have long commented that opponents of abortion lose interest in mothers and their
ospring as soon as the baby is born, but cannot that charge be levelled with some
justice at feminists as well? If adoption is not a simple story about nding homes
for institutionalised children and these perspectives from Brazil and Guatemala
should give lie to that belief then it is, as Joe suggested in response to Solinger,
about two mothers. There is a birth mother who some say is not oering her child
the best possible life, and an actual or potential adoptive mother. This question is
simplied when the birth mother does not want to or is certain she cannot raise the
baby, but even then, it takes particular and extreme precarity poverty and
absence of family or community key among them or, more likely, powerlessness
in relation to state or private actors that purport to know best for the child. Is it the
case, as Fonseca suggests, that it is primarily a lack of cross-class knowledge,

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Briggs 97

familiarity, and solidarity that has resulted in the failure of some feminists to attend
to the claims of birth mothers that they were losing their children against their will?
Yngvesson oers an important counter-weight, and, together with Collard, holds
out an interesting and hopeful alternative of reproductive alliances.
The third and nal issue I want to highlight here as a problem for feminist
theorising is the relationship between the o shoring of production and reproduc-
tion. Marre calls our attention to the way the conditions of professional work in
particular have changed almost not at all in response to the massive entry of
women. While Spain may be, as Marre argues, an extreme case, a variant of her
argument would be true across the US and, increasingly, much of the EU and
Canada it is absurdly dicult to combine childrearing and paid labour. Marre
suggests in an argument that can also be made in parallel for the US (Briggs,
2010) that the massive expansion in the use of ARTs and transnational adoption
among those with access to advanced education and professional jobs is a result of
the structural infertility induced by the unyielding nature of regimes of education
and labour that demand that women in particular delay reproduction until such
time as they are relatively established in a career. Together, these three questions
call out for robust, morally hard-edged, compassionate, and above all feminist,
theory, activism, and scholarship that rejects the conceit that children available
for adoption are orphans in any conventional sense of that term and takes seri-
ously the ways their mothers lives are shaped by forces that are producing poverty
and precarity (and fathers, but mostly mothers). As Collard and Yngvesson sug-
gest, too, we need ne-grained tools ethnography, archives, long periods of time
to understand the multiple layers and complexities of alliance and alienation that
shape the politics of raising children that might, under a dierent set of circum-
stances, be understood to be someone elses.

Notes
1. Held 1113 June, 2009 and sponsored jointly by the Departamento de Psicologia do
Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro e departamentos de Antropologia Social da
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul e da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
(Department of Psychology at the Rio de Janeiro State University, and departments of
Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and the Federal
University of Rio de Janeiro).
2. In Brazil the only legal adoption is plenary adoption; there is no simple or open adoption.
3. The research for this contribution was done in the context of a research project financed
by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation on transnational adoption in Spain
(MICINNCSO2009-14763-C03-01 subprograma SOCI).
4. See Graff (2008) for a discussion of manufactured orphans.

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