Product Description

Adoption is a hot topic--played out in the news and on TV talk shows, in advice columns and tell-all tales--but for the 25 million Americans who are members of the adoption triad of adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth parents, the true story of adoption has not been told until now. Family Matters cuts through the sealed records, changing policies, and conflicting agendas that have obscured the history of adoption in America and reveals how the practice and attitudes about it have evolved from colonial days to the present.

Amid recent controversies over sealed adoption records and open adoption, it is ever more apparent that secrecy and disclosure are the defining issues in American adoptions--and these are also the central concerns of E. Wayne Carp's book. Mining a vast range of sources (including for the first time confidential case records of a twentieth-century adoption agency), Carp makes a startling discovery: openness, not secrecy, has been the norm in adoption for most of our history; sealed records were a post-World War II aberration, resulting from the convergence of several unusual cultural, demographic, and social trends.

Pursuing this idea, Family Matters offers surprising insights into various notions that have affected the course of adoption, among them Americans' complex feelings about biological kinship versus socially constructed families; the stigma of adoption, used at times to promote both openness and secrecy; and, finally, suspect psychoanalytic concepts, such as "genealogical bewilderment," and bogus medical terms, such as "adopted child syndrome," that paint all parties to adoption as psychologically damaged.

With an unswerving gaze and incisive analysis, Carp brings clarity to a subject often muddled by extreme emotions and competing agendas. His book is essential reading for adoptees and their adoptive and biological families, and for the countless others who follow their fortunes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #615380 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-07
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Do adoptees have the right to the identities of their biological parents? Carp traces the complicated history of adoption and attitudes to it to show how and why attitudes changed. Adoption of children not related by blood was not common in this country until the 20th century. And while adoption proceedings were usually conducted with "discretion," they were not legally confidential. It wasn't until the Progressive Era that reformers, hoping to remove the socialAand (thanks to eugenicists) biologicalAstigma of illegitimacy, successfully pressed for legal secrecy. After WWII, confidentiality gave way to obsessive secrecy as adoption officials feared biological parents might interfere with the new adoptive family and adoptive parents feared the insecurity and stigma of telling an adopted child the truth. But in the 1960s and '70s, changing sexual mores diminished the shame of illegitimacy and the adoption rights movement (ARM) rebelled against decades of sealed records, demanding instead openness and disclosure in adoption. Through the 1980s and '90s, the traditional secretive adoption became increasingly vilified, with wrongful adoption lawsuits and the "Baby M" custody case. But, as Carp notes, ARM's desire for complete openness in adoption records has come against "an insuperable obstacle"Abirth mothers' right to privacy. The most fascinating aspect of this very accessible study is the ups and downs of the often questionable belief in the primacy of blood ties. Bringing clarity, historical perspective and objectivity, historian Carp offers a book that deserves the attention of anyone with an interest in adoption.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In this lucid and thought-provoking book, Carp reviews the controversies surrounding the management of adoption records in the United States. Identifying the concerns of adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents, Carp surveys changing social attitudes toward the importance of family history, governmentally dictated secrecy, and the recognition of often conflicting rights of everyone involved in the adoption triad. Over the decades, government-supported, legally mandated concealment has prevailed, but the rise of search and reunion groups, adoption registries, newsletters, Internet bulletin boards, and web sites as well as experimental consensual open adoptions are beginning to force the records open. The debate continues (see, e.g., Katarina Wegar, Adoption, Identity, and Kinship, LJ 4/1/97), and Carp makes an important contribution. Highly recommended for academics, professionals, and the interested public.?Suzanne W. Wood, SUNY Coll. of Technology, Alfred
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Judith Newman
...a solid contribution to understanding adoption in the United States today.

Customer Reviews

Interesting but flawed
Carp's book has some interesting info, but he shoots himself in the foot by decrying the lack of hard scientific evidence and research on the part of any group whose arguments HE doesn't like. After all, the book makes clear that almost NO ONE on ANY side of the sealed records debate has hard scientific evidence and research about anything concerning adoption, trauma, etc. Also, his constant use of the words "emotional," "drama," and "therapeutic entertainment" when he discusses adoptees in search (most of whom are female) and birthmothers is suspicious to the point of smelling like misogyny. This book tried to be even-handed, but the lack of gendered analysis renders many of his insights useless to any ongoing project of justice and ethics in adoption.

One of the best books on adoption
I've read Carp's book very carefully and I can say without hesitation that it is one of a handful of the most important books on adoption published in the last 25 years. As the co-author of two editions of The Encyclopedia of Adoption (Facts on File) and the Executive Editor of three editions of Adoption Factbook, I have had the opportunity to become familiar with the full range of writing on adoption. Carp's book is outstanding.
I say this despite some of the book's flaws -- some minor errors that might have been avoided if the author had interviewed one of the individuals he credits with being a major player during the last two decades, yours truly. I'm not sure that any such interview would have changed Carp's mind: he strikes me, in what he has written in this book and what he has said in public fora, as a typical academic -- stubbornly wedded to the facts he has unearthed. And facts he's unearthed are so critical to the history of adoption in this country that his book should be required reading in every school of social work, in every family law course and for every judge that ever hears an adoption case. His recitation of the history of the role played by the women in the U.S. Children's Bureau is worth the price of the book all by itself. His central contribution, however, is to say in much more detail what Alfred Kadushin said years earlier in his textbook, CHILD WELFARE. Like Kadushin, Carp finds no evidence to support the junk science that underlies most of what passes for "professional practice" in today's social work and related fields. If only Carp had written his work 20 years earlier, adoption of newborn infants in the U.S. today might well be still flourishing instead of hanging on by a thread. As the last two editions of Adoption Factbook pointed out, the number of pregnancies which end in adoption is about one out of every hundred. For some, such as the collection of cranks and quacks that make up the "Adoption Reform Movement," such a statistic is evidence of victory. But it is no victory for children or parents who are unwilling or unable to raise children. Perhaps Carp will turn his attention next to the most pernicious and deadly aspect of the "Adoption Reform Movement," the crew of self-anointed "counselors" who invent new psychiatric labels and then proceed to try to heal them. I speak here of those like the "rebirthing" therapists who smothered a girl to death. Such a book may take a psychiatrist with Carp's gift for research. In sum, Carp's book is a very good read. The only tragedy is that it has been so widely ignored, the victim of a planned campaign by those whose empty agenda is so clearly revealed by Carp's detective work.

Lessons for us in the U.K.
As Parliament has finally determined to find families for children who have been languishing in care, I was keen to see if there were any favourable accounts about adoption in the U.S. that might be of interest. A search of the Amazon.com site led me to the Carp book, which I confess I read at my university library. It is an altogether fascinating tale, one that is uniquely American, of course. As a student of some of the fostering homes set up here, back as far as those of Rev. Muller in Bristol, I could not put the book down. I must say that the question of privacy was handled in an altogether fresh way for me. In particular, I found the academic examination of the claims that children adopted as infants suffer all sorts of trauma very helpful. It seems that the U.K. took quite a wrong turn when we set about changing our system based on wholly inadequate research. Many thanks to Mr Carp for his fine book.