Creating ‘family’ in adoption from care

Abstract

Adoption may be defined as "the legal process through which the state establishes a parental relationship, with all its attendant rights and duties, between a child and a (set of) parent(s) where there exists no previous procreative relationship" (De Wispelaere and Weinstock 2018, 213). In adoptions from care, state intervention effectively converts an established, or nascent, adult-child relationship into 'family' in the legal sense. From the state's perspective, adoption thus entails the transfer of parental responsibilities for a child in public care to a private family unit, enabling the state to permanently delegate its duties towards a child to this new unit. This seemingly straightforward legal act raises deeper philosophical questions relating to such state 'family creation', particularly when the child's perspective is taken. Such child-centric approach normatively regards children as equal moral beings, who ought to be included in actions concerning them, regardless of their capacity to form and express an opinion. Accordingly, adoption from care can be described as a moral decision, aimed at doing what is in the child's best interests. The purpose of this chapter is to explore a suspicion of lack of child-centrism in adoption from care practice, and to illustrate how adopted children's rights are inferior to those of their nonadopted peers. This will shed light on a practice currently lacking transparency and accountability (cf. Burns et al. 2019) and will increase our understanding of how we fail to treat children as equal moral individuals in decision-making that severely impacts children's lives.The law plays a critical role in adoption, as its status-conferring power determines who falls within the state's protective sphere, and who is excluded from it. 'Parent' is one example, in that the legal status of parenthood confers upon an individual certain rights and obligations concerning a child. This status may or may not align with the social reality of those involved; 'parent' or 'family' as social constructs may well differ from social life as experienced by children and parents in the non-traditional social kinship network formed by adoption, including birth and adoptive family members.