Adoption Ethics and Issues

You dont’ have to be adopted to know that prying into a family’s genetics is rude.

By Jeanne Marie Laskas

Sunday, February 27, 2005; Page W35
Washington Post

(Original Story)

One of the grandmothers, a gentle woman in her sixties, turns to me and says, “Are your girls real sisters?”

I look at her. We’re at a birthday party. It’s a large one, kids everywhere, pizza boxes half-empty, giant cake decorated with Ninja Turtles about to be cut. Noise level: elevated. My girls, who were both adopted as infants from China, are in this mix, the 3-year-old chasing the 5-year-old, who is tackling the boy she calls her boyfriend.

Now, this grandmother. She often shows up at the birthday parties. She’s been a part of this group since preschool, as have I. I’m taken aback that the question I so often get from strangers should come from someone I know.

(Continued)

(this is an early draft of an article which appeared in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Law and Economics)

by John Palmer / The University of Western Ontario

(Original Story)

The adoption of a child by non-biological parents is the transfer of a limited property right. To understand an economics-and-law analysis of adoption, one must first examine the nature of this property right. Then the conditions of exchange can be studied and assessed.The property right that is being exchanged is a parenthood right — the right to take on the rights and obligations that accompany parenting a child. These rights are limited by governments in many different ways. One may not buy and sell these rights, one may not readily dispose of one’s “property”, nor may one indiscriminately cause harm to the property. Also, one must provide food, clothing, shelter, and education for the property. These limitations have been imposed upon the owners of all such property in the class, whether the property right was acquired biologically or via exchange.

Changing Supply Conditions

Through the first half of the twentieth century, into the 1950s, the primary issue in adoption was finding acceptable homes for children, including adoptable infants born out of wedlock. Beginning in the 1960s, though, shortages of normal healthy infants emerged. This dramatic shift in the supply and demand conditions has been related to many concurrent shifts in relative prices, technology and tastes. Certainly one of the major determinants of the reduced supply of parenthood rights for adoptable infants has been the falling birth rates themselves, throughout the entire populations (and not just among unwed mothers) of industrialized countries. This decline in birth rates has been related to rises in the labour force participation rates of females and to lower-cost and more reliable birth control technologies (see Medoff 1993).

(Continued)