UC Berkeley

The United States has historically been the top receiving country for children adopted from abroad. Since 2004, though, massive changes in sending countries have led to a significant reduction in the supply of adoptable children, and a corresponding decline in transnational adoptions. Not only are there fewer children legally available for transnational adoption, but the types of children available today are markedly different from those that were adopted during the international adoption boom of the 1990s. This shift has created a mismatch between the desires of adoptive parents and the types of children that are most readily available for international adoption. Managing this mismatch becomes particularly challenging without a pricing mechanism—one of the central legitimating factors of adoption is that parents do not pay a price to adopt a child, but instead pay a fee tied to professional services. This dissertation asks: when there is no pricing mechanism to restore the balance between supply and demand, how do organizations and individuals manage parental desire and the shortage of certain types of children? How do the children available for adoption come to be emotionally valuable to the parents who eventually adopt them?

To answer these questions, I draw on government reports, in-depth interviews with adoption agency professionals and adoptive parents, participant observation in an adoption agency, and textual analysis of agency promotional materials. I show that perceptions of permanency, racial boundaries, and certainty of placement affect parents’ decisions to pursue transnational adoption over other types of adoption. I then trace the origins of the mismatch between supply and desire to massive changes in policy that constrain the supply of children and the eligibility of certain types of parents. I argue that when confronted with this mismatch, adoption agencies, and the parents they serve, engage in a process of (re)evaluation that recasts previously less desirable types of children as sentimentally valuable. In a transnational adoption economy characterized by shortage, parents must make compromises about the children they are willing to bring into their families, and the shape of these compromises reveals a hierarchy of socially constructed desire. By considering the work of adoption agencies and the experiences of adoptive parents, I show how classificatory schemes, boundary making, morality and emotions operate within this economy. Through the emotional connections that they forge with parents, agency staff carefully frame parental preferences for different types of children, while helping parents feel that their decisions are supported and legitimate.