Friday Morning Session B

Ethics are implicitly embedded in nearly every aspect of adoption. They are at the heart of our professional practice -- including, but not limited to, educators, medical practitioners, lawyers, mental health providers, adoption advocates, researchers, and genetic counselors (Koh & Kim, 2021). 



Moral theory is an important aspect of our use of self in adoption practice. In fact, Babb (1999) argued that our values simply operationalize our ethics. Moral theories may inform our deliberative processes (Osmos and Landau, 2006) in adoption. As adoption professionals, having an explicit understanding of moral theory (i.e., the theoretical underpinnings that guide our ethical decision-making) may strengthen our self-awareness and help us navigate ethical dilemmas in our adoption practice. Yet little is known about the use of moral theory in the context of ethical decision-making in adoptive practice.



Cultural values and beliefs are undoubtedly important in ethics practice (Abramson, 1996; Barsky, 2019; Hugman, 2013; Msoroka & Amundsen, 2018). Indeed, our values develop in a cultural context (Schwartz, 1999); moral theory is implicitly embedded within these cultural values (Hinman, 2013; Koh & Reamer, 2021). In a given ethical situation, there may be tension or incongruence between one's values and belief system and the moral theories available to help guide ethical decisions.




Taken together, this interactive workshop proposes the use of intersectional ethics as a heuristic and anti-oppressive framework in adoption dilemmas. Drawing from intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991; Collins & Bilge, 2016) as a heuristic (Collins, 2019), the heuristic provides an anti-oppressive practice framework (Dominelli, 2002) to move beyond dominant theories such as deontology and utilitarianism (Dolgoff, Harrington, & Lowenberg, 2012; Hugman, 2013; Reamer, 2005; Strom-Gottfried, 2015) to include non-dominant moral theories such as Buddhist, Confucian, and Islamic ethics. Small group discussion will draw from case-based ethical dilemmas in adoption. 

Developing a theoretical framework for transracial adoption offers critical adoption scholars a new perspective on an under-theorized research area. Most adoption studies originate from social disciplines, with only one other scholar applying a childhood studies framework to critical adoption studies.[1] My approach, which combines biopolitics, children's participation rights as outlined in the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, and Lauren Berlant's compassionate logics (or Kyla Schuller's "sentimental biopower"[2]), locates the transacted non-White child's body in an adoption system that often erases their rights and treats as fungible their racial identities. This presentation reflects my ongoing research and uses non-White babies' adoption marketing photos to ground my theoretical framework. Within the United States' child-saving/savior rhetoric, how might these photo listings contribute to the future of Western compassion's political "privilege," and how might non-White "needy" adoptable "babies-over-there" maintain compassion as "part of the practice of injustice"?[3] How does the display of their bodies, as well as the practice of transacting them outside of their birth culture, violate their right to have "continuity" in their "upbringing and…the child's ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic background"?[4] Answering these complex questions could produce discussions that transform transracial adoption into a truly child-centered and child-rights preserving institution.
[1] See Dr. Rosemarie Peña's profile on The University of British Columbia's website
[2] Kyla Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 166.
[3] Lauren Berlant, Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, (New York: Routledge, 2004).
[4] See "Convention on the Rights of the Child," Article 20.3.