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BestsellerE-book
Author Wegar, Katarina.

Title Adoption, identity, and kinship : the debate over sealed birth records / Katarina Wegar.

Publication Info. New Haven [Conn.] : Yale University Press, [1997]
©1997

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (xv, 169 pages)
Physical Medium polychrome
Description text file
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 139-158) and index.
Summary Sociologist Katarina Wegar offers a new perspective on adoption and the search debate, placing them within a social context. She argues that Americans who are embroiled in adoption controversies have failed to understand how much the debate, adoption research, and the experience of adoption itself are affected by persistent social beliefs that adopted children are different from and somehow inferior to children reared by their biological families. Wegar begins by considering the historical and legal development of adoption and of sealed-records policies, showing how kinship ideology, the helping professions, and gender issues intersect to frame adoption policies and the ongoing debate. Drawing on articles in social work and mental health journals, activist newsletters, and autobiographies by search activists, as well as on popular images of adoption portrayed in talk shows and other media, she analyzes the rhetoric to reveal the unconscious biases that exist. She concludes with a discussion of ways in which adoption reformers can avoid perpetuating harmful and confining images of those who participate in adoption.
Contents Introduction: adoption and the difference dilemma -- Adoption, inequality, and the law: the origins of the sealed records controversy -- Adoption research: trends and perspectives -- Debating sealed records: the social construction of search narratives -- Adoption in popular culture: similar yet different -- Conclusion: adoption in context.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject Adoption -- United States.
Adoption.
United States.
Birthparents -- United States -- Identification.
Birthparents.
Genre/Form Field guides.
Subject Adoptees -- United States -- Identification.
Adoptees.
Confidential communications -- United States.
Confidential communications.
Registers of births, etc. -- United States.
Registers of births, etc.
Genre/Form Electronic books.
Guidebooks.
Subject Birth parents.
Other Form: Print version: Wegar, Katarina. Adoption, identity, and kinship. New Haven [Conn.] : Yale University Press, ©1997 0300067593 (DLC) 96008145 (OCoLC)34576664
ISBN 0585349991 (electronic book)
9780585349992 (electronic book)
9780300146387 (electronic book)
0300146388 (electronic book)
0300067593 (alkaline paper)