Adoption Industrial Complex
A Critical Adoption Studies (CAS) explainer for the Reading Room.
What people mean by “Adoption Industrial Complex”
Adoption is a multibillion-dollar industry: a network of institutions, laws, money flows, and cultural narratives that can make family separation more likely and make adoption easier to justify as a solution to inadequate policies or resources. Writers use it to zoom out from individual families to a big picture view of the systems that shape which children are separated from their birth families, why, and who has power in the process.
In transnational contexts, scholar Kimberly McKee, author of Disrupting Kinship, describes the transnational adoption industry as a multi-million-dollar global industry driven by alliances among states, orphanages, agencies, and immigration laws, and argues that children can be commodified and function as substitutes for robust social support.
Institutions within the Adoption Industrial Complex:
Critical Adoption Studies Scholars may draw the boundaries differently, but the industrial complex framing typically points to how these pieces work together:
1) Institutions and Stakeholders
Agencies, attorneys, facilitators, social services, courts, hospitals, and religious organizations.
2) Financial Incentives and Market Logic
Adoption can involve large fees and revenue streams. Critics argue that when organizations must fund operations through completed adoptions, it can create structural pressure to keep placements moving and to market adoption as a solution to social problems.
3) Narrative Control
The industrial-complex prioritizes narratives that normalize separation:
“Rescue” / “child-saving”
“Blank slate” myths
The gratitude narrative
Colorblind expectations: “love is enough” framings in transracial/transnational adoption
Scholars of transnational adoption note how adoption rhetoric can position the U.S. as benevolent and adoptive parents who are most often white as superior to non-white parents, reinforcing racial hierarchy hidden under “colorblind” language.
CAS Analysis: Asking the Right Questions:
Who is better supported to be a parent, and why?
What support systems would make family separation less likely? Think, housing, healthcare, childcare, disability supports, and/or income support.
Who controls information and identity (sealed records, amended documents, access to truth)?
How do stigma, pressure from family, and adoption agencies create an impact on choice?
Examples of the “Industrial Complex” at work
You might be looking at industrial-complex dynamics when you see:
Crisis pregnancies are treated as “supply,” and adoptive demand is treated as urgent.
Organizations funded primarily through completed adoptions.
Limited resources for family preservation compared with resources for placement.
Messaging that frames separation as inevitable, moral, or “best for everyone.”
Cross-class/cross-race “upward mobility” framings that sidestep structural inequality.
What to read next in the Reading Room”
Reading lists (internal):