Start Here: Critical Adoption Studies

An adoptee-centered introduction for readers coming from memoirs, podcasts, and lived experience.

Before we begin

If you’re here because a memoir cracked something open—or because a conversation about adoption suddenly felt too real—you’re not alone. Critical Adoption Studies (CAS) offers language for what many adoptees have long known: adoption isn’t just a personal story. It’s also a system shaped by power, policy, race, class, disability, borders, religion, gender, and economics.

This “Start Here” page is an educational guide. It’s not therapy advice. If you want personal support, you can explore therapy options separately.

Content note: This library may reference family separation, coercion, sealed records, violence, racism, and reproductive oppression. Please take care of your yourself and monitor your pace, if helpful.

What is Critical Adoption Studies?

Critical Adoption Studies (CAS) is a framework that applies reproductive justice principles to study adoption. CAS analyzes:

Power and institutions: law, child welfare, agencies, courts, immigration
Narratives: the “gratitude” story, savior stories, silence around loss
Material realities: money, resources, housing, healthcare, disability supports
History: maternity homes, The Baby Scoop Era forced/pressured relinquishment, colonialism, war
Lived experience: especially adoptee voices and adoptee scholarship

CAS doesn’t require you to pick a single stance like “adoption is good” or “adoption is bad.” It asks better questions, like:

Who benefits? Who is harmed? Who has choices—and who doesn’t?
What alternatives were possible if families had support?
What gets erased when we focus only on “happy outcomes”?
Who controls records, identity, and origin information?

What CAS is not:

CAS is not:

A how-to guide for adopting
A debate club for “pro/anti adoption” soundbites
A demand that adoptees feel one correct emotion
A replacement for therapy, crisis support, or legal advice

CAS is:

A framework for complexity
A way to name structural forces around adoption
A pathway to more honest, less isolating conversations

Key CAS Ideas:

Here are the concepts you’ll see repeatedly in CAS writing.

The rupture that precedes adoption: legal, relational, cultural, and/or geographic. CAS emphasizes that adoption begins with loss and disconnection, not just a new family formation, even when adoptive families are loving.
A way of describing how adoption can be supported by interlocking systems (policy, agencies, courts, money, and social narratives) that can make family separation easier to fund and justify than family support or preservation.
Who “owns” origin information? What does it mean when adults can access their own birth records, or can’t?
CAS asks how “choice” is shaped by poverty, stigma, lack of support, age, disability, immigration status, incarceration, and social power.
The social demand that adoptees perform gratitude, minimize loss, and protect others from discomfort.
Different visions for change—ranging from policy fixes to deep structural transformation, often grounded in differing diagnoses of what harms are “bugs” vs “features.”
CAS prioritizes alternatives that keep children connected to family, culture, and community—especially when adequate support is available.
How adoption can function inside racial hierarchies, including expectations to assimilate or “be grateful” for proximity to whiteness.
How war, poverty, international policy, and geopolitical power shape which children move and why.