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Members of adoption triangles-adoptees, birthparents, and adopting parents-must struggle with difficult and sometimes heartrending issues. Should adopted children be enabled to trace their biological parents? Does the individual's right to self-discovery outweigh another's wish for confidentiality? In this thoughtful book, 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

Introduction / Katarina Wegar -- Adoption and the culture of genetic determinism / Barbara Katz Rothman -- Family ideals and the social construction of modern adoption : a historical perspective / Julie Berebitsky -- Adoption and public opinion : implications for social support and practice in adoption / Charlene E. Miall and Karen March -- Adoption in the media : in need of editing / Adam Pertman -- Urchins, orphans, monsters, and victims : images of adoptive families in U.S. commercial films, 1950-2000 / Christine Ward Gailey -- Adoption and identity in social context / Emily Upshur and Jack Demick -- Adoptive fatherhood : gender, identity, and sociocultural considerations / Ramon Hinojosa, Melanie Sberna, and William Marsiglio -- Family values : gay men and adoption in America / Ellen Lewin -- "Real" mothers : adoptive mothers resisting marginalization and recreating motherhood / Betsy Smith, Janet L. Surrey, and Mary Watkins -- "Whatever they think of us, we're a family" : single mother adopters / Christine Ward Gailey -- Open adoption and family boundaries / Deborah H. Siegel -- Adoption, foster care, and guardianship in minority families / Sandra T. Azar and Lisa K. Hill -- Interracial couples, multiracial people, and the color line in adoption / Heather M. Dalmage -- My child, my choice : parental well-being in the adoption of children with developmental disabilities / Laraine Masters Glidden -- Identity, race, and culture in adoption : ethical values in the power of language / Janet Farrell Smith -- Adoption and identity : nomadic possibilities for reconceiving the self / Mary Watkins

This article explores the impact of the dominant North American genetic family ideal on community attitudes toward adoption, on adoption research, and on the beliefs and attitudes of adoption case workers. It examines how the failure to recognize the stigmatized social position of adoptive families has shaped not only current public opinion about adoption, but adoption research and practice as well. In conclusion, the article offers suggestions for erasing negative bias from adoption research and practice.

Examines the effects of 1970s welfare state policies in Finland & Norway designed to narrow inequalities in health care delivery, focusing on their implication for the gendered division of labor in medicine. Empirical literature demonstrates that one consequence of the new policies was the creation of new medical schools & the entrance of large numbers of women into the medical field. However, women have been concentrated in low-paying, low-status, primary care specialities. This gender segregation is taken to be a consequence of the profession's claim to have mastered medical uncertainty per its definition by a male ethic of rationality. Interview data gathered in 1987 from 31 women doctors in Finland reveal a discursive strategy manifested in a self-concept as a traditionally valued community doctor, a holistic perspective on their medical tasks, & a service-over-achievement orientation. Thus, women doctors have asserted medical uncertainty through appeal to this a female gaze that solidifies their professional power amid the prevailing division of labor. 1 Table, 57 References. D. M. Smith