Gendered Trafficking: How Adoption Coerces Women
Bodies That Supply the System
Plenary adoption rests on a foundation of gendered control. The system targets women’s bodies, women’s sexuality, and women’s reproductive choices. It profits from their vulnerability under the guise of a loving choice.
The post-World War II forced adoption era illustrates this clearly. Between the war and the legalization of abortion in 1973, approximately four million white babies were adopted in the United States.
The practice depended on the vulnerability of single white women. Psychiatrists and social workers designated white unwed mothers as psychologically maladjusted and “not-mothers,” while marking their babies as untainted, valuable commodities.
The underlying attitude of adoption professionals was simple: an unmarried woman and her child did not constitute a family. Stripping single moms of their children was clearly structured by society’s disapproval of women who violated female norms of sexual purity and obedience.
Coercive Machinery
The pressure operated through multiple mechanisms. Single pregnant women were shunned by family and friends, evicted from schools, sent away to maternity homes, and often treated with contempt by doctors, nurses, and clergy.
They were told that adoption was the only acceptable solution. Their shame was the engine that drove the system.
Rickie Solinger documents that the racial and sex-based controls at the heart of adoption clarify its fundamental violence. White babies derived their adoption-value racially, in distinction to the “valuelessness” of Black and other “non-white” infants.
Black women were punished for giving birth to children considered unadoptable, while white women were pressured to surrender their babies to preserve the appearance of white chastity.
Adoption practices depended on this relatively resourceless class of specifically white women. Their disadvantage became the commodity.
Modern Continuation
The sex-based control continues today. Crisis pregnancy centers and adoption agencies still encourage single women to place their babies for adoption because they are unmarried.
A real mother named Jennifer described the pressure from her mother: “She thought I’d be selling the baby short if I didn’t provide him with a father.” Single moms fear being judged for pregnancy outside marriage.
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Recent research confirms that most mothers were coerced or forced to give up their babies for adoption. Instead of receiving support to keep their families intact, they were shamed, and their children were separated from them.
An overriding narrative suffocates the voices of adoptees and their real mothers: the fairy-tale idea that these relinquishing moms are “brave heroes” who voluntarily sacrificed their children.
One mother described the reality: “To present us as angels and selfless people, it’s a bunch of bullshit.”
Patriarchal Framework
The system operates within a patriarchal framework. “Hegemonic motherhood,” the ideal of a white, upper-middle-class, married woman, has been the engine pushing adoption policy in the U.S. for the last 100 years.
The normative family is one with a mother and a father, and adoption agencies still encourage single women to place their babies for adoption because they are unmarried.
The patriarchy drives both the supply and demand sides of adoption. The demand for adoptable infants reflects a desire for the “ideal” family structure, and the supply depends on the vulnerability of women who do not fit that structure.
Full Recognition
Plenary adoption is a sex-based institution. It depends on the manipulation of women. It profits from their shame. It erases their existence from the child’s new identity. The mom becomes a footnote, a secret, a sealed file.
The system uses women. It serves the industry, not the parent. It traffics babies while pretending to protect them. It destroys families while pretending to honor them.
The abolition of plenary adoption requires the recognition that sex-based control is not an unfortunate side effect, it is the system’s main operating principle.
A just future would preserve families, support real moms, and end the buying and selling of children. It would never require any parent to surrender their child to strangers.
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Sources:
Solinger, R. (1992). Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade. Routledge.
(2024). The Gendered and Racial Politics of Adoption. The American Prospect.
(2016). Adoption as a Feminist Issue. The New Inquiry.
