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Breaking Families, Making Families: Adoption and Child Welfare in the 1990s

Breaking Families, Making Families: Adoption and Child Welfare in the 1990s

Hardcover

General SociologySocial MovementsWomen's Studies

ISBN10: 1469694670
ISBN13: 9781469694672
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: Sep 22 2026
Pages: 240
Weight: 1.14
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
Families in the United States experience child abuse investigations, the removal of children from their homes, and the termination of parental rights at higher rates than peer countries. Yet this does not make them safer and comes at a cost. As a historian and practicing doctor, Mical Raz asks how American society came to accept punitive interventionist policies that prioritize termination of parental rights. These practices free children for adoption, which leads to the devastation of families and communities and the creation of legal orphans--children who have no legal ties to their families of origin.

Drawing on original archival sources, legislative documents, and oral histories, Raz argues that adoption is not the inevitable solution to a child welfare system in crisis, maps the political history of this shift in child welfare policymaking--exemplified in the passage of the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act--and proposes future reforms.

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General Sociology