Adoption, Identity, and Kinship: The Debate over Sealed Birth Records

Adoption, Identity, and Kinship: The Debate over Sealed Birth Records Author: Katarina Wegar
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.