social-history

"The use of human adoptees to separate nature from nurture was first suggested by (1912–1913). During the early decades of the century, interest in adoptees first centered around the question of nature and nurture in human intelligence, which was stimulated in part by the development at that time of tests to measure intelligence. The adoption strategy involved a study of adoptees, their biologic parents, and their adoptive parents. As adoptions developed in the early years of this century, children generally separated at birth from biologic parents and birth environment were placed with nonrelatives who legally adopted and raised the children. In nature-nurture studies the focus of the investigation was usually a trait, behavior, or other characteristic—as in the early studies during the teens and twenties of this century when the focus was on intelligence. The crux of the technique involves comparisons between adoptees and both sets of parents, biologic and adoptive."

"In , only children ... may be adopted ... Adoption is usually associated with the desire to nurture and protect the child as if one's own, and s or illegitimate children are the most frequent candidates for adoption. ... This has little in common with adoption among the . ... Those given in adoption are mostly adults ... Very few adoptions are directly attested. Roman legal writings are one of our best sources of evidence for the actual practice of adoption among the Romans; inscriptions are insufficiently specific for certainty in detecting adoptions, and the adoptions mentioned in literary sources are numbered in tens rather than hundreds. There is even less direct evidence about the reasons for adoption. Of the adoptions that are mentioned in literary sources, those in successive imperial families are not entirely typical of Roman society at large, since they generally have a specifically dynastic and political purpose. As in private families, however, a definite preference is shown for adopting persons related by blood, or at least by marriage, where any are available. This is the case between and , among the and the , and is most evident among the ."

"It was also the only country in the world to allow fully privatised adoptions from 1977 to 2008. At the height of the adoption boom, one in 100 children born in Guatemala was placed for adoption with a family abroad. “Some countries export bananas,” one lawyer who arranged private adoptions told the in 2016. “We exported babies.” Guatemala is often cited as the worst-case scenario for what can go wrong when adoptions are commercialised and children are sent from poorer countries to wealthier ones."

"When you are adopted, the desire to search for your parents can suddenly seem unquenchable and the curiosity has to be sated. That's when it becomes dangerous. It is an oddity that many adopted people embark on the search just when they have settled, finally, on an adult identity. I suppose they feel that now they can. Then the findings of the search throw everything into chaos."

"... if offspring of poor parents, adopted when newly born into well-to-do and well-educated families, turn out markedly different from the birthright members of those families then the presumption is that the dullness, of whichever is the duller, is a saturated growth. If on the other hand they all turn out much alike there is no proof that growth is saturated for any of them. There remains the presumption that the conditions have been much alike for all the members of one family and we get a more uncertain but still useful comparison of native worth, as pointed out above. A thorough study of a hundred such cases of adopted children would do more to reveal the nature of the poorer than statistics of 100,000 poor persons brought up in poverty."

"While and followed their father's footsteps to , (regarded, in the absence of the disabled George, as second in age) left for a new life, as the adopted heir to a wealthy, childless couple who could offer hims great prospects. Edward's benefactor was of in , son of the kinsman who had presented the Steventon living to the Revd . The unofficial adoption of children for social advantage — so strange to twenty-first-century sensibilities — was by no means uncommon in Jane Austen's time: in her own fiction it would be central to the plot in two of her six novels, with being sent to live with the haughty Bertrams, in ', and becoming the adoptive heir of his rich aunt in '. In 's case, the arrangement worked well."