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16th Century - Adoption was denounced by 16th century Catholic and Protestant reformers who insisted that marriage should be the sole arena for secual activity and procreation. Legal opposition to adoption, in America, stemmed froma desire to protect the property rights of blood relatives in cases of inheritance. There was a moral repugnance to illegitamacy.
17th Century - The institution of adoption hardly existed. There were no established legal processes, no confidential court records, birth certificates or adoption case records, no social worker, no standards for determining the best interest's of the child. This climate of openess and disclosure lasted until the end of World War II. In America, colonial Americans showed little preference for the primacy of biological kinship. They practiced adopion on a limited scale and frequently placed children in what we would call foster care. Colonial Americans copied the English poor law system when it came to caring for chilren born out of wedlock, orphaned or neglected. Statutes permitted town and parish authorities to remove children from pauper families and place them with masters who in exchange for labor would provide them with an adequate maintenance. The first known case of adoption in colonial Massachusettes occurred in 1693, when Governor Sir William Phips mentioned his adopted son in his will. The adopted son was Phip's nephew who legally changed his name in 1716.
1851 - Massauchsettes law, "An Act to Provide for the Adoption of Children" is commonly considered the first moderrn adoption law.
1853 - Beginning of the Orphan Trains, 20,000 Eastern children were placed by New York's Chilldren Aid Society in the western states of MIchigan, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, MIssouri and Kansas. By 1890, the number had reached 84,000. The origins of America's first adoption laws can be traced to the increase in the number of middle-class farmers who wished to legalize the addition of a child into the family.
1886 - Reverend Martin Van Arsdale started the Illinois Children's Home and Aid Society and instituted standards of child placing that reformed most of Brace's unsound practices.
1909 - There was a White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children which proclaimed "home life is the highest and finest product of civilization. . . Children should not be deprived of it except for urgent and compelling reasons."
1910 - 1925 - The eugenics influence advocated separating the feeble minded unwed mother from her child and ruled out the possibility of adoption for what they called "defective children". Potential adoptive parents were also reluctant to adopt children because of the chaotic free market in child placement which sprang up at the beginning of the 20th century and gave adoption a distinctly disreputable reputation. The first private adoption agencies, created at the beginning of the 20th century were largely unsupervised by federal or state agencies.
1921 - Sheppard-Towner Infancy and Maternity Protection Act provided for Federal spending to promote infant and maternal health. This era witnessed a flurry of child welfare reforms by Congress and state legislatures.
1926 - England enacted the first adoption statutes.
Late 1930's - The Child Welfare League of America began to address the issue of adoption standards.
1940's - The Children's Bureau extimated that almost half of the adoptions in America were made outside of the purview of licensed agencies.
Between 1946 and 1953 - The end of the World War II witnessed the first phase of an upsurge in intercountry adoption. American citizens and organizations brought to the US 5814 foreign-born orphans and abandoned children for adoption, many from Greece, Germany and Japan.
1950's - A baby boom which began in the mid 1940's reached its peak in the late 1950's. That exacerbated the increase demand of children to adopt.
1955 - The ubiquity of black market baby rings spurred a Senate subcommittee to hold public hearings to investigate them.
1960's - American adoption was riding high and was a popular and respected institution. First, states create or expand a family. Second, states or adoption agencies must get informed and voluntary consent to the adoption from natural parents. Third adoption must meet "the best interest of the child" doctrine. Fourth, adoptive relationships are permanent. All child's prior connections to the biological family are severed and adoptive family replaces the original one. Fifth, adoption records are sealed and access is denied to everyone, "Except upon a judicial finding of good cause." This is the beginning of sealed records in all of the states in the United States.
1975 - US Federal Government decided to stop collecting statistics on adoptions. No one knows exactly how many adoptions have occurred since that time.
(The previous information is being presented under the fair use doctrine of the US Copyright Law. Thank you. This information has been gathered from: Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption by E. Wayne Carp, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusettes & London, England (c)1998. ISBN: 0-674-79668-3)
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