Babies without Borders: Adoption and Migration across the Americas

by Karen Dubinsky

While international adoptions have risen in the public eye and recent scholarship has covered transnational adoption from Asia to the U.S., adoptions between North America and Latin America have been overshadowed and, in some cases, forgotten. In this nuanced study of adoption, Karen Dubinsky expands the historical record while she considers the political symbolism of children caught up in adoption and migration controversies in Canada, the United States, Cuba, and Guatemala.
Babies without Borders tells the interrelated stories of Cuban children caught in Operation Peter Pan, adopted Black and Native American children who became icons in the Sixties, and Guatemalan children whose “disappearance” today in transnational adoption networks echoes their fate during the country’s brutal civil war. Drawing from archival research as well as from her critical observations as an adoptive parent, Dubinsky moves debates around transnational adoption beyond the current dichotomy—the good of “humanitarian rescue,” against the evil of “imperialist kidnap.” Integrating the personal with the scholarly, Babies without Borders exposes what happens when children bear the weight of adult political conflicts.

Genres: Adoption, Nonfiction

210 pages, Paperback

First published March 23, 2010

About the author

Karen Dubinsky teaches in the departments of Global Development Studies and History at Queen's University. She has published and edited books on a wide variety of topics, including the history of gender and sexuality in Canada (Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929 and The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooners, Heterosexuality and the Tourist Industry at Niagara Falls; the global 1960s (New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness; adoption and child migration in Canada, Cuba and Guatemala (Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas); the politics of music in Cuba (My Havana: The Musical City of Carlos Varela). She has co-edited two recent anthologies about Canada and the world (Within and Without the Nation: Transnational Canadian History and Canada and the Third World: Overlapping Histories). Her most recent book is Cuba Beyond the Beach: Stories of Life in Havana.

Reviews

[Marley · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important book on international adoption that apparently hasn't gotten much press. It should. Dubinsky really rips the lid off of the political uses of children in the adoption fora. Informed by feminist and post modern theory, while keeping an open heart and supporting ethical and strictly controlled adoption, she gives a keen analysis of child "welfare" propaganda, the mythology and politicization of adpoption, and those adoption policy and industry pretends to serve. Sorry for not a better review, but Dubinsky herself says it best.