“As foreign demand rose and the revolutionary notion of a child’s right to remain with their birth family was suppressed,” Nolan writes, “the principle of the best interests of the child was defined in a straightforward way: material wealth.” As with much of the Global South, permanent international adoption came to supersede older, informal modes of mutual aid. Among many Indigenous groups, personal struggles—including with childcare—are shared by the community. But coerced adoptions only accelerate the dissolution of existing support systems: a textbook example of how colonial logic disrupts perfectly functional societies. Blame for children being transferred abroad—if cast at all—almost always landed on mothers. They were often called madres desnaturalizadas, or “denatured mothers,” by journalists.
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