The traffic in babies
Subtitle: cross-border adoption and baby-selling between the United States and Canada, 1930-1972
By: Karen A. Balcom
Series: Studies in gender and history; Studies in gender and history
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Toronto
Language: eng
Number of pages: 356
ISBN-13: 9780802099181; 9780802096135
Subjects: Cas, Études de; Law and legislation; Histoire; Corrupt practices; Pratiques déloyales; Adoption internationale; Droit; Intercountry adoption; History; Case studies
Description: "Between 1930 and the mid-1970s, several thousand Canadian-born children were adopted by families in the United States. At times, adopting across the border was a strategy used to deliberately avoid professional oversight and take advantage of varying levels of regulation across states and provinces. The Traffic in Babies traces the efforts of Canadian and American child welfare leaders - with intermittent support from immigration officials, politicians, police, and criminal prosecutors - to build bridges between disconnected jurisdictions and control the flow of babies across the Canada-U.S. border.

Karen A. Balcom details the dramatic and sometimes tragic history of cross-border adoptions - from the Ideal Maternity Home case and the Alberta Babies-for-Export scandal to trans-racial adoptions of Aboriginal children. Exploring how and why babies were moved across borders, The Traffic in Babies is a fascinating look at how social workers and other policy makers tried to find the birth mothers, adopted children, and adoptive parents who disappeared into the spaces between child welfare and immigration laws in Canada and the United States."--pub. desc.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [317]-341) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Babies Across Borders; title: Charlotte Whitton and Border-Crossings in the 1930s; title: Border-Crossing Responses to the Ideal Maternity Home, 1945-1947; title: The Alberta Babies-for-Export Scandal, 1947-1949; title: Cross-Border Placements for Catholic Children From Quebec, 1945-1960; title: Criminal Law and Baby Black Markets, 1954-1964; title: Controlling Cross Border Adoption, 1950-1972; title: Conclusion: A "No Man's Land" of Jurisdiction