During much of the twentieth century,
matching was the philosophy that governed non-relative adoption.
Its goal was to make families socially that would “match”
families made naturally. Matching required that adoptive parents
be married heterosexual couples who looked, felt, and behaved as
if they had, by themselves, conceived other peoples children.
What this meant in practice was that physical resemblance, intellectual
similarity, and racial and religious continuity between parents
and children were preferred goals in adoptive families. Matching
was the technique that could inject naturalness and realness into
a family form stigmatized as artificial and less real than the “real
thing.” Matching stood for safety and security. Difference
spelled trouble.
Under the matching
paradigm, one family was substituted for another so carefully, systematically,
and completely that the old family was replaced, rendered invisible
and unnecessary. This was not usually the case before the twentieth
century. Children who were placed did not lose contact with their
natal kin, even in the case of very young children placed permanently
for adoption. The only matching required by early adoption laws
was matching by religion, and these laws were frequently disregarded
by child-savers, such as Charles
Loring Brace, who preferred matching children with the (Protestant)
religion of the placing organization, rather than that of (Catholic)
natal kin. In the nineteenth century, many adoptions involved sharing
children rather than giving them away.
In contrast, matching was an optimistic, arrogant, and historically
novel objective that suggested that a social operation could and
should approximate nature by copying it. Between 1920 and 1970,
matching was popular, especially among infertile couples who sought
to adopt because they were unable to conceive children of their
“own.” By midcentury, infertility
had become an unquestioned qualification for adoption. This reinforced
the notion that matching compensated for reproductive failure by
promising relationships that could pass for the exclusive, authentic,
and permanent bonds of kinship that were only natural.
Matching confronted
the central problem of modern adoption. It attempted to create kinship
without blood in the face of an enduring equivalence between blood
and belonging. The results were paradoxical. Matching reinforced
the notion that blood was thicker than water, the very ideology
that made adoption inferior, while seeking to equalize and dignify
it.
The naturalness of matching still has ardent defenders today, especially
with regard to race. Since 1970, however, its dominance has been
criticized by movements opposing confidentiality
and sealed records. Transracial
adoptions and international
adoptions also challenge matching by celebrating families deliberately
and visibly formed across lines of race, ethnicity, and nation.
Open adoption arrangements undercut matching too. They acknowledge
an obvious truth that matching concealed: it is possible to have
more than one mother, one father, one family.
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