Kinship with strangers

Adoption challenges our understanding of the core symbols of kinship in American culture - birth, biology, and blood. Judith Modell examines these symbols and the way they affect people who experience the "fictive" kinship of adoption. Her findings are timely and profoundly moving; as presented here, they contribute valuable insights to the current debates about removing the veil of secrecy from adoption records and about giving more decision-making power to the participant in an adoptive relationship. Modell draws extensively on interviews with birthparents, adoptive parents, and adoptees, some of whom are active in the movement to reform American adoption. The proposed reform - the opening of records, the acknowledgment of a biological and a legal parent, the blending of families that are related only through a child - challenges accepted meanings of "mother" and "father," "parent" and "child," "ancestry" and "identity" in this country. But Modell shows that uncertainties have long surrounded these familiar concepts and that adoption has always upset our conventional cultural interpretations of "being related." Kinship with Strangers explores for the first time the profound impac