Officials of the BFA noted that, although the asylum promoted otherwise, adoptive parents did not distinguish between indenture and adoption: "We believe," the asylum officials said, "that often, when children of a younger age are taken to be adopted, the adoption is only another name for service." Modern period
Adopting to create a familyThe next stage of adoptions evolution fell to the emerging nation of the United States. Rapid immigration and the American Civil War resulted in unprecedented overcrowding of orphanages and foundling homes in the mid-nineteenth century. Charles Loring Brace, a Protestant minister, became appalled by the legions of homeless waifs roaming the streets of New York City. Brace considered the abandoned youth, particularly Catholics, to be the most dangerous element challenging the citys order. His solution was outlined in The Best Method of Disposing of Our Pauper and Vagrant Children (1859), which started the Orphan Train movement. The orphan trains eventually shipped an estimated 200,000 children from the urban centers of the East to the nations rural regions. The children were generally indentured, rather than adopted, to families who took them in. As in times past, some children were raised as members of the family while others were used as farm laborers and household servants. The sheer size of the displacement—the largest migration of children in history—and the degree of exploitation that occurred, gave rise to new agencies and a series of laws that promoted adoption arrangements rather than indenture.
More recently the military dictatorship in Argentina from 1976 to 1983 is known to have given hundreds of babies born to women captives who were then murdered to be brought up by military families.In Spain under Francisco Francos 1939–75 dictatorship the newborns of some left-wing opponents of the regime, or unmarried or poor couples, were removed from their mothers and adopted. New mothers were frequently told their babies had died suddenly after birth and the hospital had taken care of their burials, when in fact they were given or sold to another family. It is believed that up to 300,000 babies were involved. These system—which allegedly involved doctors, nurses, nuns and priests—outlived Francos death in 1975 and carried on as an illegal baby trafficking network until 1987 when a new law regulating adoption was introduced.On January 29, 2010, a group of ten American Baptist missionaries from Idaho attempted to cross the Haiti–Dominican Republic border with 33 Haitian children. The group, known as the New Life Childrens Refuge, did not have proper authorization for transporting the children and were arrested on kidnapping charges. After the process for the adoption of 400 children by families in the US and the Netherlands was expedited, Unicef and SOS Children urged an immediate halt to adoptions from Haiti.