Nevertheless, closed adoption may allow the transmittal of non-identifying information such as medical history and religious and ethnic background. Today, as a result of safe haven laws passed by some U.S. states, secret adoption is seeing renewed influence. In so-called "safe-haven" states, infants can be left anonymously at hospitals, fire departments, or police stations within a few days of birth, a practice criticized by some adoption advocacy organizations as being retrograde and dangerous. How adoptions originate
Adoptions can occur between related or unrelated individuals. Historically, most adoptions occurred within a family. The most recent data from the U.S. indicates that about half of adoptions are currently between related individuals. A common example of this is a "step-parent adoption", where the new partner of a parent legally adopts a child from the parents previous relationship. Intra-family adoption can also occur through surrender, as a result of parental death, or when the child cannot otherwise be cared for and a family member agrees to take over. Adoption is not always a voluntary process. In some countries, for example in the U.K., one of the main origins of children being placed for adoption is that they have been removed from the birth home, often by a government body such as the local authority. There are a number of reasons why children are removed including abuse and neglect, which can have a lasting impact on the adoptee.
The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade (2007) excerpt and text search
Gailey, Christine Ward. Blue-Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love: Race, Class, and Gender in U.S. Adoption Practice (University of Texas Press; 185 pages; 2010). Uses interviews with 131 adoptive parents in a study of how adopters attitudes uphold, accommodate, or subvert prevailing ideologies of kinship in the United States. Melosh, Barbara. Strangers and Kin: the American Way of Adoption (2002) excerpt and text search
Minchella, Tina Danielle. Adoption in post-Soviet Russia: Nationalism and the re-invention of the "Russian family" (2011)
Pertman, A. (2000). Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution Is Transforming America. New York: Basic Books. Seligmann, Linda J. Broken Links, Enduring Ties: American Adoption Across Race, Class, and Nation (Stanford University Press; 2013) 336 pages); comparative ethnographic study of transnational and interracial adoption. Fictive Kinship: Making Maladaptation Palatable Archived 4 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine