Anti-Adoption Trafficking Library

Adoption: What You Should Know

Janine Myung Ja (2020)
Adoption: What You Should Know has been divided into four short, easy-to-read sections, revealing the making of the global system throughout time, starting in Europe, America, South Korea (Asia), and today finally, in Africa. Learn how religious folks, like Harry Holt (1954), spearheaded overseas adoption programs that have exploded into a worldwide in-demand phenomenon but blatantly ignore inherent and natural human rights (aka God's laws) for patriarchal and evangelical dreams and continue to violate the correct interpretation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).

The Child Catchers

Kathryn Joyce (2013)
The Child Catchers is a shocking exposè of what the adoption industry has become and how it got there, told through deep investigative reporting and the heartbreaking stories of individuals who became collateral damage in a market driven by profit and, now, pulpit command.

The Stork Market: America’s Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry

Mirah Riben (2007)
An in-depth examination of the corruption in the adoption industry; the fine line between black and gray market adoption; scams, coercion and exploitation; international adoption; foster care. Foreword by Evelyn Robinson, author, MA, Dip Ed, BSW. Myths that prevail in adoption primarily to replicate motherhood are examined. Myriad of adoption experts are interviewed and quoted throughout who agree that adoption has changed from being child-centered and altruistic social arrangement to one of finding solutions for the medical problem of infertility, putting the needs of adults, and those who profit from their desperation, before the needs of children who need homes.

We Were Once A Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America

Roxanna Asgarian (2023)
Roxanna Asgarian’s We Were Once a Family is a revelation of vulnerable lives; it is also a shattering exposé of the foster care and adoption systems that produced this tragedy. As a journalist in Houston, Asgarian became the first reporter to put the children’s birth families at the center of the story. We follow the author as she runs up against the intransigence of a state agency that removes tens of thousands of kids from homes each year in the name of child welfare, while often failing to consider alternatives. Her reporting uncovers persistent racial biases and corruption as children of color are separated from birth parents without proper cause. The result is a riveting narrative and a deeply reported indictment of a system that continues to fail America’s most vulnerable children while upending the lives of their families.

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

Ann Fessler (2006)
In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Fessler brilliantly brings to life the voices of more than 100 women as well as the spirit of those times, allowing the women to tell their stories in gripping and intimate detail.

Taken at Birth: Stolen Babies, Hidden Lies, and My Journey to Finding Home

Jane Blasio (2021)
From the 1940s through the 1960s, young pregnant women entered the front door of a clinic in a small North Georgia town. Sometimes their babies exited out the back, sold to Northern couples who were desperate to hold a newborn in their arms. But these weren't adoptions - they were transactions. And one unethical doctor was exploiting other people's tragedies.

The Adoption Machine: The Dark History of Ireland’s Mother & Baby Homes and the Inside Story of How ‘Tuam 800’ Became a Global Scandal

Paul Jude Redmond (2018)
In The Adoption Machine, Paul Jude Redmond, Chairperson of the Coalition of Mother and Baby Homes Survivors, who himself was born in the Castlepollard Home, candidly reveals the shocking history of one of the worst abuses of Church power since the foundation of the Irish State. From Bessboro, Castlepollard, and Sean Ross Abbey to St. Patrick’s and Tuam, a dark shadow was cast by the collusion between Church and State in the systematic repression of women and the wilful neglect of illegitimate babies, resulting in the deaths of thousands.

Selling Transracial Adoption: Families, Markets, and the Color Line

Elizabeth Raleigh (2017)
While focused on serving children and families, the adoption industry must also generate sufficient revenue to cover an agency’s operating costs. With its fee-for-service model, Elizabeth Raleigh asks, How does private adoption operate as a marketplace? Her eye-opening book, Selling Transracial Adoption, provides a fine-grained analysis of the business decisions in the adoption industry and what it teaches us about notions of kinship and race.