New from The University of North Carolina Press: Breaking Families, Making Families: Adoption and Child Welfare in the 1990s by Mical Raz.
About the book, from the publisher:
Families in the United States experience child abuse investigations, the removal of children from their homes, and the termination of parental rights at higher rates than peer countries. Yet this does not make them safer and comes at a cost. As a historian and practicing doctor, Mical Raz asks how American society came to accept punitive interventionist policies that prioritize termination of parental rights. These practices “free” children for adoption, which leads to the devastation of families and communities and the creation of “legal orphans”—children who have no legal ties to their families of origin.Raz's books include The Lobotomy Letters: The Making of American Psychosurgery (2013), which was awarded the Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Career Development Award; What's Wrong with the Poor? Race, Psychiatry and the War on Poverty (2013), and Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost its Way (2020).
Drawing on original archival sources, legislative documents, and oral histories, Raz argues that adoption is not the inevitable solution to a child welfare system in crisis, maps the political history of this shift in child welfare policymaking—exemplified in the passage of the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act—and proposes future reforms.
The Page 99 Test: What's Wrong with the Poor?.
--Marshal Zeringue
