Suppose you want to write
Of a woman braiding
Another woman's hair-
Straight down, or with beads and shells
In three-strand plaits or corn-rowsYou
had better know the thickness
The length the pattern
Why she decides to braid her hair
How it is done to her
What country it happens in
What else happens in that country
You have to know these things
-Adrienne Rich, "North American Time"

Although Adrienne Rich tells us we “have to know these things,” we are often willingly blind to the rich stories of those with whom we are most intimate. You may braid someone's hair without knowing very much about her. You may even write about it, though the writing would rapidly become very dull. In this issue of Law & Society Review, the authors examine how legal regimes facilitate knowing (and ignoring) stories when making families. For people seeking to adopt a child in western national states, the law has sometimes made it easy not to know about who bore a child, why she is available for adoption, and why a family might have raised her one way rather than another—braiding her hair in cornrows or in plaits. Also, in intercountry adoption, children often arrive with no history available, a condition legal adoption allows and often facilitates. We need not know “what else happens in that country.” Recent scholarship notes the historical and cultural specificity of the practice of ignoring. Adoptees, mothers who have placed their children for adoption, and adoptive parents have all claimed a right to know their own or their child's history, sometimes for different reasons. Scholars have followed, explaining that creating an “as if” family, in which all of this knowledge is foreclosed, does not fit with the experience of families. Articles in this issue address three interlocking themes that question the practice of not knowing: the commodification of children and family in a market economy, contests over the framework of choice in the making of a family, and the identity of children.

In this article I focus on discourses of freedom and exclusive belonging that structure the conventions of giving in transnational adoption, and I examine state practices for regulating the production and circulation of children in a global market economy. I argue that while the gift child, like the sold child, is a product of commodity thinking, experiences of giving a child, receiving a child, and of being a given child are in tension with market practices, producing the contradictions of adoptive kinship, the ambiguities of adoption law, and the creative potential in the construction of adoptive families.

The practices through which American society regulates the transfer of human gametes (eggs and sperm) reflects and shapes our understanding of our relationship to our genetic materials. The ways in which we think about and justify these practices engages important themes of liberal political theory and law: the understanding of individuals as autonomous or defined (at least in part) by relationships that entail dependence and care; the meaning of reproductive freedom and procreative collaboration; and the extent to which a free market may protect or undercut individual liberty. Two ethical and policy questions reflect these issues: should persons created with third-party gametes be able to learn the identity of the donor(s), and should the sale of eggs and sperm be prohibited, regulated, or left to the open market? This article contends that society should prohibit both anonymous transfer of and payment for human gametes themselves. Abolition of both anonymity and payment in the practice of gamete transfer is necessary to reflect properly the collaborative nature of assisted procreation. Although political reality may lead society to permit payment of a strictly capped “inconvenience allowance” for undergoing the procedures involved in transferring one's gametes, such payment (while preferable to payment for gametes themselves) inappropriately conceptualizes use of one's body as a commodity.

This is a study of meaning making and identity construction in child custody cases involving gay or lesbian parents. In it, I investigate the language of all such recorded decisions over the past 50 years, focusing on how judges—in interaction with the litigants before them—construct, negotiate, deny, and confirm the sexual and familial identities of the parents and would-be parents involved in these custody contests. Employing a constitutive framework and drawing on the social, scientific, and feminist literatures on sexuality, family, and law, I find that through multiple discursive processes, from self-representation to imposition to negotiation of new spaces of compromise, family law actors bring together sexual and familial statuses often treated as exclusive of each other.

Gays and lesbians have recently turned to the courts and the law for recognition of their families. Some of the most successful cases are those won by a gay or lesbian “second-parent” of a child whose biological or legally adoptive parent is his or her partner. The court opinions granting these second-parent adoptions have often portrayed these petitioners as similar to an idealized heterosexual family unit, albeit with two same-sex parents. In this study, 20 parents who successfully pursued a second-parent adoption were interviewed to examine their experiences with the legal system. Results indicate that these petitioners did not envision themselves as similar to heterosexual families and resisted attempts by state actors who tried to formulate them as such. The literature on legal consciousness and pragmatism is used to analyze the respondents' experiences.

Drawing on the laws and practices of three countries—England, France, and Germany—this article examines the constructions of narratives of abandoned children. Although the three countries share the values of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, having ratified it, their laws and practices with regard to the child's identity rights have little in common. Explaining the different approaches to abandonment, the article argues that these are justified by stories about the birth giver as the “real” mother, stories that vary according to place and culture. This leads to different conceptions of the child's identity and of motherhood, to exclusions and stigma. Focusing on the justifications offered in each country for its laws and practices, the article analyzes discourses of nature (England), juridical constructs (France), and pragmatic concerns for the child's life (Germany). The article concludes that, given the myriad of family forms and of life experiences, it is not surprising to find that countries governed by a shared international convention give very different accounts of the meanings of identity and motherhood.

This article analyzes why the Chinese government turned to international adoption in the 1990s as a means to deal with increasing numbers of abandoned children in Chinese orphanages. Although many people involved in international adoption assume that Chinese families are unwilling to adopt the kinds of children who fill most Chinese orphanages, primarily abandoned girls, research indicates that many families in China are willing to adopt abandoned children, including girls. Yet legal requirements that adopters be over 35 and childless severely limited the number of families who could legally adopt children in the 1990s. While this did not prevent unofficial adoption in violation of the restrictions, it did keep adopters away from government orphanages, thus increasing the burden on those institutions. Restrictions on adoption are the result of birth planning efforts to prevent adoption from being used as a loophole whereby birth parents adopt out daughters in order to be able to try again for a son. The result of this policy has been to increase abandonment while decreasing the number of legally eligible adoptive families in China. International adoption has helped enlarge the pool of potential adopters without disturbing birth planning priorities. It has also helped provide needed funds for improving conditions in state orphanages. Although legal changes in 1999 eased restrictions on the adoption of abandoned children living in orphanages, a number of factors have limited actual change, while restrictions on adoptions outside of orphanages have been largely maintained. Birth planning authorities remain wary of liberalizing domestic adoption, and a decade of international adoption has institutionalized powerful interests that orient adoption from orphanages toward the outside rather than inside China. Nonetheless, China is slowly moving toward an adoption policy more in line with the Hague Convention's injunction to prioritize domestic adoption over international placement, turning to international adoption only when it is impossible to find domestic adoptive families.

Focusing on child circulation among the urban poor in Southern Brazil, this article considers the parallels and divergences between local practice, national legislation, and global policy involved in legal adoption. Following a brief ethnographic account of child circulation among working-class families in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the analysis focuses on adoção à brasileira (clandestine adoption) as one of the ways in which the Brazilian poor bypass legal bureaucratic procedures in order to adjust the State apparatus to their needs. Finally, the comparative analysis of Brazil and North America centers on the evolution of adoption law and policies. Our approach highlights the variant experiences of family and legal consciousness according to class and national identity, while at the same time considering the political inequality implied in the hierarchization of different cultural repertoires.