Several women in this study undertook a bold and risky venture to include contact with the birth mother as part of an expanding kinship system that is not reflected on birth certificates or through other legal documents. Wflien the adop­tive family incorporates birth parents who have given up their legal rights to their biological offspring, […]

Women’s routes to motherhood and adoption are often dominated by a struggle in which they must weigh the age of an unknown adoptive child against his or her race.9 Mothers who give priority to the criterion of age in their searches hold the belief that intensive mothering is about sharing in the child’s infancy. U. […]

How does a woman such as Rebecca, typically in her late thirties to early forties, end up the mother of a different-race child? Biological motherhood prevails as the dominant way in which women become mothers; adoption remains a second best alternative. Sociologist Katarina Weger, in her article “Adoption and Kinships,” observes that in the U. […]

Rebecca, like many of the twenty-one other adoptive mothers in this study, wants to adopt a child who will not only fulfill her desire to be a mother but also fit into her preexisting private and public life. At first glance, adoption might seem like an ideal social institution that meets the needs of both […]

Rebecca Thompson I remember one clay where I was running along the river and thinking, “My God, this could he ten years ago. It’s like everything is the same in my life except that I’m older.” I wanted a change. I wanted to move on. I wanted to do something. I had tried to get […]

One might ask why women settle for this. Romance, intimacy, and pregnancy follow an older sequence that once resulted in quick marriages before women showed signs of pregnancy. The women described in this chapter followed this traditional sequencing to a substantial extent, deviating from it only in their failure to marry the fathers of their […]

Some women in this study, many of whom appear to be very similar to women who used known donors, were always very clear about what they wanted from these men: nothing. They used distance (sometimes an ocean) as a buffer. These men had all but disappeared. Those who did want a dad for their child […]

Mothers who chance pregnancy often expect that they and their children will become part of their children’s father’s extended kin networks, setting them apart from the other women in this study. Similarly, the father’s kin frequently claim these children (and, in doing so, their mothers) as part of the traditional kinship system, which remains problematic […]

The court is a tool available to women who chance pregnancy, but how they use that tool varies. Most women prioritize the emotional relationship between father and child over financial support—if they can afford it—and use (or more often avoid) the courts to that end.6 Women generally try to avoid court-ordered child support, preferring voluntary […]

Colleen, an artist, had her baby girl just shy of her fortieth birthday. The man who fathered her child was Colleen’s long-term lover. She never really thought about the implications of his involvement (or lack of involvement) with that child when she became pregnant, but she knew she didn’t want to be his wife. When […]