ABSTRACT
Adoption is a legal process in which a child’s legal rights and duties toward his natural parents are terminated and similar rights and duties are created toward the child’s adoptive parents. 1 Adoption, unknown in common law, was first created in the United States through an 1851 Massachusetts statute. By 1931 every state in the union had passed adoption statutes, and by 1985 each of the states had extended these statutes to include transracial adoption as well as same-race adoptions.
