ABSTRACT
The research that is available, with strong empirical evidence about women in impoverished countries, includes three important studies in the Marshall Islands, in the Tamil region of India, and South Africa. These studies provide important insight into how birth mothers typically view ICA, specifically full-break adoptions in which no further contact is expected by the adopting family due to a legal child adoption decree that ceases legal rights between the biological family and the adoptee (Högbacka, 2014; Richards, 2014a). Before we turn to these studies and countries, we first consider birth mothers in the United States, because a downturn in the availability of healthy young children there as well as in Canada and Western Europe is an important part of the story that we have yet to tell.
