ABSTRACT
Much of the current philosophical debate concerns the ethics of adoption as it pertains to the level of personal choice, such as prospective parents deciding to adopt instead of procreate. Very little philosophical analysis is devoted to evaluating the background policies informing people’s choices to adopt rather than procreate, and many related ethical issues. The purpose of this chapter is to remedy this lack of ethical analysis of adoption regimes – understood as the different ways in which the state simultaneously regulates the demand and supply side of the adoption process, and its normative justification for doing so. In this chapter we critically examine the unequal treatment of procreative and adoptive routes towards parenthood and argue that the use of screening and monitoring in current adoption policy and practice in fact causes harm to some children.
