ABSTRACT
In Britain and the United States today, adoption is seen as a service for children and there are calls in both countries for an increase in the number of adoptions to provide families for cared-for children. But this ignores two important features of legal adoption in the two countries:
• that over its brief history legal adoption has come to serve a number of very different goals and it should not be assumed that all are equally successful
• that, whatever the rhetoric, adoption affects all three members of the ‘adoption triangle’ and benefits for one may be at the expense of the others.
