ABSTRACT
Intercountry adoption is the product of global inequality and vulnerability resulting from poverty, disaster, war, corruption, and market forces (see Chapters 3, 5, 9, 10, and 11). It is also a child welfare strategy that has been described as “a successful natural intervention” (Van IJzendoorn and Juffer, 2005) for improving children’s well-being. There is substantial evidence that children adopted internationally show better cognitive, emotional, and physical development than do their peers left behind (see Chapter 13). Moreover, recent evolutionary evidence suggests that humans may be predisposed to cooperative child rearing (Hrdy, 2009), so that child circulation and adoption are built-in human adaptations to our environmental conditions (Fonseca, 2003; Leinaweaver, 2007).
