ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a historical perspective of adoption agency policies on disclosing to adoptive parents the medical and social history of the children they have adopted or are seeking to adopt. It argues that adoption agencies’ release of medical and social history to adoptive parents has been cyclical in nature. Beginning in the 1950s, adoption agencies increasingly restricted disclosure of negative medical and social history to adoptive parents, partly in an effort to protect adopted children from social stigma and partly to accommodate adoptive parents’ reluctance to discuss the matter with their children. Self-help adoption manuals of the 1950s provided a rationale for the agencies’ selective disclosure policy and implicitly supported adoptive parents’ reluctance to respond to their children’s request for biological family information. The confidential adoption case records of Children’s Home Society of Washington, a voluntary, nonsectarian, child-placing agency, reveal a different picture of postadoption contact prior to the Second World War.
