Rescue or Kidnapping?

The Toronto subway underlined the timeliness of this book for me: I looked up from reading it one afternoon to encounter two toddlers appraising one another across the aisle. The blue-eyed blond child braced herself for comfort against an Asian woman, almost certainly her nanny, probably from the Philippines. The Asian child kept one hand reassuringly twisted in the clothing of the woman with her—a tall redhead, almost certainly her adoptive mother.

There are enough questions and themes in that tableau for dozens of books. Babies without Borders: Adoption and Migration across the Americas attempts to address some of them. Its author, Karen Dubinsky, wants to give due consideration to the two models that international and interracial adoption can be moulded to fit: kidnap or rescue. She wants her readers at least to think about the fact that we welcome babies from developing world countries—but often not their parents. She tries to trace the shifting line...