Care, profit, and kinship: tracing the limits of child trafficking

Abstract

Focusing on the Brazilian context, I propose in this article to discuss how certain notions involving money, care, and kinship underwrite laws that decree the termination of relations between birth parents and their children who have been adopted into other families. Inspired in discussions on biopolitics, I consider laws and legislation as part of the “new reproductive technologies”. Relying on a multi-sited ethnography in southern Brazil that took me from shanty towns in Porto Alegre to the observation of court proceedings as well as interviews with adoptive parents, I introduce the theme of money in order to bring out some of the arguments used to justify the procedures of “de-kinning” typical of plenary adoption. I then investigate how the legal technologies surrounding adoption influence the sentiments and practices of certain birth and adoptive mothers in Brazil.