The Traffic In Babies

. Exploring how and why babies were moved across borders, The Traffic in Babies is a fascinating look at how social workers and other policy makers tried to find birth mothers, adopted children, and adoptive parents

This book is a shocking exposé of the trafficking of infants and children in early 20th century America. It details the conditions and practices discovered by a government investigation in 1914 and provides valuable insights into the history of child welfare and social reform in the United States. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

. Exploring how and why babies were moved across borders, The Traffic in Babies is a fascinating look at how social workers and other policy makers tried to find birth mothers, adopted children, and adoptive parents

Excerpt from The Traffic in Babies: An Analysis of the Conditions Discovered During an Investigation Conducted in the Year 1914 The material comprised in this present publication was embodied in that section of the Report of the Maryland State-wide Vice Commission dealing with the traffic in babies. It was obtained during the latter part of the year 1914, and was gathered almost entirely under the personal direction of the Chairman, George Walker, M.D. The Commission, appointed by the Governor of the State of Maryland, handed in its report on December 15, 1915, after three years of investigation. The following symbols are used as substitutes for proper names: Physicians - P1, P2, P3, etc. Clergymen - C1, C2, C3, etc. Nurses - N1, N2, N3, etc. Midwives - M1, M2, M3, etc. Social Workers - S1, S2, S3, etc. Hospitals - Hospitals 1, Hospital 2, Hospital 3, etc. Boarding-home Keepers - B1, B2, B3, etc. Orphanages, Day Nurseries, etc. - O1, O2, O3, etc. Persons offering to adopt children in answer to advertisement - A1, A2, A3, etc. Miscellaneous references not included in the fore-going - X1. X2, X3, etc.; or simply: -. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Between 1930 and the mid-1970s, several thousand Canadian-born children were adopted by families in the United States. At times, adopting across the border was a strategy used to deliberately avoid professional oversight and take advantage of varying levels of regulation across states and provinces. The Traffic in Babies traces the efforts of Canadian and American child welfare leaders—with intermittent support from immigration officials, politicians, police, and criminal prosecutors—to build bridges between disconnected jurisdictions and control the flow of babies across the Canada-U.S. border. Karen A. Balcom details the dramatic and sometimes tragic history of cross-border adoptions—from the Ideal Maternity Home case and the Alberta Babies-for-Export scandal to trans-racial adoptions of Aboriginal children. Exploring how and why babies were moved across borders, The Traffic in Babies is a fascinating look at how social workers and other policy makers tried to find the birth mothers, adopted children, and adoptive parents who disappeared into the spaces between child welfare and immigration laws in Canada and the United States.