The Politics of Adoption: Child Rights in the Brazilian Setting

This paper, centered on adoption policy in Brazil, asks to what extent the open–ended principles apparent in international child rights accords, filtered down through different national laws, adjust to local realities. Ethnographic data on child circulation practices in urban favelas is compared with specific clauses in the 1990 Brazilian Children's Code, as well as with adoption policies in North America, to question the code's way of legislating which children can be placed for adoption, on what terms they should be placed, and who has the power to place them.