La construcción ideológica y social del fenómeno de las adopcionesavances y retos para una sociología de las adopciones

Abstract

The present paper deals with the social construction process for the adoption phenomenon, which started to acquire numerical relevance and social impact in Spain during the 1990s thanks to the increase in international adoptions. The conclusions offered arise from the documentary research carried out into official and personal documents. The laws, rules, regulations and decrees reviewed are examined within their social structure and bearing in mind the dominant ideologies about motherhood, upbringing, childhood and family. The study includes the normative legacy that the movement for the recovery of historical memory has provided with contemporaneity while simultaneously situating us in the present-day construction of adoption. This diachronic vision is completed with the analysis of personal documents. Even though there has been a significant growth of international adoptions in Spain, it is also worth highlighting the considerable number of personal documents where fathers and mothers tell their experience with adoption in first person. Their narrations are critical of the way in which the adoption process is managed, and also of the underlying ideology based on the construction of difference with a strong bias in favor of the biological model and on the sacralization of the adopted child. Their accounts follow the contemporary process of identity-based, individual and social construction of adoption in Spain.