Adoption and the Goods of Birth

The rise of adoption in the United States demands a theological treatment, especially as concerns the roles of adoptive parents, who are, Coolman says, simultaneously more and less than “replacements” of the adopted child’s biological parents. Coolman argues that, in accepting and working through the diverse and complex factors involved in every individual and unique child’s case, adoptive parents are meant to bestow rightly-ordered, specifically human forms of love to their adopted children. A healthy understanding of adoption means not rejecting the “goods of birth” and giving attention to the framework of society and family in which it finds itself contextualized.