A Scandinavian Way of Adoption?

Organised by

• Department of History

This thesis examines transnational adoption in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden from a comparative historical perspective in the context of the Nordic welfare state. The international research on transnational adoption is heavily focused on North America. However, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have seen some of the highest rates of transnational adoptions in the world when measured per capita, and these countries have received the most children relative to their population size. This thesis seeks to contribute to the growing scholarship on transnational adoption as well as to bring it into conversation with research on the Nordic welfare state. It uses adoption to break away from the top-down statist perspective on welfare states and demonstrate how private associations and families in Scandinavia both shape the services that they receive and play a crucial role in how these services are delivered and regulated. A main finding of this comparative study is that transnational adoption in Scandinavia has been primarily promoted by private actors (adoptive parents, associations) who successfully forced the authorities to not only accept but also assist with the adoption of foreign children from abroad during the latter half of the 20th century.