The social control of illegitimacy through adoption

Birth is a culturally patterned life-cycle event that has personal and poli tical significance. Core cultural values are transmitted to participants du ring pregnancy and the postpartum period. For illegitimate births, cultural values may be transmitted by punishments for the unapproved mother that in clude abandonment or, in some instances, pressures to relinquish her child to adoption. In this article relinquishing mothers offer a cultural critiqu e of American adoption programs enacted in earlier decades and provide supp ort for the hypothesis that adoption was used as a form of social control.