History of Adoption and Fostering in Canada

In the time before contact with European settlers and in the early colonial period, care for orphans and destitute and abandoned children in Canada was performed by kin and neighbors. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, local charitable endowments managed by religious orders, secular charities, or women’s organizations created institutional spaces in the form of workhouses, orphanages, and industrial schools for dependent children. Formal adoptions were rare—rather, apprenticeships, farm placements, and domestic service positions were secured for the young inmates. The late nineteenth century saw middle-class reformers promote a more nurturing environment for children, which resulted in a number of social reforms directed at improving their health, welfare, and education. As part of these reforms, the state took responsibility for child protection. Across Canada, provinces created laws establishing child welfare agencies, which were granted authority to care for dependent children and remove any child from parents deemed negligent, making them temporary or permanent wards of the state. The agencies were managed by a new profession, social workers, who sought homes for their wards in orphanages or foster families. Nonkin adoptions, arranged by public agencies and private channels, grew more common in the early twentieth century. Motivations to adopt included infertility as well as altruism. Until the late twentieth century, the management of adoptions reflected patriarchal social norms and the interests of the majority white culture. Thus, the preferred adoptive parents were heterosexual white married couples matched with healthy white infants with a similar appearance, religion, intellect, ethnicity, and economic class. Due to social stigma and the lack of financial support for single mothers, the main pool of infants available for adoption from the 1920s to the 1970s were those born to unwed mothers, who were often coerced to surrender their children. As prejudice against illegitimacy lessened, social welfare programs grew and birth control and abortion were decriminalized, resulting in fewer newborns placed for adoption. Yet demand for adoption remained strong; therefore, new candidates for adoption were considered, including older children and children with disabilities or health challenges. By the postwar period, rigidity over matching had relaxed enough to encourage transracial adoptions. Concurrently, there was an interest from Canadians wishing to adopt internationally. The practices of transracial and transnational adoption were met with praise for their inclusivity, but also controversy due to their assimilationist nature, particularly with regard to Indigenous children raised in non-Indigenous families. In the 1980s and 1990s, the secrecy surrounding adoption dissipated when the provinces gave adoptees who had reached adulthood and birth parents access to their records, introduced open adoptions, and began to offer search and counseling to facilitate reunions. In the early twenty-first century, adoptions by same-sex couples were legalized in every province and territory. Despite reforms making adoption more open and inclusive, the number of permanent wards across Canada, a disproportionate number of whom are Indigenous or have high-needs youth, far exceeds available adoptive parents. The youth who spend long periods in the child welfare system or age out of state care are a highly vulnerable population, more likely to experience maltreatment, mental illness, academic struggles, and behavioral challenges than children not in care.

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