Adoption

Adoption is when someone takes on the role of parent for another person, typically a child, from that child’s birth parents or legal guardians. In a legal adoption, all rights, responsibilities, and the parent-child relationship are permanently moved from the birth parents to the adoptive parents. Unlike guardianship or other temporary care arrangements, adoption is meant to be a lasting change in legal status, so it needs society’s approval, either through law or religious rules. Some societies in the past had specific adoption laws, while others used less formal methods, like contracts that spelled out inheritance and duties without changing the parent-child bond.

Modern adoption systems, which started in the 1900s, are usually run by detailed laws and regulations. Adoption for the wealthy Although the modern version of adoption began in the United States, similar practices existed long before. The Code of Hammurabi, for instance, describes in detail the rights of adopters and the duties of adopted people.

Antiquity

Adoption in ancient Rome is well recorded in the Codex Justinianus. Unlike today, ancient adoption focused on the adopter’s political and financial gain—it was a legal way to strengthen ties between rich families and to create male heirs to manage property. The upper class used adoption often; many Roman emperors were adopted sons. One type, called adrogation, required the person being adopted to agree to it.

Some adoptions even happened after the adopter’s death. Adopting infants in ancient times seems to have been rare. Abandoned children were often taken as slaves and made up a large part of the Roman Empire’s slave supply. Roman legal records show that foundlings were sometimes taken into homes and raised as sons or daughters.

Though not formally adopted under Roman law, these children, called alumni, were raised in a guardianship-like arrangement and were considered the property of the father who had left them. Other ancient civilizations, such as India and China, also had forms of adoption. Evidence suggests the goal there was to keep cultural and religious traditions alive, rather than to extend a family line like in the West. In ancient India, adoption was limited and highly ritualistic, so that an adopter could have a son perform necessary funeral rites.

China had a similar idea, with males adopted only to carry out ancestor worship. Adopting children of relatives or close friends was common in Polynesian cultures, including Hawaii, where the custom was called hānai. Adoption and common people After the Roman Empire fell, the noble classes of Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic cultures in Europe rejected adoption.

Middle Ages to modern period

In medieval society, bloodlines were everything; a ruling family without a natural-born heir was simply replaced, unlike Roman tradition. European law evolved to reflect this dislike of adoption. English common law, for example, did not allow adoption because it went against inheritance rules. Similarly, France’s Napoleonic Code made adoption difficult, requiring adopters to be over 50, sterile, at least 15 years older than the adopted person, and to have fostered them for six years.

Still, some adoptions happened informally, based on one-off contracts. For instance, in 737, a charter from the town of Lucca made three adoptees heirs to an estate. Like other such agreements, this one stressed the adopted person’s duty to care for the adoptive father in old age—a concept similar to Roman adoption ideas. Europe’s cultural shift also brought major changes to adoption.

Without noble support, the practice gradually turned toward abandoned children. Abandonment increased after the empire fell, and many foundlings were left at church doors. At first, clergy created rules for exposing, selling, and raising these children. But the Church’s real innovation was oblation, where children were dedicated to a lay life inside monasteries and raised there.

This was the first European system where abandoned children faced no legal, social, or moral disadvantages. As a result, many of Europe’s abandoned and orphaned children became alumni of the Church, which acted as their adopter. Oblation started a shift toward institutional care, eventually leading to foundling hospitals and orphanages.

As institutional care became accepted, formal rules emerged for placing children into families: boys could be apprenticed to a craftsman, and girls might be married off under the institution’s authority. Institutions also informally adopted out children, often as cheap labor—when an adopted child died, the family returned the body to the institution for burial. This system of apprenticeship and informal adoption lasted into the 1800s, seen today as a transition period in adoption history. Guided by social welfare activists, orphan asylums began to promote adoptions based on affection rather than work; children were placed out under agreements to provide care.