Concerned United Birthparents, based in California, began as a support group for birth parents and other birth family members. The group promotes open adoption records and family searches, proposes that most adoptions can and should be prevented and helps some families keep their children when they’re considering adoption because of financial stress. Contact Sarah Burns.

Bastard Nation is known for militant advocacy of adoptees’ right to information about legal and genetic background as a civil right. Contact through the form on their website.

The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, founded in 1996, is a national not-for-profit organization devoted to improving adoption policy and practice. They Institute has offices in New York and Boston. April Dinwoodie is the executive director.

Pact is a national nonprofit that provides education and adoption service to children of color, their birth parents and their adoptive parents. Beth Hall is the founder and executive director.

The Child Welfare League of America in Arlington, Va., is a coalition of hundreds of private and public member agencies and a leader in the national child welfare movement, beginning with efforts to abolish orphanages in the 1920s and ’30s. The organization also is a center for information about cultural and racial diversity, including efforts […]

The U.S. Children’s Bureau was a federal investigative agency created by Congress in 1912, as an outgrowth of national campaigns to reduce infant mortality and child labor and of baby-farming and black-market adoption scandals. It advocated standards in placement and state adoption laws, and it held the first conferences on child welfare. Today the organization […]

Elizabeth Samuels is a professor at the University Baltimore School of Law. Her areas of expertise include child and family law/adoption, constitutional law and Supreme Court seminar.

Barbara Yngvesson is a professor emerita of anthropology at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., where she is also the former Dean of the School of Social Science and founding director of the interdisciplinary Program in Culture, Brain, and Development. Her interests include the cultural study of law, family and kinship; theories of identity and belonging; […]

Stephen Presser is Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History at Northwestern School of Law. His areas of expertise include business associations and legal history.