Adoption as a Mechanism of Power: The Biopolitics of Reassigning Mothers and Children

The dissonance of people thinking that adoption isn’t already a part of The Handmaid's Tale.

The discourse surrounding adoption, particularly in Western societies, has long been framed through a moralizing lens – one that positions it as an act of salvation, of rescue, of necessary intervention into the lives of those deemed incapable of raising their own offspring. However, to analyze adoption purely in terms of individual acts of charity or parental longing is to ignore the broader biopolitical structures in which it is embedded. Adoption is not merely a personal transaction; it is a state-regulated mechanism of power, one that operates at the intersection of governance, social control, and the production of legitimate identities.

If we are to understand adoption in its modern form, we must interrogate the ways in which it functions as a form of disciplinary power, a Foucauldian dispositif designed to reshape both the subject (the adoptee) and the reproductive capacities of those classified as unfit (the biological mother). Adoption, when viewed structurally, is not simply a means of creating families but a biopolitical apparatus that reorganizes kinship, erases genealogical histories, and regulates the conditions under which life itself is deemed valuable, worthy, or in need of reassignment.

The Handmaid’s Tale as Realized Biopower

Much has been made of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as a dystopian vision, a speculative fiction depicting a world in which the state controls reproduction, assigns children to state-sanctioned parents, and justifies these actions through ideological narratives of stability and salvation. Yet what many fail to recognise is that this is not a distant horror but an ongoing reality – one woven into the historical and contemporary practices of adoption.

The forced separations in The Handmaid’s Tale are not a departure from history but a distillation of it. The mass removal of Indigenous children in Canada, Australia, and the United States under the pretence of assimilation; the Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes of Ireland, where unwed mothers were coerced into surrendering their children; the secrecy of sealed birth certificates that legally rewrite an adoptee’s origins – these are not fictional elements but documented, state-sanctioned practices of biopolitical control.

Foucault’s concept of biopower – the regulation of bodies and populations by state institutions – explains how adoption has functioned historically not merely as a means of child welfare but as a strategy of governance. Through adoption, the state determines whose reproduction is legitimate and whose must be interrupted. The reallocation of children from the poor, the unmarried, or the racially marginalized into “better” families is presented as a moral necessity, when in fact it serves a dual purpose: to discipline and neutralize the reproductive agency of certain groups while reinforcing the normative family structures that sustain the state’s ideological stability.

The Disciplining of Mothers, the Regulation of Kinship

The biological mother, within the adoption-industrial complex, is a subject to be corrected, redirected, and ultimately erased. Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power – which operates through surveillance, normalization, and correction – applies seamlessly to the treatment of birth mothers within the adoption system. The mother is scrutinized, her ability to parent questioned, her “fitness” measured against economic, social, and often racialized criteria. If she deviates from the norm – if she is young, single, poor, or otherwise positioned outside the boundaries of ideal motherhood – she is subjected to subtle yet powerful coercion.

What is particularly insidious about this form of power is that it operates not through direct force but through internalized discipline. The mother, subjected to the moralizing discourse of self-sacrifice, is persuaded to relinquish her child as an act of love, as though surrendering to the system that deems her unworthy is the highest form of maternal devotion. In this way, the state does not need to violently seize children from their mothers – it simply needs to construct a social reality in which these mothers feel they have no choice but to comply.

Once the child is removed, the process of erasure is legally reinforced. In many jurisdictions, adoption entails the sealing of birth records, the alteration of legal documents, and the complete transformation of the adoptee’s identity. The state becomes the author of a new narrative, one in which the biological lineage is overwritten in favour of a constructed legitimacy. The adoptee, like the handmaid’s child in Atwood’s fiction, is reclassified – no longer the product of a disrupted family but the rightful heir of their new, state-approved lineage.

Adoptees as Governed Subjects:

The Surveillance of Identity

If the biological mother is disciplined into disappearance, the adoptee is governed by gratitude. From the moment their birth certificate is rewritten, the adoptee is expected to assimilate into their assigned identity without question. Foucault’s analysis of panopticism, in which individuals internalize the surveillance and regulate their own behaviour accordingly, applies directly to the lived experience of many adoptees.

To question one’s adoption, to express grief or anger, to seek out one’s origins – these acts are often met with resistance, both socially and institutionally. The adoptee, like any governed subject, is expected to embody the role assigned to them. The trope of the “happy adoptee,” much like the handmaid who is expected to perform her assigned function without resistance, serves as a mechanism of control. To step outside this role is to invite scrutiny to disrupt the carefully curated narrative of adoption as an unqualified good.

The fact that adoptees often must fight legal battles simply to access their own birth records demonstrates the extent to which their identities remain under state control. The mere act of seeking one’s original birth certificate – an act so mundane for non-adopted individuals – is, for adoptees, an act of defiance, a refusal to accept the terms of their own bureaucratic reclassification.

The Illusion of Benevolence

What The Handmaid’s Tale presents as dystopia is, in many ways, an exaggerated reflection of the structures that have already existed for decades. Adoption, as it is practised within a state-regulated system, is not a neutral institution. It is a mechanism of power that disciplines mothers, regulates kinship, and governs identity through legal and ideological means.

The dissonance lies in the refusal to see it as such. Adoption has been constructed as a benevolent system, a necessary intervention for the well-being of children. But benevolence is often the most insidious form of power, for it operates under the guise of care while obscuring the mechanisms of control beneath it.

If adoption were truly about the best interests of children, it would not require secrecy, identity erasure, or coerced separation. If it were truly about family, it would not be built upon the destruction of another. And if it were truly about love, it would not demand the silence of those it claims to serve.