The Face of Forced Consent in Postwar Adoptions from Greece: What Does It Look Like? ^†

Abstract

This article explores the nature of forced consent in 1950s child adoptions from Greece to the United States. It contributes to critical adoption studies by centering the lesser-known “sending country” of Greece and by drawing from a rare combination of biographical data and testimonies, microhistorical contexts, and otherwise scant archival sources. At stake is the exceptionally well-documented treatment of a Greek birthmother who consented to the overseas adoption of her daughter under conditions of socioeconomic pressure. The article illustrates and denounces the aggressive postwar American approach to child adoption from Greece, which left no room for a strengths-based approach to the dependent nation, let alone to the unwed birthmother. The systemically disempowered birthmother and adopted daughter become paradigmatic of many more such seemingly private but essentially biopolitical adoption processes, which may elude notice for lack of proper documentation. Drawing also on conversations with the affected adoptee in later life, this article further endorses recent child-centered, diachronic historical methods and interdisciplinary approaches, as well as a call for truth and reconciliation.

1. Introduction: A Snapshot from Cold War Greece

Critical adoption studies have long dwelled on the concept of forced adoptions, that is, of permanent child placements based on the coerced consent of the first family, typically the first mother or birthmother (the latter in accordance with the adoptee informants’ preferences). Forced or involuntary adoptions have become the topic of the 2020s: they are currently hotly debated in Ireland, Scotland, England, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States, Canada, Australia, and in other countries. A recent book by Karen Constantine, titled Taken: Experiences of Forced Adoption (Constantine 2024), has kept the topic in the spotlight in the United Kingdom. We tend to ascribe the use of coercive means to agencies and institutions: some of them, driven by humanitarian motivations at best, or by monetary incentives at worst, have routinely separated children from their first families and rendered them available for adoption. In the post-WWII era, the children’s time spent in orphanages abroad or in other types of residential care facilities often constituted an intermediary step in the process of family separation, placing an anonymizing barrier of distance between the first family, the adoption brokers, and the adoptive parents. These brokers or adoption practitioners of the postwar period, among them private individuals as well, were still inventing the blueprint of mass intercountry adoption, which had yet to take off as the global but unilateral phenomenon that is still with us today.

One country in which this blueprint of mass overseas adoption was being tried out in its early stages was postwar and post-Civil War Greece. With the turn to 1950, Greece would go on to send about 4000 of its children abroad for permanent, irreversible adoption placements. What makes the Greek cases special as well as paradigmatic is that they are the cases of the oldest international adoptees who were not individual instances but part of a mass movement, soon to be replicated with the Korean and other adoptee flows (Van Steen 2019). There were earlier, pre-1950 intercountry adoption cases but they were not yet part of a mass movement that would increasingly focus on nonrelative adoptions. Between 1950 and 1970, the favored recipient countries of Greek-born children were the United States, the Netherlands and, to a lesser extent, Sweden. Especially the United States, which invested huge amounts of American taxpayers’ money in the reconstruction of postwar Greece, expected the vulnerable nation to also respond to its demand for white adoptable children with a steady supply of available babies. This era placed Greece on one of the major frontlines of the Cold War, for the fragile Greek state was the last domino of the Balkans that had not been absorbed into the Soviet bloc. Many of the adoption brokers, organizations and individuals alike, were convinced that placing disadvantaged Greek children with well-to-do, “patriotic” American couples was the right thing to do—and that all parties would go on living their lives, leaving the one-time mass child export to linger forever in the poorly documented past.

This article’s inquiry into the specific nature of forced consent in the postwar Greek context is based on thirteen years of archival work as well as numerous personal interactions and correspondences, which affirm my belief that life-changing shifts converse with big historical changes but are ultimately experienced most profoundly by the individuals themselves. The experiences of the Greek Cold War adoptees, or of any international adoptees for that matter, make a strong case in support of that belief in the microhistorical data that illuminate the macrohistorical. It is also the premise underpinning my earlier publications and, in particular, my 2019 book, Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? (Van Steen 2019). This book was the product of a lengthy involvement with adopted persons, but also with larger communities of readers, practitioners, and activists, as I continued to engage with them post-publication. I therefore aim to present a topic that, even though grounded in the specific circumstances of Greek forced consent, is still a representative theme that crosses over into other so-called “sending countries” marked by Cold War adoptions as well. This article may, therefore, be about particulars, but it should still be entirely recognizable in other adoption contexts. With 1950s Greece, I bring in an example of the destitute postwar European South. Like Korea, Greece’s territory was far from a side show to the main events of the early Cold War. By linking postwar Greece to another anticommunist Cold War testing ground, Korea, our discussion may transcend the Greece versus America binary and may open our eyes to the dynamics of emerging adoption consumerism that permeated “host” countries along with the provision of massive military and economic aid (Van Steen 2025). Caught between international pressures and Greek state development policies, international adoption can hardly be considered a private matter. And yet the Greek government was happy to let far-away adoptive parents and their mediators play lead roles, without much guidance or interference of the state. The Greek government of the postwar era was more committed to maintaining good trade and diplomatic relations and was not seen to interfere on behalf of the first parents, its own Greek citizens. The real-life case study presented in this article further presses the issue of the ethics of international adoption, when nonstate, non-Greek agents become involved, using the mantle of voluntarism. It lays bare some of the conflicting paradigms in foreign adoption, which were kept in the realm of immigration or refugee policy rather than of nationwide social welfare work (Van Steen 2019).

None of the immediate postwar Greek adoption brokers is still alive, and with them vanished the opportunity to hear them interpret their own actions, to listen to their views on intercountry adoption in its embryonic form. But is there a way to retrieve some of the popular, untrained and still contemporary voices? Is the voice of the average American of the early 1950s still audible? Can the popular 1950s American listener to nonspecialized information about adoption still be reconstrued? This article aims to accomplish two goals: first, to give a brief, more general view of early 1950s adoption and the lay attitudes in which it was couched; and, secondly, to delve into a unique record related to the mid-1950s international adoption of a Greek-born girl called Maria. The nonprofessional adoption go-between in the latter case was the brother of the prospective American mother, who was tasked with finding two children for his sister while spending several months working in Greece for an American company. This sister and her husband already had one adopted child, and they were therefore no longer a priority for local adoption services. Because “Uncle Phil” was not professionally involved in childcare, let alone in adoption, his views, which he expounds in his autobiography and in a personal letter to his then-teenage niece (Adams c. 1984; Adams 1971, respectively), deliver rather pragmatic insight into the adoption procedure and into the process of extracting the consent of the birthmother. All the circumstances and descriptions are startingly real. I was able to verify them in May 2021, when I managed to reunite mother and daughter after no less than sixty-six years had gone by. This reunion extends the historical reach of the case study to this day, and again it presents a kind of shorthand for a broader sweep of sociopolitical history. To protect the family’s privacy, I have omitted or changed the names of some persons involved except for that of Phillip Adams, the ad hoc adoption broker. Adams took lifelong pride in his actions and corroborated them in his autobiography, which he would have published if the right opportunity had presented itself. This autobiography remains undated but certain details point to a date in the mid-1980s (Adams c. 1984).

Rather than deploying a range of sources, this article strives to stay close to sources that come from or directly relate to the American postwar home culture, or to the cult of the “proper” home. Gabrielle Glaser’s acclaimed book, American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption (Glaser 2021), has poignantly marked what domestic normativity of the 1950s through early 1960s looked like. Glaser has drawn from personal testimonies as well as from older literature, including books, medical reports, and newspaper articles, to make the prevailing conservative norms palpable. Elaine Tyler May was the first to study the ties between Cold War anticommunist containment and the ensuing American tendency to reinvest in a strong family life focused on raising children (May [1988] 2008, first published 1988). She has situated 1950s family (self-)containment against the backdrop of a revived domestic ideology, that is, of “the nuclear family in the nuclear age” (May [1988] 2008, p. 1). E. Wayne Carp and Anna Leon-Guerrero speak of the “baby boom pronatalism that put a premium on family and home life” (Carp and Leon-Guerrero 2002, p. 210; also Fessler 2006; Solinger [1992] 2000; Zelizer 1985). Christina Klein shifts the focus back to the upswing in adoptions and calls transethnic adoptive families instrumental in assigning “re-domesticated women a role in the national [American] project of global expansion” (Klein 2003, p. 190). International adoption responded forcefully to the stated will of many childless American couples who felt marginalized in a “celebratory” pronatalist society on a mission (Carp 1998, p. 29). “[C]hildless couples besieged adoption agencies pleading for a child to add to their household,” Carp maintains, underscoring the cause–effect relationship between the American dream of “personal happiness” and an “ideology of domesticity” (Carp 1998, p. 28). The number of postwar adoptions in the United States skyrocketed as white, middle-class, and childless couples (re)discovered adoption, intercountry and domestic alike, as the pathway to familial bliss (Carp 1998, p. 29). Maria’s adoptive parents, too, received about fifty unsolicited letters from across the United States asking them to share the details of how they had successfully been able to adopt two children from Greece without having to wait for years. In fact, Adams had been able to conclude the adoption process on behalf of his sister and brother-in-law in just about four months. This widespread interest would not have come about if they had not gone public with their adoption story, but neither if there had been no pent-up demand. Some of this demand prompted American couples to travel to Europe, as when Adams confirmed in a letter dated 18 August 1954, shortly after his arrival in Greece: “I’m sure it must be easier than the [S]tates to adopt [a child] … because you see many, many Americans with them [adopted children] here, in Germany and in France” (Adams 1954b).

American society became increasingly preoccupied with adoption as a right as well as a duty. In despair, given the short supply of Caucasian children available through state-licensed agencies, some couples turned to nonregulated adoptions. In the prospective parents’ judgment, licensed agencies and their social workers threw up unnecessary hurdles (Carp 1998, pp. 29–31, 113). Push and pull factors started to work in unison, adding nuance to the complicated but contingent relationships between sending and receiving countries. But mainly, policymakers gave American families important positions in the rhetorical as well as the ideological battle lines by letting them take in innocent child victims of communist violence, poverty, or “illegitimacy” (Van Steen 2019). Through their commitment to child-rearing, adoptive families were happy to strike their blows against totalitarian communism and to help define the new democratic nation, ready to assume its role of progressive world leader.

Life magazine, a popular favorite, did much to help define, broaden, and occasionally narrow postwar American culture. The flood of popular media images, in Life and elsewhere, of Greek children arriving would soon become so overwhelming that one well-meaning American mother kept referring to the time of her new daughter’s 1956 arrival as her own “Life magazine moment” (Heckinger 2019, p. 57). A quick search through the resources of www.newspapers.com shows little Greek boys being embraced, and little Greek girls being kissed and handed dolls. The 1950s media coverage was not exclusive to Greek children, of course, but Greek children were among the very first postwar intercountry adoptees, and they kept arriving in steady numbers through the mid-1960s.

Closest in time to the 1954 Greek-to-American adoption case that I will discuss below is a Life magazine article, or rather a “heart-warming picture story,” of 19 February 1951, which deserves our attention. The characterization is that of the anonymous reporter of The Akron Beacon Journal (Akron, Ohio) of 28 February 1951 (Anonymous 1951a), who upheld the domestic adoption story of Linda Joy, featured in Life, as a good antidote against some Americans’ temptation to circumvent the regular adoption application procedures and to chase after “black market” babies. Ironically, the Ohio newspaper article bears the title “Babies Not for Sale,” but the reporter had no qualms about affirming the shaming techniques applied to the first mothers, as described in Life. The feature in Life itself, then, notes an important fact that marked the year 1950: in that year, about one million US couples tried to adopt a baby but only 75,000 babies were available for adoption (Anonymous 1951c, p. 99).1 Not surprisingly, waiting periods for would-be adoptive parents who had been approved for domestic adoptions by US agencies grew notoriously long. In 1953, waiting periods from one to more than four years were not exceptional (Herman 2008, pp. 143–44). The piece in Life is infused with warnings against taking shortcuts to obtain a child amidst these unfavorable odds. Apparently, the worst that can happen is that “without legal safeguards the natural mother can show up at any time to shatter the new family by taking her baby back” (Anonymous 1951c, p. 99). Life unabashedly presents the first mother as a threat, and an unpredictable one at that.2 In the in-country American adoption world, and soon also in the international world of adoption, the as-if family was conceived of as strictly nuclear, enclosed or inward-facing, and intolerant of the supposedly menacing figure of the birthmother.3 The latter was vilified for her stalking-like behavior on the one extreme, or for her—equally putative—indifference, on the other. In a rather contrived manner, Life quotes one young unwed mother who gives up her newborn as saying: “It hurts, but I have a long life ahead of me” (Anonymous 1951c, p. 100).

Paradoxically, as much as this Life magazine article of 1951 tried to promote “regular” and in-country American adoptions, it, too, helped to amplify the international adoption boom. The appeal of intercountry adoptions was on the rise because they placed the roadblocks of distance, cost, and the sheer unknown between the first family and the new American family. An additional attractive factor associated with intercountry adoptions was that of confidential or sealed records in the ultimate “stranger” adoptions. Stranger or nonrelative adoptions exploded in numbers as a quintessential postwar phenomenon (Carp 2009, pp. 21–23), which also took a novel, interventionist approach to the societal “problem” of “illegitimacy,” for first mothers and their babies alike. But if illegitimacy was stigma, coerced adoption should have been a stigma, too. International adoption became so popular, not only because it responded to a quantitative demand, but also because it erased the first family even more drastically and thus enhanced the illusion of the child’s exclusive belonging to the adoptive family.

Psychoanalytical literature and “professional” advice given to adoption agencies backed up the early 1950s discourse that favored adoptive families over first families, while purportedly pursuing the best interest of the child. Viola Bernard, who identified as a “psychiatric consultant to the Free Synagogue Child Adoption Committee” (Bernard 1953, pp. 184–85), believed that the mother figure was “interchangeable” to the young child of less than six months old (Bernard 1953, p. 178). Bernard invoked psychoanalytical studies and the “growing body of successful experience with such [very early] placements since 1946” to posit “the desirability of adoptive placement before six months of age so that the mother-child relationship can be established with the permanent mother” (Bernard 1953, p. 178).

2. Methodology and Theoretical Framing

This article deploys a mixed methods approach and avails itself of intimate archival records, microhistorical analyses, and biographical insights, based on oral interviews with the most affected parties in this transnational family history of adoption (the Greek mother, the adopted daughter Maria, Maria’s daughter, and the birthmother’s granddaughter). The analysis presented below ranges across different types of sources and genres of “texts,” and these data reveal their limitations as well as their strengths. For reasons of methodological transparency, it must be stated that the Greek birthmother introduced in this study did not leave any records in writing. Like many other birthmothers of the mid-1950s (born in the 1930s), she was practically illiterate. This deficit placed the researcher at a disadvantage when trying to balance ego-documents and other (auto)biographical records, which required careful calibration and repeated cross-checking. Here, oral interviews filled the gap, however imperfectly, given the emotional charge of such conversations. Thus, oral interviews preempted the archival silences, but they were only possible as long as the informants were still alive. They further required reflection on how to use them conscientiously. I have opted to embed the findings from oral testimonies without unnecessarily interrupting the narrative flow, which honors the narrative practice of the interview process.

A recent article written by Atamhi Cawayu and Hari Prasad Sacré, titled “Can First Parents Speak?,” led me to not only differentiate but also elevate the voice of the “subaltern” first parent, that is, of the Greek birthmother, who was confronted with oppressive bureaucracies and interlocutors in positions of superiority ((Cawayu and Sacré 2024), bridging critical adoption studies and subaltern theory as articulated by Spivak (1988)). Although the opportunity for the birthmother to resist was very limited (discursively as well as spatially), her eagerness to reconnect across borders (and language barriers) and to tell her side of the story constituted the act of resistance by which she could eventually transcend entrenched hegemonies. The Greek birthmother de facto implemented the notion of “active waiting” or “agency-in-waiting,” which has been productively explored by Chandra Kala Clemente-Martínez in the context of intercountry adoptions from Nepal (Clemente-Martínez 2023).

Ann Laura Stoler’s older but still seminal study, titled Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Stoler 2009), offered every incentive to also read against the archival grain and to further contextualize the interwoven nature of affect, sentiment, morality, and presumed rationality, against the backdrop of colonial theory and praxis. Stoler alerts the reader not only to the epistemic advantages and suppressive force fields that are embedded in colonial dominion, but also to the rhetorical residues that have remained hidden or “unwritten” or that have otherwise fallen between the cracks of power formations. My initial training as a classicist has further prompted a close, philologically driven attention to the informants’ choices of words and expressions, including the repetition and stylistic embellishment of certain words and motives. Thus, this study’s selection of sources and approaches is a selection shaped by transnational perspectives as well as local contingencies and by the need to deploy versatile interpretive, transhistorical, and transcultural tools while the opportunity presented itself.

I value four strong women’s special gift of granting me as much access as I was able to gain under ethical and professional conditions. I adhere to the principles of the ethical clearance that my home institution has extended to me for five years. I have implemented these principles also in other articles that delve deep into the personal experiences of intercountry adoption, which cannot (and should not) be severed from their entanglements with media discourses, private and international legal systems, and the polarizing ideologies of West and East in the early Cold War years. Admittedly, the rich but rare ego-documents and interview results that shed light on the family and adoption history presented here do not allow for broad generalizations, but they can still fruitfully be read against the dynamic backdrop of a Foulcauldian analysis of knowledge, power, and privilege and of colonial and postcolonial critiques of the practice of separating children from their birth families (Wesseling 2024).

3. Results

3.1. But What Did Forced Consent Look Like?

What exactly transpired in Greece in 1954, in circumstances that must illuminate the notion of “forced consent”? In 1953, Phillip Adams took a new position with the company he had been working for in Paris. He characterized this company as “an American architect-engineering firm designing military airports and other facilities in France” (Adams c. 1984, pp. 28–29). The reader of his unpublished autobiography never learns much about Adams’ position, and it came at a moment in his career when he was still sorting out his personal as well as his professional life. Adams was, in fact, employed by the Joint Construction Agency (JCA) of the American Military Mission. This military contract firm was founded by the US Department of Defense in 1953 and took on assignments in various countries (Grathwol and Moorhus 2005, pp. vii–viii, 115–16). His new assignment in Greece may well have been as interventionist as the private adoption initiative that he was about to undertake. Adams loaded up his car and traveled with his wife and their baby from Paris to Greece, taking the Balkan route (Adams c. 1984, p. 31). This trip, too, marks his sense of adventure.

A brief look at a few of the watershed dates in American–Greek relations may provide further context. On 18 February 1952, Greece officially became a member state of NATO. On 7 August 1953, President Eisenhower signed into law the Refugee Relief Act (RRA, Public Law 203, 5Section. (a)). This landmark act offered a crucial opening to European refugees who were victims and opponents of communism. Significantly, by distinguishing adoptable children from other refugees, the 1953 RRA changed the landscape of intercountry adoption. It also marked the growing trend to redefine intercountry adoption as nonrelative and confidential adoption (with sealed records). Specifically, the watershed RRA of 1953 allowed 4000 special nonquota immigrant visas to be given out to eligible orphans under ten years of age who had been adopted abroad or who were to be adopted in the United States by US citizens and their spouses (with a two-petition limitation on the number of adoptable children per applicant couple).4 With the RRA firmly in place, intercountry adoption from Greece and from Korea advanced at an accelerated pace, with Greece proportionally in the lead (Van Steen 2019, pp. 77–87). In 1953, too, the United States and Greece signed several bilateral agreements of an economic and financial nature, mainly intended to facilitate, or rather prioritize, American investment in Greece. Historian David Close speaks of American investors being ceded “virtually colonial rights” (Close 2002, p. 86). Two months after the RRA went into effect, on 12 October 1953, the Greeks signed a major bilateral security agreement with the United States, which was seen as a “significant Greek diplomatic success,” strengthening Greece against “‘enemies in the North’” (Karamouzi 2022, p. 131). Work on American military bases in Greece began, and, by the end of the 1950s, three of the four agreed bases had been constructed (Karamouzi 2022, p. 131). Eirini Karamouzi quotes Alkis Argyriadis, a leading Greek anti-base activist, as stating in 1983:

In 1953 with the US-Greek agreement we gave the Americans the right to come in, move around our country, do whatever they want without asking anyone. We reached a point where in every ministry there would be an American consultant. The bases form a kind of dictatorship, a heavy web that is spreading throughout the country that is keeping Greece hostage.

(Karamouzi 2022, p. 137)

Argyriadis’ characterization carries ominous weight, in hindsight. American money flows continued to reach Greece, and with them heightened expectations. By the mid-1950s it became clear that an uninterrupted stream of young and healthy adoptable children could work miracles when it came to strengthening bilateral relations and diplomatic contacts. Intercountry adoption would go on to play a dynamic role in the forcefield of a dependent country’s foreign affairs. Again, Greece was in the forefront of this new and soon-to-be global phenomenon, with Korea becoming a close runner-up. This development was even more deplorable given that American assistance was not necessarily well-thought-out or strategically deployed, as the following statement by the American diplomat Herbert Daniel Brewster may show:

Once 1956 came along …, we phased out on major economic aid. In fact I was there in 1963 and for the seventeenth time we told them “the last $30 million dollars of aid, this is the last.”

(Brewster 1991, p. 16)

Once Adams started working in Athens, he explains: “we lived in a nice home at 14 Parnassou Street, Psychiko, just outside Athens. … I did work that year but I am afraid most of my time was consumed by two other activities” (Adams c. 1984, p. 32). Here is how Adams describes the supposedly very time-consuming adoption process of two Greek children destined for his sister and her husband, who lived in Utah at the time:

The first activity was adopting, for my sister [name omitted], two Greek babies, Maria and Peter [not his real name]. This was a saga in itself. I began by going to the large orphanage in Athens, choosing about twelve of the healthiest looking babies who could be adopted, and taking pictures of them to send to [names of the couple] in Utah. Although they originally only planned on adopting one baby, they fell in love with two and decided to adopt them both. Peter had been left at the doorstep and was of unknown parents.

(Adams c. 1984, p. 32)

Adams’ search is on, as he goes looking for children for a family, his own extended family. In the case of Greek foundling Peter, the wish to look for a family to give to a child is also present, but it is not Adams’ main concern. That point is proven promptly, when, in his consumerist selection process of picking and choosing, he settles on Maria, who is not “of unknown parents” and whose birth family therefore needs to consent to the adoption. This fact contradicts Adams’ casual statement about the dozen babies “who could be adopted,” which seems to mean merely that they were “on display” in the orphanage, but not necessarily that they were free for adoption. The orphanage provides not only the locale but also the mechanisms for supposedly uncomplicated adoptions: its dorm room morphs into the on-site version of the picture catalog of babies, which we see appear in other Greek mediators’ practices. The “customer” is encouraged to leaf through, or to walk through, picking out just the “right” child or children with which to accessorize the American family. What goes unspoken in Adams’ memoirs is that a white child is at stake, in fact a dozen white children, which he sees as ready candidates for some sort of glorified resettlement. Admittedly, Adams sees white children as particularly good “matches” that will easily fit into his sister’s white family and community. This drive to seek out not only racial matches but overall “suitable” matches (qua age, sex, physical traits and conditions, presumed intelligence, and so on) was a common practice in 1950s intercountry adoption, which was also readily accepted by any mediators in adoption procedures.

Adams does not let the lack of knowledge about Peter’s first parents fill him with sympathy, or spur altruistic action. He sees it, rather, as a procedural advantage: without the need to seek the consent of the first parents, Peter’s adoption procedure will move along more rapidly and more smoothly. Adams continues:

Maria’s mother, however, had brought her baby to the orphanage and so would have to give permission for the adoption. I hired a lawyer, and a private detective to find Maria’s mother. After month’s [sic] of investigation we finally found her working as a scrub woman in a hospital. Maria had been born out of wedlock, a real sin in Greece, and the young mother had been ousted from her home and village. She was young and very pretty, and she, with tears rolling down her face, signed the papers releasing Maria for adoption.

(Adams c. 1984, pp. 32–33)

Adams pulls out all the stops: he hires a lawyer and a private detective to find a young woman whose whereabouts were known to the orphanage directorship, because she came to visit her daughter regularly. Nonetheless, he sets up the plot of an adventure story in which he stars as the hero who nearly ambushes the young mother at the hospital where she works in a low-paying but perfectly respectable job. The holder of a highly professional position and contract, shaped in the mold of postwar Greek-American relations, meets with a Greek woman whom he labels a “scrub woman”—in his view the simplest of service hands, utterly deprived of economic and social capital. The power differentials are palpable. However, they do not bother Adams, who is more concerned with portraying the young mother, not as promiscuous, but as a one-time “sinner.” Maria’s mother is not in hiding but she is probably terrified about the questions that her supervisors, who may see her meet with unknown men during working hours, might ask. Adams shows very little concern for the mother’s situation, sense of exposure, panic, or despair, but he does note that she is “young and very pretty” (Adams c. 1984, p. 33).

Adams and the lawyer catch Maria’s mother at her most vulnerable, and they expect consent when she is clearly not ready to give it. At the time of the ominous first and last meeting, the young mother had not given consent to any form of adoption or child placement. She may have had plans to look for a better job and to retrieve her child from the orphanage as soon as her financial situation would be more stable and/or the conflict with her parents would be resolved. But Adams shows up unannounced at her workplace and in the company of another male authority figure, to spring the news on her, after conversing among each other in English, a language she cannot follow. Significantly, Adams was introduced to the baby girl, among other babies to “choose from.” Only after he had settled on Maria did he and the lawyer actively start seeking the first mother’s consent. Such practices (and pressures) would be considered highly unethical today.5 No orphanage official or social worker intervened on behalf of the first mother, even though the circumstances of “entrapment” presented the kind of situation in which the assistance of a trained social worker could have made a difference. A prescribed period of deliberation (or “grace period”) granted to the mother could have made a critical difference as well. The mother did not benefit from any legal representation, either, given that the Greek lawyer who was present was hired by and working for Adams. It may well have been her first contact with a lawyer ever, which she would have associated with criminal behavior or conduct worthy of investigation—hers, if she were to give in to fear and self-doubt. The way in which this process of consent-seeking unfolded signals coercion in its undiluted, immoral form.

Adams is keenly aware of American power and pull. His next lines show the telltale signs of people whose “moral” mission and “altruistic” actions should not be thwarted by any, supposedly low-level or local authorities. With an inflated sense of superiority, Adams describes the new family’s encounter with the US Immigration and Naturalization Service and with the general objections of Greek Orthodox religious leaders:

After months of paper preparation for their immigration to the United States, the Immigration Department in Washington, D.C. said they had lost the papers. [Names of the couple] contacted their Senator from Utah and he personally went to the Immigration Department and told them to find the papers or else. They found them! The next hurdle was the Greek Orthodox Church which decided that the children could not be adopted except by members of the Greek Orthodox Church. Apparently the Church would rather have the babies starve in an orphanage rather than let them be adopted by a Mormon family. I went to the U.S. Ambassador to Greece. He knew the head of the Greek Orthodox Church personally and intervened for us.

(Adams c. 1984, p. 33)

Adams keeps emphasizing his own, “heroic” efforts to make the adoptions happen. His representation of the Church’s refusal to let Greek children go to non-Greek-Orthodox parents is highly exaggerated. Adams further diminishes his lawyer’s contribution, since he himself did not master the Greek language, let alone the Greek legal culture. He also dismisses the efforts of the first mother and of the orphanage, which was not in the business of letting babies “starve.” He keeps reusing the theme of “starvation” in Greece in the mid-1950s: it is an anachronistic concept, but one that aptly captures the subtext of American supremacy versus Greek dependency.6 With his constant emphasis on the orphanage and on starvation, Adams effectively produces the needy “orphan,” but his wording reveals less about the child’s status and more about the political and economic forces at work, which usurp the power of generating their own subordinates. In Adams’ view, the pre-adoption narrative bears little relevance. The months that the girl has spent in Greece are not worth properly documenting. The local Greeks are only in his picture to raise objections and to throw up roadblocks. But luckily the persistent American, the trouble-shooter par excellence, is there to resolve them. Moreover, Adams expects that women in service roles step up as volunteers, only too happy to make the dramatic “rescue” or “escape” happen:

The other smaller hurdles appeared at the last minute. The airline required someone to take personal responsibility for the one-year-old babies. An airline stewardess, returning home, volunteered. At the last minute, literally when the plane was ready to take off, I was informed that two baby hammocks were needed. I called the TWA office in Athens, about ten miles away, and they happened to have two which they sent out by police escort.

(Adams c. 1984, p. 33)

Adams chooses to pay for specialized services, or to find female volunteers for “nonspecialized” ones. The other parties are expected to simply deliver on these requests. This holds true not only of the lawyer and the detective, but also of the people in high places (the Utah senator, the US ambassador in Greece).7 Adams expects to use privileged contacts and to pull strings if he needs to, while exaggerating the local conditions and the supposed lack of collaboration. In a letter to his sister dated 15 December 1954 (Adams 1954d), Adams urges her to start the visa application process with “pulls and pushes here and there from anyone possible”—a phrase that captures his own modus operandi. Also, “you should start contacting your Senator and others about letters of ‘expediting’ action for humanitarian reasons,” he advises in the same letter (Adams 1954d). This is exactly what his sister and her husband did. The reader cannot but ponder the blurred demarcation line between “humanitarian action” and selfish insistence on preferential treatment from the start to the finish line.

Adoption from Greece is an obstacle course that Adams successfully completes. But when two friends of his sister ask for his assistance in arranging their adoptions of Greek children, he declines. He does not mention any subsequent requests or efforts in his autobiography.8 Adams never explains why his sister and her friends chose Greece as a country to adopt from, either, but he implies that word-of-mouth traveled fast. That impression is confirmed by a subsequent complaint made by the adoptive father, who told the Greek lawyer who handled the family’s additional adoptions of 1959: “when all of our neighbors have received their wires or their children and we have not even so much as heard from you …” (P.G. 1959, a letter from the personal archive of Greek-born adoptee P.G. dated 23 March 1959). In the end, Adams is a reluctant adoption broker, and that is precisely the image he tries to instill when the teenage Maria starts asking critical questions.

Adams did not imply that money exchanged hands in 1955. But on the occasion of the 1959 adoptions again pursued by his sister’s family, small monetary transactions between the adoptive parents and the birth parents were part of the “process.” A letter dated 15 January 1959 and written by the Greek lawyer-broker informs the adoptive parents: “The next day I was lucky enough to meet the [birth] mother and to take her, after giving her a small sum, to the American Consulate where she signed an Affidavit declaring on oath that she is releasing her [male] child for adoption and emigration” (P.G. 1959). The lawyer followed up with the adoptive parents, in a letter of 15 April 1959, that blends deception into the mix of bribery and power abuse:

After searching [for the birth father] I located him and I sent for him with a notice that you have had sent ten dollars for him. I hope God will forgive me for this white lie. He came to my Office quickly to receive the money. I gave him 300 drachmas, equal $10, and on the occasion I asked him to do me a favor; to go with me to the American Consulate where the Consul would like to see him. We went there together, and so he signed the Affidavit.

(P.G. 1959)

3.2. But How to Explain the Adoption to Maria?

We do not have a copy of the letter that Maria sent to “Uncle Phil” around the time of her seventeenth birthday. We only have the letter in which he responded to the questions she asked. This two-page letter is dated 4 February 1971 (Adams 1971). Describing the circumstances in which Maria’s adoption took place, Adams relates the following:

It took the Greek lawyer and I several weeks to find her [your mother] because we needed her permission to have you adopted.9 She had taken you as a baby to the orphanage and left you there with their knowledge, telling them that she could not support you. She visited the orphanage once or twice a week to see you and she brought you things as she could afford to buy them—toys, dolls, clothes. She could not, of course, afford to buy many things. She loved you and did not want to leave you at the orphanage—but she had to because of the lack of a good place to keep you and money to buy you food and clothing each day as you needed it. I got the above information from the head of the orphanage.

(Adams 1971, p. 1)

Even the head of the orphanage apparently allowed the American stranger to go and seek consent from a mother who had not shown any intention to give up her baby. The orphanage director was the official guardian of many children, among them several who had long been formally relinquished. Why did the institution not steer the independent adoption broker to orphans in need of a family? Why did it permit him to pursue the kind of consent that cannot be free when two intimidating strangers show up at the workplace of an unsupported mother without any advance notice? Papers ready to be produced at the first inkling in the direction they have been pressing for … Papers that have been written up beforehand and that follow a template that is entirely alien to the young woman … Adams does not embellish that particular set of circumstances, still believing there was nothing wrong with his aggressive approach, which he presents as a moral project:

When your mother was found at the hospital working, the lawyer and I called her out to the front of the hospital by the main stairs in order to talk to her. We told her that my sister in America—from a very good family—wanted to adopt you, her baby. We needed her permission because she had not given her permission to the orphanage—the orphanage was only keeping you because of your mother’s poor financial position. When we told her what we wanted she was very thoughtful, then told us how much she loved you and how much you meant to her, and how much she basically did not want her baby taken away. But she also said that she could not take care of the baby in the fashion that she wanted to and that it would be good for her baby to be brought up in a good family—not only good spiritually and morally and one with love, but a family that could buy enough food and clothing for her baby. She started to cry and said that she would sign the papers for adoption. The lawyer produced the papers and she signed them right there in front of the hospital where she worked while she was crying. It was obvious that she loved you very much, that she did not want to give you up from an emotional point of view, that she knew you would be better off in a good home than in the orphanage where there was little love, little care, little food and little clothing.

(Adams 1971, p. 1)

The lawyer produces the form right there and then, while the young mother is still too overwhelmed and is still running all possible, better scenarios through her mind. But the stranger tells her that his sister is from a very good family! In other words, his own very good family does not count fallen girls among its members. As a mother made irrelevant, the young woman is never mentioned by name. The entire scenario stages her degradation and exclusion. Shamed as this birthmother has long been, she is essentially told that her love is not good enough compared to that of the “proper” couple, which is deserving of the girl, perhaps even more deserving than her very own mother. In this presentation, the birthmother was never supposed to raise her child. She is de facto disqualified as a mother and even asked to humbly agree with that conclusion. She is made to feel like a moral problem which the stranger will resolve with a moral solution. The adoption legal scholar David Smolin aptly remarks, in terms that reach well beyond postwar Greece: “Negative viewpoints of unwed mothers, influenced by eugenics, psychiatry and social work, stereotyped unwed mothers as unfit parents and their children as suffering from the social stigma of ‘illegitimacy’ and from inherited negative moral characteristics” (Smolin 2016, p. 187). Adams essentially tells Maria’s mother that her child can be saved, despite the burden that she has placed upon it and even though she herself has done little to deserve this “positive” outcome. The birthmother can at best hope to regain respectability and secure a “proper” marriage.

Adams actively constructs the United States as the preferred location in which to raise children, that is, the carefully selected children, namely “twelve of the healthiest looking babies” (Adams c. 1984, p. 32). Yielding to colonial-style domination, international adoption often considers the first mother to be inferior and oppresses her desire to mother. The victim of empire is disposable, and the baby as the sought-after product will be expropriated from the original context.10 Oppression and exploitation are presented as beneficence, in a typical colonial trope. The adopter strips the first mother and the child of their history, to enable the adoptive family to fulfill its own, new history—and presents his intervention as part of a moral mission. Adams resorts to some rhetorical flourish to depict the homeland as deficient, with the repeated emphasis on “little”: “little love, little care, little food and little clothing” (Adams 1971, p. 1). Given that Adams never subjected these presumed conditions to close and personal scrutiny, this is a “poverty porn”-type comment that must support the act of disenfranchising the birthmother. Moreover, this rhetoric of “little” is absent from the letters and cards that Adams exchanges with his sister while working to complete the adoptions in Greece; it therefore seems to serve as a justification after the fact. But he does admit to Maria’s mother being “poor,” as in a Christmas card he writes in December 1954 (Adams 1954a), in which he identifies the birthmother as an appropriate recipient of his own and his sister’s holiday charity: “Met the mother of Maria—very nice but poor + sad—gave her $7! You should send her some things. I have her address” (Adams 1954a).

If Adams kept the address of Maria’s mother, he never shared it. Adams’ wife, who visited the orphanage to “look up” the two chosen babies, reports in a letter to her sister-in-law that they are “simply beautiful,” and that she would like to keep them for herself. “[T]hey looked fatter,” she continues, and adds, “their legs are a bit thin but probably more from lack of exercise than lack of food” (wife of Phillip Adams 1954, letter dated 30 December 1954). Adams and his wife may have wanted to sound reassuring, but, nonetheless, their depiction of the conditions in which the babies are being kept at the orphanage in 1954 is much more positive than the bleak conditions they paint for Maria years later.11 The reader is left with the impression that the savior rhetoric had to be amplified over time to justify separating a baby girl from her loving mother.

The ethnocentric American pull, propelled by the rhetoric of “plenty” and “prosperity,” dispossessed those people seen as “lesser than.” Abandonment had to spur abundance, in “better” company, while reifying socioeconomic disparities. It would be the belittled mother’s selfless act of love to negate her own feelings and to give up her baby for a “better” life. After all, what “little” would she have to offer to her child? At stake was yet another strong-armed argument. Maria was led to believe that her Greek mother loved her so much that she gave her up. But what an emotional burden to place on a young child … Would that not mean that, when an adult caregiver loves you, he or she may relinquish you at any time? Would one not fear more of the same later in life? This narrative fallacy screamed out for clarification and truth. “Uncle Phil,” however, did not think it through, and he was not an exception.12

The “better than” trope, construed materially, did not reckon with any “side-effects”; it was perceived to be wholly unproblematic. So ingrained was the “adoption abroad is better” or “best” trope that a mid-1950s consent form issued by the International Social Service (ISS) literally associated the birth parent’s consent to the child’s migration and adoption with “the best” that the future held in store for the child. The document below codifies the alliance between the procedural consent-giving in the here and now and the freighted promise concerning the child’s future. The proximity of the essentially unrelated lines and now value-laden concepts made the mother sign for the “best interest” of the child—and has made her and us wonder how she could possibly resist—in the very act of formally consenting to the child’s emigration and adoption overseas. Even though this ISS form differs from what Maria’s mother would have signed, it is still worth quoting and translating the brief lines of the coercive non sequitur:

ACT OF CONSENT TO EMIGRATION AND ADOPTION

(3 copies)

[Name of the mother,] who requested that the present act be composed by which she declares that she agrees to and consents to the departure of her unbaptized … illegitimate child … for the United States of America and to its adoption by American citizens in care of the International Social Service … and that from this adoption her unbaptized natural child will benefit to the greatest extent [τά μέγιστα].

(International Social Service c. 1955)13

Adams hardly dwells on procedure or paperwork. With the emphasis on love, weeping, and other emotions, he steers the account away from the class or power differentials and in the direction of the logic of sentiment. Equally moving is supposed to be the argument that his sister and her husband really want children. The description of the heightened feelings on both ends are supposed to steer the reader away from the process of commodification centered on the child, which will not be “saved” but will rather change hands like a piece of property. The palpable historical context of inequity is brushed over by the ideology of domesticity, sentimentalism, and “salvation.”

Adams’ response letter and his subsequently written autobiography converge on the above points, leading us to believe that he did not necessarily burnish the story of the encounter to comfort his niece. He only dwells longer on the details, realizing that they are important to Maria. But, despite his consistence, one wonders how he could still dwell on the “very good family” (Adams 1971, p. 1). Half a century later, Maria told me how abusive her American family had been. While I do not necessarily take an iconoclastic approach to international adoption, I do insist that the voice of the adoptee needs to be heard—and heard repeatedly over time. Maria as a child may have viewed her adoption differently than the adult Maria, and that is entirely legitimate. The pre-teen Maria may have believed in the “selfless” “rescue” narrative, but the seventeen-year-old started to ask valid questions that have been with her since. Why was everyone sold on the fairytale of a parental love that would conquer all but that still needed to be proven, in front of a young mother who had already proven herself and who was left heartbroken? Even Adams agreed: “she radiated warmth and love” (Adams 1971, p. 1). But he soon added his patronizing comments again, rationalizing Greek society’s rejection of the young woman who had “sinned”—as if she really did that or did that on her own:

Your Greek mother’s mother and father must have been very mad at her because of her pregnancy and would not help her. One thing you must realize is that the families in Greece are very strict. … This extreme strictness is quite different from the more intelligent and liberal ways of raising children found here. One cannot even blame the mother and father of the woman in Greece, your mother, because they were doing what they were taught to do and what the social structure demanded.

(Adams 1971, p. 2)

Adams adds to the guilting of a young women who never committed a crime. He invokes the Greek village’s taboo on unwed single motherhood as a sign of a less “intelligent” and less “liberal” way of raising children. He offers it up as another reason to take a little girl away from her loving mother, to have her grow up basking in “the more intelligent and liberal ways of raising children found here.” Again, the reality, on which we will not dwell for reasons of confidentiality, could not have been more different. The “gains” never outweighed the losses. But the bottom line is: the adoption let down the very child it claimed to save.

The last response that Adams provides to his inquisitive niece condenses all of the above. He starts by repeating what was probably Maria’s last and most critical question, then paves right over the cracks:

What were my feelings during the meeting? I was very sad because I was asking a woman to part with her child whom she loved very much; and I could feel these things. But I know without a doubt that you would be much better off being adopted and going to America than staying in that orphanage in Athens. It was such a sad and pathetic place with babies literally starving to death, getting no attention. You were better off than most because your mother did come to see you and did bring you a few things. But she probably would never have been able to take you out of the orphanage …

(Adams 1971, p. 2)

Poor Adams felt bad, he “was very sad” as he experienced an ever-so-short-lived attack of remorse. In a last-ditch attempt, Adams may reinvent himself as deeply conflicted, torn by his sympathy for the young mother, but he did not let that deter him. He remains driven by the “need” to transport a child to a “better,” that is, an American life. To do so, he needs to depict the orphanage once more as a sad and deficient place, and the young mother’s situation as stagnant, as unlikely to ever change. That, too, is an unfair presumption, given that the birthmother’s contact with her baby girl had already been viable for about a year. Confusing “poor” mothers with mothers incapable of raising their own children is shallow judgmentalism. The concept of poverty merely acts as a nominal defense against any conscience on the part of the mediator-cog, who has moved the wheels of the adoption process from conception to “possession.” Thus, Greece is repeatedly depicted as a place of inferiority and inadequacy, rather than of inequity, of displacement that meets dispossession. Also, the interpersonal contacts made in Greece on the subject of intercountry adoption become metonymic for enduring and global imbalances. In reality, Greece was undergoing rapid change and would see dramatic economic, societal, and other developments in the next ten years. Adams left Greece soon after the double adoption was completed, and he never checked back. He never went as far as to tell lies about the Greek mother, but he did help to create the ghost of first motherhood. He never bothered to leave the young mother with a picture of her baby girl, either. He never shared her address with Maria. And for a lifetime, Maria and Peter, de facto conscripted victims, were asked to show gratitude to their new parents and especially to “Uncle Phil.”

4. Conclusions

This is the founding fiction of adoption, a mode of intimate violence that refuses to admit the traumas of adoption or its enabling structures of war, poverty, racism, and reproductive injustice.

—Kelly Rich (2023, p. 54, about the historic adoptions by proxy from Korea)

This case study of the forced consent scenario that changed Maria’s life forever touches on Cold War wounds, which exist as open wounds in other countries as well, South Korea being a prime example. Therefore, the need for a trauma-informed approach to shared adoption histories is urgent, and an informed biographical and archival treatment of individual cases can open new directions. Such an approach must acknowledge the adoptee survivors as well as the erased birth family, which, in this case, is still in the grip of that most repressive biopolitical control mechanism: shame. The first mother, who could hardly be called a free agent and who, for the rest of her life, could not avail herself of any structured professional or legal assistance, was told to carry on living as if nothing had happened. Maria had to play the bio child part for uncaring strangers. The clearly extractive relationship between mother, child, and mediator was nothing short of a rich man’s game. The prosperous American’s first order of business should have been to protect the most vulnerable subjects. Adams paternalistically used his position and the law, and yet he undermined the credibility of both. International adoption is an entitlement to vulnerable parties’ minds and bodies by way of exploitation—often ever so poorly disguised and unapologetic for decades thereafter. To represent Maria’s experience of intercountry adoption as a feel-good story would be to do a huge disservice, if not injustice, to the most affected parties, which are also the most silenced parties: any sentimentalization of the supposedly private adoption can only thinly cloak the political dynamics of inequitable power relations, not only in one particular family but in the systemic adoption flow from Greece to the United States through the postwar and early Cold War years.

Maria’s story, then, is about a lot more than the Greek children of the Cold War era: it is about the marginalized family, the suppression of motherhood, the social taboos, the economic dependencies, the political engineering, the legal maneuvering, and so on. Like her, the Greek adoptees became the victims of a sense of belatedness with which postwar Greece rushed to join the Western capitalist world. The Greek story connects with similar histories in Ireland, Italy, Romania, Central and South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, where there are now many voices going up denouncing the transfer of children from impoverished countries to rich white parents as the last gasp of colonialism. Other coercive child movements come into view as well. Why did indigenous Canadian or Australian children need to be forcibly Westernized? Why did the Greek and the other children need to be forcibly Americanized? A colonialist or imperialist type of violence accompanies the arrogant presumption that moving children to our “superior” culture is saving them, even though the vast majority really did not and does not need to be saved. And if this “rescuing” is done as carelessly as happened in the Greek case, then there is no guarantee whatsoever that something good will come of it. The Greek story and its broader context place us at the nodal point of an intense biopolitical moment, back then and now, and we do well to turn it into a moment of introspection.

But, to return to our driving question, what does coerced consent in intercountry adoption look like? Did someone actually steal the baby? No. Did anyone hold a gun to the mother’s head? Or a knife to her throat? Of course not. But the baby girl was still taken in an unethical manner in a context of the Americans leveraging their power in Greece. Thus, “informed consent” can still be trapped in what are essentially very asymmetrical power dynamics, in which the “legitimate” rights of one party cannot be measured equitably against the rights and privileges of the other party. The notion of “legitimacy” is eroded by the absence of a level playing field, which leaves us to conclude that the concept of “informed consent” is often overdetermined.14 In the case of Maria, the first mother gave notional express consent. This means that the adoption was not directly institutionally coercive, but the specific circumstances and the prevailing culture indicate that women did not have any true options—or rights. They are trapped in the paradox of choice: the choice made by the Westerner is based on their own non-choice (Van Wichelen 2019, pp. 147–48). Coerced consent bears the face of the commanding, nonprofessional independent adoption broker who applies the pressures that come with authority, money, and male power. It speaks the biased language of neo-imperialism, classism, and sexism, without even realizing it. It moves about with pride and entitlement and expects people and particulars to follow, to know their place, to fall into place. With a distinct degree of cognitive dissonance, the voice of coerced consent emphasizes sin, shame, and stigma, and it hides behind the mantle of altruism and humanitarian “salvation.” It shifts moral relations on the ground and within families and communities. Lastly, for the “gift” of a lifetime, it expects eternal gratitude and loyalty in return. What does abolishing forced consent look like? The answer has to come, not from theorizing or even historicizing, but from our willingness to follow our moral compass. Rather than persist as a historical model of humanitarian action, the Greek adoption movement becomes the model of a historical practice that was not allowed to tell its own history—until Maria went out looking and finding.