Introduction
1Why has international adoption become a frequent recourse to allow couples or wealthy individuals in the countries of the North to satisfy their desire for a child? What does the transfer of children from poor countries teach us about the new international division of social reproduction? And what is the leeway mothers who decide to give up a child for adoption 1 ? Answering these questions involves knowing the experiences and feelings of mothers / parents who have separated from a child. With the exception of a few testimonies published in the North (among others Jones 2000; Kelly 2005; 2009), the lived stories of mothers living in the South have not attracted attention. Previous research conducted in India (Bos 2008) allowed - for the first time - to document the decision-making process of young pregnant women faced with the following alternative: raising their unborn child themselves or abandoning it for adoption. A two-year stay in the field and meticulous ethnographic work were necessary to identify these mothers and to create safe and confidential meeting conditions. Indeed, mothers who decide to abandon a child for adoption, in India and elsewhere, are often stigmatized and insist on secrecy. The difficulty of conducting research among mothers / parents who have abandoned a child for adoption and the taboo surrounding this "social group" (which is not one) explains the lack of research highlighting their perspective2 .
2In fact, given the difficulty of accessing mothers, most of the existing research is carried out among professionals and organizations that provide support to mothers in distress or children placed in institutions. The available knowledge consists above all of an institutional discourse onthe mothers. These surveys propagate the image of irresponsible or deviant mothers, unable to raise their children (Mykytyn-Gazziero 2006; 2010; Bos, Reysoo and Dambach 2013). This dominant discourse on an alleged “good motherhood” and a “responsible parentage” is the reflection of moral values ??conveyed by the professionals of social assistance or child protection from the middle classes. They generally defend bourgeois norms of marriage and conjugal sexuality. Any mother who, for a variety of reasons, does not correspond to the dominant norm of the “decent mother” is confronted with mechanisms of social exclusion and actions aimed at getting her back on the right path.
3Our contribution in this volume on the international transfer of social reproduction aims to present some of our ethnographic data, more particularly those that have been collected in Vietnam, in order to show how the construction of femininity and gender inequalities shape the field of international adoption. Indeed, the scope of international adoption includes the transfer of children from poor countries, born to certain categories of mothers, to rich countries and certain categories of couples / foster families. If, at the quantitative level, the number of children who migrate within the framework of intercountry adoption - 40,000 per year (United Nations Population Division 2009, 74) - is not significant in the global statistics of the migration,
4The questions underlying our contribution relate to the sociological profile of mothers who consent to abandon a child for adoption and the circumstances in which they make this decision. It is not uncommon to hear that children adopted by wealthy families in the West come from poor mothers without agency and unable to raise their children on their own. This image ignores complex social dynamics as well as hidden power relations.