Lori Chambers’ fascinating study explores the legal history of adoption in Ontario since the passage of the first statute in 1921.

Lori Chambers is a professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at Lakehead University.

"Chambers’s scholarship provides needed insights into the origins of adoption law, the dubious tactics of social workers…, the responsibilities of putative fathers, the sordid tale of child apprehension, the debate between closed and open adoptions, and the fight to be legally recognized as parents by step-parents, same-sex parents, and biological fathers."

Tarah Brookfield:

‘This is a timely and through analysis that will be of interest to scholars of legal and family history.’

Joan I. Sangster, FRSC, Vanier Professor, Trent University:

"Lori Chambers’s excellent study of adoption law situates key Canadian legal cases in their social and political context, illuminating with immense clarity and insight the changing assumptions shaping the experiences of adoptive and adopting parents, children, and families over the twentieth century. Her acute analysis of adoption law exposes the conflicts, contradictions, pain, and well-meaning intentions that shaped the experience of adoption, with particular attention to the inequalities and power imbalances created by gender, race, class, and colonialism. Chambers’s study will remain the definitive look at adoption law for years to come."

Robert Leckey, Dean and Samuel Gale Professor, Faculty of Law, McGill University:

"With her customary subtlety, alertness to multiple perspectives, and critical scrutiny of received wisdom, Lori Chambers tackles the complexities of an institution that has aided many families while intensifying hierarchies of gender, race, and class."

Cynthia Comacchio, Department of History, Wilfrid Laurier University:

"With her usual scholarly rigour, Lori Chambers untangles the interwoven relations of the law, society and the state concerning adoption in Ontario. She brings clarity to a subject not infrequently paradoxical, even as a social construct: adoption, she demonstrates, was not always "in the best interests" of the children at its centre despite the laws developed exactly to that end."