“Making parents”: between lists and registries. from discretionality to professionalized selection

Abstract

In 2005, the creation in Argentina of the Unique Registry of Adopters was grounded on the need to make the adoption of children more transparent and to limit the discretionality that judges enjoyed to select potential adopters. In this article, we contextualize the creation of the mentioned Registry to understand the senses with which it is endowed and the features that the “sanitization” of the adoption process has acquired in our context. At the same time, we analyze the actions developed by its professionals aimed at evaluating future adopters, as well as at transmitting a certain family morality that – by integrating topics such as the children’s “right to identity” and the respect for their history, and by privileging the reflexive attitude of those who wish to adopt a child – contributes to recreate and/or reify ways of practical and symbolic identification of the “urban middle class”.