Representations on motherhood in adoption: educational reflections beyond stigma and prejudice

Abstract

The paper aims to critically investigate the representations of motherhood about adoption. To become mother represents a complex challenge for women, called to redesign balances, identities, and relationships. The interdisciplinary literature on adoption highlights how mothers of birth and adoptive mothers are constantly facing the issue of stigma and prejudice. In the case of mothers who do not recognize or grow up their child, it is appropriate to consider complexity underlying this choice, which cannot be reduced to naive simplifications or preconceptions. In the case of adoptive motherhood, however, it is urgent to question blood ties as a sine qua non condition for the assumption of parental function. In a pedagogical perspective, the purpose is to analyse the dimensions of stigma in biological and adoptive motherhood, starting from an exploratory investigation of the representations conveyed by the mass media.