Forced adoption as war crime: representations of orphanizing and child trafficking in The Giver and The Handmaid's Tale

The nonconsensual—yet legally enshrined and politically encouraged—child relinquishments seen within certain dystopian narratives (namely, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Lois Lowry's young adult novel The Giver) show us the nature and scope of the war crime of forced adoption. These texts contain representations of compulsory abandonments and harmful displacements which render the concept of legal or de facto adoption superfluous: prior to their conception, these chattel-infants are destined for familial and sociocultural transplantations, to be raised by privileged substitute carers. Both can be read as sharp critiques of such practices, presenting the reader with a new language with which to discuss the harms and injustices arising from the war crime of forced adoption, especially those seen recently within occupied Ukraine.