Adoption Does Not Increase the Risk of Mortality among Taiwanese Girls in a Longitudinal Analysis.
Adopted children often experience health and well-being disadvantages compared to biological children remaining in their natal households. The degree of genetic relatedness is thought to mediate the level of parental investment in children, leading to poorer outcomes of biologically unrelated children. We explore whether mortality is related to adoption in a historical Taiwanese population where adoption rarely occurred among kin. Using Cox proportional hazards models in which adoption is included as a time-dependent covariate, we show that adoption of girls does not increase the risk of mortality, as previously suggested; in fact, it is either protective or neutral with respect to mortality. These results suggest that socio-structural variables may produce positive outcomes for adopted children, even compared to biological children who remain in the care of their parents.
Department of Biology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, Boston University, 5 Cummington Mall, Boston, Massachusetts, 02215, United States of America; Department of Anthropology, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland Centre, 1142, New Zealand.
Siobhán M
SM
Mattison
Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2 Divinity Ave, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States of America; Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, 50 Willey Hall, 225 - 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55455, United States of America.
Melissa J
MJ
Brown
Department of Anthropology, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland Centre, 1142, New Zealand.
Bruce
B
Floyd
Department of Biology and Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 94305, United States of America.
Marcus W
MW
Feldman
D000300:Adoption / Q000523:psychology; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005191:Family Characteristics; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008017:Life Expectancy; D008297:Male; D061213:Mortality, Premature; D010290:Parents; D016016:Proportional Hazards Models; D012306:Risk