Karen Smith Rotabi

Karen Smith Rotabi research focuses on child protection and family support with an emphasis on poverty and gender. Rotabi has published extensively on intercountry adoption to include her 2012 co-edited book entitled Intercountry Adoption: Policies, Practices, and Outcomes. This particular edited volume won a Choice Award for an outstanding academic book. More recently, she has co-authored From Intercountry Adoption to Global Surrogacy: A Human Rights History and New Fertility Frontiers (2016).

Rotabi’s work on intercountry adoption emphasizes how fraud has been carried out in case studies and the intersection with policy; her expertise is in both adoption practice as well as the 1993 Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect to Intercountry Adoption. Rotabi has been involved in implementing the Hague Convention in the United States, evaluating dozens of adoption agencies for accreditation. Her publications indicate her insight into the practical functioning of agencies.

Rotabi has expanded her research area to also include commercial global surrogacy, most notably looking to surrogate mothers in India for their perspectives on the practice. The global movement towards regulating commercial global surrogacy is of interest, applying knowledge about intercountry adoption to surrogacy dynamics.

Other areas of research interest include U.S. military families and their unique support needs. Also, social work education with an emphasis on global topics is clearly apparent in her work to include expertise in developing social work education and training.

Rotabi received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2005). She also received a master of social work and a master of public health from the University of South Carolina.