The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (11 page)

The Holts appealed to Americans to save Korean orphans from the “cold and misery and darkness of Korea into the warmth and love of your homes.” They also noted that they hoped “that every adopted child would become a born-again Christian.” Interest continued to grow. By 1956 World Vision, which briefly partnered with Holt, published an ad in the
Los Angeles Times
offering “A Korean Orphan for You” to families who couldn’t personally adopt but could join in the movement through sponsorship, becoming symbolic “Mother or Daddy to your own child in a Christian orphanage in Korea.”

The Holts received requests for adoption by the hundreds and then the thousands. They began to organize regular chartered flights, with airplanes bearing as many as one hundred or more children at a time tucked into cardboard bassinets and occupying most seats in the cabin. The children became known as “mail-order babies,” and some of the Holts’ flights seemed designed to appeal to the public imagination, such as a widely covered “Thanksgiving Baby Lift.” Many of the children underwent expedited procedures and benefited from the intensive involvement of supportive US politicians, who, then as now, were eager to be associated with missionaries bringing back planeloads of babies to the United States from a poorly understood Korean warfront. What would today be considered unusual practices reigned, such as quick proxy adoptions, where Holt adopted children on behalf of foreign parents, then transported the babies back to the United States to meet their families; “order-taking” that matched children to parents’ desired age, race, and physical traits; and “prioritizing Christian fundamentalists as adoptive parents,” as historian and Korean adoptee Tobias Hübinette wrote.

The Holts turned their basement into an adoption agency, asking of prospective adoptive parents few qualifications beyond a statement of faith. They also began to organize lobbying efforts, rallying thousands to write their representatives to pass special orphan legislation that would allow more adoptees to come. In Korea Harry’s staff, including one of his adult daughters, traveled into the countryside, looking for “Amerasian” babies living with their mothers, and Harry began considering expanding his operations to Mexico as well. Meanwhile, at home Bertha rocked her eight new children two at a time for an hour each night, in a family expanded so large it resembled a small orphanage in itself.

Because the Holts’ religion was such a huge part of their mission, unsurprisingly, the families they served were all Christians as well; until 1964 Holt placed its children exclusively with Christian families. Parents who had been denied adoption applications with other agencies “because of one thing or another,” as Bertha Holt dismissively wrote in one of her several memoirs,
The Seed from the East
, completed adoptions with Holt. As such, social service agencies worried that the Holts’ proxy adoptions were becoming a loophole for parents to bypass home-study requirements.

In 1958 a critical Child Welfare League of America worker, Arnold Lyslo (who ironically would head the League’s Indian Adoption Project), wrote with dismay about meeting one Holt plane bearing 107 children that arrived in Portland, Oregon, two days after Christmas. Lyslo claimed to see cardboard boxes with holes in the ends that he thought had been used to hold infants on the ride and possibly be stacked. He was surprised by both the appearance of the adoptive parents—women so austere that he thought “these particular families [might be] of a strict religious sect”—and the explanation of one family that they had been approved for adoption on the basis of a letter of recommendation from their pastor and some brief financial statements. Many of the families, he wrote, seemed disappointed with the children they received, and he was concerned about how well they might parent.

The expression on some of their faces were revealing that perhaps this was not the child that they had dreamed of, and they were still bewildered at the appearance of the child and his inability to make immediate response as they wished.

I came away from this experience ill and almost as bewildered as some of the adoptive parents themselves—that this could happen to children and parents in the United States today! My worries for these children have never ceased, and one can only hope and pray that they are doing as well as circumstances have allowed with such inadequate planning. I could only think how different this could have been with the participation of good social agencies who could work with these families to evaluate for their own good and the welfare of the child, their capacity to adopt a Korean child.

From the beginning there were problems, and not all of the adoptions turned out well. One child was returned to the Holts, another couple of children died, rumors spread in the media about physical abuse of adoptees, and one mother was charged with her adopted child’s murder yet, within the year, was given two more babies by the Holts. A number of sick children died during the arduous trip from Korea to the United States or in transport from the flight to their homes. When a doctor reportedly insisted that the Holts’ mission be investigated, Bertha answered with sharp conviction “that it was the Lord’s work and that even the devil would not be able to stop it.” She wrote extensively of what she felt were the anti-adoption attitudes of critics in government or social services, beginning what would become a long-standing narrative of adoption as a battle between saviors and obstructionists who think they know better.

Ultimately the Holts’ ad hoc services for US Christian adoptive parents became the basis for the longest-standing international adoption agency in the world—and one of the largest: Holt International Children’s Services. Today Holt has facilitated adoptions for more children than any other agency and is often considered the standard bearer for ethical adoption practices.

The Holts’ influence and that of other, competing agencies that followed in their wake could be felt on the ground in Korea. The number of children’s homes in the country had already leapt from 38 in 1945 to 215 in 1950. By 1957, after the war, there were 482 orphanages, most of them created by Westerners, which cared for nearly fifty thousand children. And as in other countries where a sponsorship model would become part of financing orphanages, the more children an institution held, the more donations they received from abroad.

It was the start of a system wherein, as Tobias Hübinette wrote, “foreign individuals and voluntary agencies considered themselves to be guardians of the country’s children,” as the conviction that they were called by God often justified their sense of ownership. The religious makeup of the adoption agencies working in South Korea as well as the
adoptive parents lining up to adopt was so stark that even in 1988, thirty-three years after the Holts’ adoptions, a US immigration officer working at the embassy in Seoul worried to journalist Matthew Rothschild, writing in the
Progressive
, that Christian parents might see adoption as “a quick means of spreading the gospel, a head start on proselytizing.” In fact, the Holts’ program became a force so formidable that it is often credited with starting not just Korean adoptions to the United States—though there had been scattered adoptions from Korea before the Holts’ children—but also the institution of international adoption itself, endowing it from its inception with a strong evangelical mission to save children, both body and soul.

ALTHOUGH A NUMBER
of Christians followed in the Holts’ footsteps throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, for many years a majority of evangelicals did not see adoption—or any other social justice cause—as their calling. The modern evangelical movement around adoption and orphan care, said Medefind, is in some way a return to forgotten convictions, as conservative Christians reclaim a social gospel message they abandoned decades ago. When former Fox News pundit Glenn Beck urged his viewers in 2010 to quit any church that mentions “social justice,” which he claimed was code for Marxism, he was aping an old fight: the twentieth-century bifurcation of Christians into fundamentalists, who emphasized creed and doctrinal purity, and modernists, who focused on service, good works, and activism.

“In my interpretation,” Medefind told me, “this is a false split. Historic Christianity has always emphasized certain convictions and certain actions, what you could call orthodoxy and orthopraxy. The one flows from the other.” Recently, Medefind said, the evangelicals born of the twentieth century’s fundamentalists have “re-embraced the Christian call to hold together Christian conviction with Christian service to people in need.” According to this interpretation, the movement isn’t a new social gospel but rather a return to a biblical tradition of orphan care that traces back to the days of the Roman Empire, when Christians were known for saving unwanted babies left to die outside city walls in what was a legal form of infanticide. “They were responding to the exact same need as people are today,” Medefind said.

Russell Moore, however, is blunter. He told me that the anomaly isn’t Christians caring for orphans now but rather the recent decades when Christians
didn’t
care for orphans. Over the last fifty years the evangelical
church “had become fat and materialistic and comfortable and self-focused,” Moore stated. “I think there are several prongs of Christianity that are reawakening to their responsibility for social care and orphan care, with adoption care being part of that concern.”

Medefind’s Christian Alliance for Orphans was founded in 2004, beginning with little fanfare: its first meeting drew less than forty people. The movement gained momentum over the next few years, particularly with the entrance of Rick Warren, one of the most recognizable evangelical preachers in the United States, onto the global development scene in 2005. On the runaway success of his book,
The Purpose Driven Life
, which has been translated into more than fifty languages, as well as his popculture standing as a somewhat moderate evangelical figure, Warren had accumulated enough political clout to help shape trending concerns among US evangelicals. In 2002 he turned his attention to AIDS after his wife, Kay, read an article about AIDS orphans in Africa. Realizing that HIV/AIDS affected more diverse groups of people than they had thought, the Warrens began doing international aid work that eventually developed into Saddleback’s trademark global ministry, the P.E.A.C.E. Plan. The plan aims to use local churches around the world to address the social needs of the poor in their own communities, bringing in teams of volunteer American missionaries to support churches in addressing five root problems: spiritual emptiness that breeds conflict, egocentric leadership, extreme poverty, global pandemics, and poor education. In 2010 Saddleback reached its 196th nation—more nations than are represented in the UN, Warren announced—making Saddleback “the first church in 2,000 years to literally go to every nation.”

Saddleback’s global focus then caught on in the larger evangelical community. In 2007 the Christian Alliance for Orphans, still in its infancy, held a small summit at the Focus on the Family headquarters in Colorado Springs, a city so filled with evangelical ministries that it is sometimes referred to as the Protestant Vatican. Warren attended and made an announcement that was hailed in national media as a sea change for conservative Christians: “We’ve got some people who only focus on moral purity and couldn’t care less about the poor, the sick, the uneducated,” said Warren. “And they haven’t done zip for those people.”

It was grandstanding, to be sure. Prior to learning about AIDS orphans, Kay Warren has admitted, she believed HIV/AIDS victims “deserved it” for living lives of sexual risk and sin, and Saddleback remains a strong and influential opponent of gay rights, famously partnering for a
time with one of Uganda’s most vehement homophobes, the condomburning and gay porn-screening Pastor Martin Ssempa. Nonetheless, many Christians enthusiastically welcomed the opportunity to reposition themselves as fighting
for
something good instead of being known primarily for what they condemn. As Niels Hoogeveen, spokesperson for the adoption watchdog website Pound Pup Legacy, noted wryly, “Bashing gays is not really a purpose, but rescuing the orphans—that’s a purpose.”

Another influential undercurrent in the evangelicals’ espousal of adoption as a central mission was the rhetoric of the decades-old culture war over abortion. After decades of hearing pro-choice accusations that pro-life activists only cared about children before they were born and being asked, “Who’s going to care for all these unwanted children?” evangelicals began responding: we will. But what began as a half-hearted rejoinder, with Christians paying lip service to “the adoption option” on the anniversary of
Roe v. Wade,
the movement has transformed into a cause, with every adopted child seen as “a new son or daughter who escaped the abortionist’s knife or the orphanage’s grip to find at your knee the grace of a carpenter’s Son,” as Russell Moore wrote. (A chapter of Moore’s book pits Joseph of Nazareth, who “adopted” Jesus, against Planned Parenthood, which he calls the “King Herod” of our day.)

After the 2007 Christian Alliance for Orphans meeting at Focus on the Family, the word went out across the country’s churches and Christian networks. “Over the next six months,” wrote Stephanie Simon in the
Los Angeles Times,
“Christian media will be saturated with stories and ads touting adoption and foster care as a scriptural imperative, an order direct from God. Tens of thousands of pastors will be urged to preach about the issue, set up support groups for couples considering taking in troubled kids, and even invite state child-welfare officials to talk to their congregations.” The movement took off. By 2008 Focus on the Family, which has focused its advocacy most on adopting children already in the foster care system, predicted that the incidence of Christians adopting for religious reasons would become the norm within one decade; instead, it took only a few years.