The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (16 page)

When Reanne’s parents summarily dropped her off at New Beginnings, she felt unfairly abandoned and unsupported by her family. So it was no surprise that she was drawn to the image of family life presented
by New Beginnings’s founders and houseparents, Miles and Debi Musick. Reanne had become a born-again Christian only the month before arriving at the home, and the Musicks were conservative Christians who lived with their six children in the main house. In an early video Miles Musick was a beaming, mustached patriarch and Debi a maternal and soft-spoken brunette. They were missionaries with Youth With A Mission (YWAM), an international evangelical ministry with a thousand locations in 180 countries and ties to fundamentalist Christian politics. (YWAM’s Washington, DC branch formerly owned the “C Street House” at the center of the 2009 Republican congressional sex scandals.) The Musicks had opened their first maternity home in Tacoma, and in the late 1990s they expanded to Puyallup Valley with support from YWAM and New Beginnings’s individual donors, who have contributed close to two million dollars to the ministry since 2004. The Musicks brought a personal story to the ministry as well: three of their six children were adopted. Feeling estranged from her own family, the welcoming atmosphere the Musicks created and then their teachings on unwed motherhood swayed Reanne.

The Musicks told her that, on the one hand, if she decided to raise her child herself, she wouldn’t fulfill her potential and go to college. On the other, they encouraged her to see her child as a divine gift she could bestow on infertile couples and to consider biblical stories of adoption. After all, they told her, Moses and even Jesus were adoptees of sorts. Many of the families associated with New Beginnings had adopted already. “They’re telling you that God wants you to do it: look at Moses in the Bible. . . . They always refer to your child as a gift,” Reanne recalled. “You go in there feeling worthless—how could you get pregnant outside of marriage? Then you hear that these other people have been waiting so long [for a child]. . . . They made me think I didn’t deserve a child.”

At the same time Reanne was increasingly isolated from people in her outside life. Testimonials on the New Beginnings’s website feature young women gushing that Miles Musick was like “the father I never had,” and Reanne said the Musicks generally see themselves as substitute parents for girls who grew up without enough discipline. House rules aimed to change this. Resident women had to make their phone calls in front of staff and adhere to a policy that requires any boyfriends of residents to submit to three interviews with houseparents before they can visit. Ostensibly this rule was in place to ensure that the men prove their dedication, but in practice, Reanne believes, it was also to make sure they don’t interfere with adoption plans. Although Reanne’s boyfriend called the
Musicks, he was never approved to visit; whenever he called to speak to Reanne, she said, they told him she was out.

There was a constant background hum of pressure in the home about who should raise the babies the residents were carrying, though Reanne was the only one actively considering adoption. The Musicks had her conduct an exercise that’s common among maternity homes and crisis pregnancy centers: setting down on paper the things she was in a position to offer a child versus what the adoptive family could give. The advantages of adopters’ two-parent home were stressed, whereas the situations of residents like Reanne were described in disastrous terms: they were “needy women” undergoing “crisis pregnancies.” The Musicks gave Reanne a Christian book about teen pregnancy and adoption,
Bittersweet
. She also regularly heard testimony from the roommate she had been paired with, a birthmother who had relinquished her child for adoption the year before and constantly spoke of it to Reanne as a positive choice. (Continued support to women who relinquished for adoption was one of the perks of the home.)

Reanne said that she was first shown paperwork concerning her preliminary relinquishment of her future child on one of her first days in the home and that the Musicks took her to the office of a local attorney, Dennis Casey, to discuss the legal ramifications of adoption. Soon afterward the Musicks gave her a series of family profiles to look through: scrapbooks created by would-be adoptive parents to entice women to choose them. One stuck out to Reanne: that of Jeff and Chris Butler, a nearby evangelical couple with a teenage daughter. Jeff was a church leader described as “very involved in evangelism” and would later become a pastor; Chris was a stay-at-home mom. Their faith was reflected in the scrap-book, as the Butlers wrote of their sense that God wanted them to fulfill their desire for a large family through adoption. Both parents wrote letters addressed to a generic birthmother, praising the women reading their words for their courageous choice in carrying the pregnancy to term and their selflessness in preparing for adoption. The rest of the book was full of pictures of the house; the Butlers’ daughter engaged in sports, music, and church activities; and the family on vacation in Lake Tahoe and Disneyland. If a birthmother chose them, the letters promised, they would always speak reverently of her to the child and “will be sure to tell of the great love you had, and the gift that you so graciously gave.”

“Everything is so negative and subtle, and it starts to work on you,” said Reanne. “I felt like I was walking around with a baby that wasn’t mine. I was a birthmother before the child was born.”

A MONTH BEFORE
her due date, on February 16, Reanne signed preliminary relinquishment papers, allowing the Butlers to adopt her son. When Reanne met with Dennis Casey, who was representing the Butlers, she believed he was representing her as well. She also thought she was agreeing to an open adoption—a formal adoption contract that specifies a certain degree of continuing contact between the adoptive family and the birthmother, from them sending occasional pictures and updates about the child to ongoing visits with the family.

Debi Musick encouraged Reanne to plan activities with the Butlers so as to foster a relationship that Reanne believed was meant to continue as the child grew up: going to get an ultrasound together or having them take her to her prenatal checkups. In her last week of pregnancy Reanne gave voice to the doubts that she had been having while Chris Butler was driving her back from the doctor’s office and said she “couldn’t do this.” Chris cried and left, and later called Debi Musick.

That’s when the pressure turned ugly. The Musicks sat her down, Reanne said, and asked her what her plan to parent was. They pointed to their own adopted daughter, then a toddler, and told Reanne that they didn’t know what they would have done if someone had done to them what Reanne was considering doing to the Butlers: not following through on an adoption plan.

In a letter she wrote later she listed the arguments the Musicks made: “That placing your child for adoption was biblical, so God would bless me abundantly for my decision. That I had too much potential to be a single mother and God had big plans for me. That they had to hold me to what I said when I first moved in,” and, finally, “That it shows you care more for your child when you place them for adoption.” They told her that she had already signed the papers and that she was just being emotional. Reanne didn’t know that consent documents for adoption are not legally binding in Washington state until after birth. “Everything was screaming at me to keep my child,” Reanne said. “Absolutely I was emotional.” She wishes now that she had asked what the difference was between her emotions and those of the prospective adopters; after all, everyone was similarly attaching themselves to the baby growing inside her. But then, that week, Reanne’s boyfriend broke his back in a car accident, and the Musicks seized upon the news to convince her she really had no choice but to relinquish.

Through the stress of the conflict, Reanne became ill. She was diagnosed with toxemia, and her legs swelled dramatically. Doctors had to
break her water to induce labor and forcefully pulled out the baby, a boy I’ll call Jason, born at nine and a quarter pounds. The New Beginnings staff was supposed to call Reanne’s contacts when she went into labor, but she said they didn’t call her boyfriend; he later told her that he had been calling all day and the staff wouldn’t tell him where she was. Instead, Chris Butler was in the room with Reanne during labor, and after birth, when Debi Musick, Dennis Casey, and the rest of the Butler family came in, the nurse handed the baby directly to the Butlers before Reanne had a chance to hold him. The labor was traumatic and Reanne tore badly. After the birth she was put on heavy pain medication and sleeping pills. Her blood pressure had risen severely, and she developed postpartum preeclampsia, a form of hypertension. Her hospital records from the labor and the following day make repeated mention of maternal exhaustion.

She never did get a chance to hold Jason by herself, without the Butlers or Musicks present. He had been born after 5 p.m. in the evening, and the next morning, while Reanne was still under heavy pain medication, she was asked to sign consent papers granting the Butlers temporary custody until the adoption documents were filed in court. Then they took him home.

Reanne claims Dennis Casey had lied to her, telling her she had only twenty-four hours to change her mind and revoke her consent when, by state law in Washington, she should have had at least forty-eight, possibly longer, depending on when the papers were filed. She was still recovering in the hospital later that day when her boyfriend finally got through to say he didn’t want to proceed with the adoption. Though Reanne agreed, she believed their window to object had expired, and she told him there was nothing they could do. Neither Casey, the Butlers, nor the Musicks responded to my repeated e-mails to explain their side of this story.

Casey would later defend himself, successfully, to the Washington Bar, asserting that he never represented Reanne and had made this clear to her and had not misrepresented her right to revoke consent. Reanne responds to this claim with a picture from her scrapbook, taken shortly after the birth. In it Casey, a dark-haired man in a striped sweater, leans over Reanne’s hospital bed while the Butlers’ daughter holds Jason in the foreground, smiling. “If he wasn’t my lawyer, what’s he doing in my room right after labor?” she demands. “They knew what they were doing, and they knew how to play it just right where I thought that I had no choice.”

THE NEXT SIX MONTHS
were a blur of emotional and physical pain, said Reanne. She was so depressed the first month that she barely ate,
losing almost all of her baby weight in four weeks. She grappled with uncharacteristic thoughts of suicide, and the Musicks’ doctor prescribed her antidepressants. She returned to New Beginnings to recuperate and get her life together but soon began to rebel against the house rules: she was hanging around with outside friends, having phone calls that weren’t monitored, and regularly skipping church. One day she left without permission to meet a friend to play tennis, and she didn’t return, leaving most of her belongings in the home. Through the rest of the year she lived with friends and, later, on her own. She dabbled with drugs—something she had never done before. “I had [Jason] and then I lost it for a while,” she said. “I didn’t want to live anymore, and that’s really out of character for me.”

In Puyallup the Musicks filed a missing persons report, and then went through Reanne’s things. They found her journal and, within it, an entry in which Reanne had been drafting a letter to her son. The pages, written in a looping, feminine script with a number of words scratched out and written over, echo the lessons Reanne had learned at New Beginnings. She wrote to her son that she was “happy to be involved in God’s special plan for you.” “It’s not every day someone gets to give a life to someone,” she had written, then crossed out. She tried again: “As much as I wanted to be selfish and keep you for myself, I knew that you would be better off with TWO loving parents, a sister, to protect you.” The Musicks gave the journal entry to the Butlers, presenting the scratched-out draft as a “dear son” letter they could share with Jason when he was older. To Reanne, the state of the pages, full of mistakes and rewrites—obviously not a final draft—is proof in itself that the letter was never intended for her son. She would never introduce herself in such a sloppy manner, she said indignantly.

It took six months for Mosley to pull herself out of depression and to meet the man, Josh, whom she would later marry. Josh’s mother was appalled to hear what Reanne had gone through and set about to help her reclaim Jason. But Reanne, in so new a relationship and still angry at her own family for sending her away, still felt dependent on the maternity home for security and a place to stay. So she returned in early 2001, and the Musicks found her a place to stay with friends: another large adoptive family whose husband sits on New Beginnings’s board.

There, Reanne had extensive contact with the Butlers and Jason for several months, meeting occasionally at the house she was staying in or at New Beginnings, playing with the baby and taking photos for her scrapbook. But around the summer of 2001 Reanne called the Butlers and left a message, asking to talk. They never returned the call, so Reanne
thinks they understood why she was calling. To others in New Beginnings’s circle, she had already begun to say that she thought she had been pressured to relinquish Jason. Although Reanne didn’t know it then, she said the clock was running out on her window to contest the adoption legally, as some birthparents in Washington have up to two years to fight an adoption if they claim their consent was obtained by fraud, duress, or coercion.
*

Soon after she called the Butlers the Musicks arrived at the home where Reanne was staying and, together with the couple who owned it, again sat her down. She said they warned that if she didn’t stop what she was doing, she would have to pack up and leave the house immediately. They told her that if she hoped to see her son again, she should write a letter of apology to the Butlers at once. The family she was staying with would have to approve the letter before she sent it. “I didn’t know I had recourse, that I could have gotten him back,” she said. So she wrote the letter. Reading it more than a decade later, it’s a painful document: a page of self-recrimination, as Reanne repeats what the Musicks were telling her: that she had been influenced by Josh’s mother but she had again found God’s peace regarding her decision and that she hoped she hadn’t caused irreversible damage to their relationship.