The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (19 page)

The Australian example is a shockingly different understanding from that in the United States, where the default view of adoption is as a “win-win” scenario. From this perspective the experiences of birthparents are often treated with condescension or dismissal. This is perhaps best epitomized by actor and LGBT adoption advocate Rosie O’Donnell, who has written that she told her adopted son that God mistakenly put him in another woman’s womb and that she had taught him to call birthmothers “tummy ladies.” Or as actor and adoptive mother Edie Falco told Anderson Cooper in 2012, “The second you are handed a newborn it is yours. It doesn’t matter what body it came out of.”

In 2012 Falco’s comment was absolutely unremarkable, a statement of conventional wisdom so universally accepted as to be bland. That this is so is a testament to how successful the adoption industry has been in shaping our attitudes and conversations on the subject. Adoptive parents—almost always a more privileged cohort than birthparents—have access to an adoption system that legitimizes their parenthood over that of the poorer women who birthed their children. The system masks that discomfiting fact by obscuring or denying the significant role of money in the adoption services sector, where domestic infant adoptions generally range from $15,000 up to $40,000; babies’ adoption fees are sometimes bluntly scaled to reflect their race and health conditions; and large agencies may take in as much as $10 million annually. The perception of adoption as the ultimate form of charity diminishes all of these costs and profits. “You can thank the adoption industry for the idea that adoption is
noble,” said Wilson-Buterbaugh. “They took on the media,” she continues, noting successful public campaigns to alter the representation and language of adoption, “and society bought it hook, line and sinker.”

Indeed, it’s no accident that discussions of adoption today often embody or emphasize an understanding of it as an uncomplicated good. In the 1980s adoption agencies helped popularize what came to be known as “positive adoption language,” a new set of euphemistic terminology intended to remove any stigma from the ideas of being adopted or relinquishing a child for adoption. Instead of saying “relinquished” or “gave up,” advises a handout from the North American Council on Adoptable Children, an adoptive parents’ lobby group, use the phrase “made an adoption plan.” Instead of saying a mother “keeps” her child, say she “parents” him or her; “not keeping” implies abandonment, and NACAC wanted to emphasize the positive interpretation that “birth parents always ‘keep’ feelings for their children.” And instead of saying “real” or “natural parents,” say “birthmother”
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or “biological father,” as adoptive families are just as real. Some families celebrate “gotcha days”—the days on which they adopted their child—in addition to or in place of birthdays. The significance of the language and the meanings it conveys has become so important that many adoptive parents express (or affect) outrage when outsiders use the wrong terminology to ask about their children’s biological ties.

The same hierarchy of values is implicit in the way many adoptive parents construct their experiences—for example when they blog on websites with names like “Her Womb, Our Hearts.” Although these names and phrases bring the pain of infertility into sharp relief, they also reduce birthmothers to a functioning body part, obscuring with sentimental language the vulgar reality that, as Wilson-Buterbaugh explains, adoption is often a system in which “young fertile women are breeding for more powerful, moneyed, older people.”

As this language, ideologically weighted toward adoptive parents, has become the accepted standard, there is quite literally almost no neutral way to discuss adoption, as the very words people use to discuss it shape
and betray their perspective. Further, this type of language, prevalent in even secular discussions of adoption, goes into overdrive in the Christian adoption movement. “When people are talking about their very difficult road with infertility, and the adoption finally happens and it seems so right, that’s when they start saying how it was very clear that God intended this child for us,” said Jessica Pegis, an adoptive mother of a daughter from China who wrote the influential adoption blog O Solo Mama. “If you dissect that, that really means God picks some people far away to undergo a terrible tragedy: that God chose some people to live under the One Child policy, and it’s all going to work out that you get your baby in the end; that some people suffer so that other people can be happy. That’s a theology I wouldn’t want any part of.”

But that’s the message that the Christian adoption community receives—and it comes from the top. Brian Luwis, founder of the Virginia-based evangelical adoption agency America World Adoption and a Christian Alliance for Orphans board member—the Alliance in fact shares his agency’s McLean, Virginia, address—gave voice to this in an interview with the
Christian Post
about “God’s Design for Adoption.” “God knew there was going to be a Fall,” Luwis said, explaining his belief that just as the sin of Adam and Eve was predestined, so is it predestined that some parents are infertile because God has a child for them “in another place.” “It’s part of His plan that other families raise other children, because he knew that this world was going to have sin.”

“When we know that suffering is part of a loving God’s plan,” he continued on America World Adoption’s website, “then we can understand that the existence of orphaned children is not an accident or failure of God’s plan.”

Many Christian adoption advocates not only accept this logic but take it to absurdist ends, using it to justify laying claim to children of poorer parents. For instance, one Christian prospective adoptive parent blogged about her plans to adopt a newborn Ethiopian girl she intended to name Bethlehem. As she wrote, it became clear that the child she was talking about as an orphan in need of rescue was as-yet unborn, indicating that she had requested an adoption agency to supply her with a baby as young as humanly possible, not an orphan already out in the world in need of parental care. “Somewhere there is a woman who is pregnant with a girl,” wrote the blogger. “The woman will make a great sacrifice to give her life—either by her own death, or by handing the child who has kicked her womb for months to strangers with a desperate plea for them to care for her.” After that mother gives birth, relinquishes the child, and the child is
handed over to her, the blogger, then and only then, the woman wrote, would the future child “be an orphan no more.”

This was a particularly baffling example, but not uncommon logic. Within this framing—the idea that some families’ suffering is part of God’s plan to complete other adoptive families—a child’s first family is too easily pushed aside. “Children don’t grow in cabbage patches, just waiting for us to find and rescue them,” said Karen Dubinsky, author of
Babies without Borders
. “In order for the ‘rescue’ narrative to work, you really have to erase the families of origin.”

Some Christian adoptive parents recognized the problem, however. The ubiquitous “rescue” narrative and what it means for the original families of “rescued orphans” disturbed one such mother, who writes the blog Our Little Tongginator. She protested that the biblical call in James 1:27 specifies caring for widows and orphans
together
. “It says to care for, not necessarily to adopt. Which, to me, reinforces the idea that family preservation”—the practice of supporting poor families to enable them to keep their children—“is God’s top priority and that adoption is His second choice for a child.” The Christians “pushing an adoption agenda with a zeal that makes me feel uncomfortable,” she wrote, reminded her of the Bible’s story of the Judgment of Solomon, when two women claimed the same baby as their own.

David Smolin, the Cumberland Law School professor as well as an adoptive parent and a conservative Christian himself, made an even stronger critique. Smolin and his wife, Desiree, are intimately familiar with the ugly side of adoption. In 1998, moved by stories of infanticide in India, they adopted two adolescent Indian girls whom Smolin describes as having been “kidnapped” from their mother: taken from the orphanage where their impoverished mother had put them temporarily and threatened by the orphanage and adoption agency staff so they would lie to US embassy officials. Smolin’s own experience with adoption fraud has informed his numerous academic critiques of the international adoption industry, and in 2012 he reluctantly turned his attention to the movement growing among his fellow Christians.

Although Smolin comes from a similar theological background as many of the proponents of the Christian adoption movement, he leveled a stinging rebuke of both the theology and the aims of the movement in a paper published in the
Regent Journal of International Law,
“Of Orphans and Adoption, Parents and the Poor, Exploitation and Revenue: A Scriptural and Theological Critique of the Evangelical Christian Adoption and Orphan Care Movement.” In it Smolin argued that the movement’s
theological claim—that American-style adoption reflects the Bible’s story of salvation—was bad theology that misinterpreted and overemphasized the scriptural analogy of adoption.
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More importantly he argued that this misinterpretation covers up a history of abusive adoption practices and in fact perpetuates more as Christians have signed onto an adoption industry that is rife with ethical problems, thus displaying what Smolin describes elsewhere as a “willful ignorance of what has come before them in the wider history and world of adoption.”

A key aspect of that is such an exclusive focus on orphans that Christian adoption advocates overlook the exploitation of families from which the orphans originate. “Normatively, the orphan and widow are a unit in the Bible, but people can read those same passages and miss that because they’re being taught to miss it,” Smolin told me. “Because, you know, ‘widows’ are messy. Are you subsidizing them being lazy, and how do you do it? Children, well you just take them into your home. . . . They’re dependent already. It’s simple and cute.”

A 2010
Christianity Today
editorial on the movement, “210 Million Reasons to Adopt,” seemed to underscore this point, literally making “widows” a parenthetical reference in their discussion of the biblical mandate to care for orphans. “The Book of James beckons every true follower of Christ to become involved in the lives of orphans (and widows),” they wrote.

Sometimes the treatment of birthmothers goes further than simply ignoring them but instead outright denigrates those families as inherently unworthy: the Bible’s widow as Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen. That perspective is hardly limited to Christian adoption advocates, though. The counterpart to positive adoption language is a lower hum of warning, portraying birthmothers as loose cannons, immoral, or manipulative, as liable to turn up on adoptive parents’ doorsteps, looking for something. Such is their depiction in a 2012 reality TV show on TLC called
Birth Moms
that shows pregnant women who are considering adoption as drug addicted and sexually loose, clearly unworthy of a child that so many
other parents want and better deserve. Even the popular MTV shows
16 and Pregnant
or
Teen Mom,
though not quite as condemning, still portray young, pregnant girls or single mothers as inept and immature.

These are reactionary portraits, but they find surprisingly little resistance. Wilson-Buterbaugh said she has reached out to both the National Organization for Women and the American Civil Liberties Union to discuss advocacy against adoption coercion, but she has received no response, leaving her and the rest of the Baby Scoop Era mothers a largely invisible constituency as well as suspicious that progressive activists and feminists who would normally object to such slanted depictions of women are unwilling to look too closely at an adoption field they may one day turn to themselves.

The mothers of the Baby Scoop Era are aging, and more than one shared the concern that Sandy Young articulated: “We’re getting older, and we’re terrified we’re going to die . . . without getting some acknowledgement that a crime was committed against us . . . six million of us,” she continued. “The industry’s biggest fear is that someone’s going to listen to us. We don’t want this to happen to another generation.”

ROE V. WADE
is often recognized as the unofficial end to the Baby Scoop Era, as women with unplanned pregnancies gained greater access to legal abortion and, concurrently, societal norms began to liberalize, making single motherhood more acceptable. But within the
Roe
decision were the seeds of a new model of adoption pressure. With the backlash against legalized abortion, millions of apolitical evangelicals and Catholics were transformed into a mobilized religious right who developed an early wave of crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), nonprofits set up by antiabortion groups to offer free pregnancy tests and dissuade pregnant women from having abortions.

Today CPCs have become a fixture of the antiabortion landscape, buttressed by millions of federal dollars from abstinence-only and marriage-promotion funds. The National Abortion Federation estimates that there are around four thousand CPCs operating in the United States—about twice the number of abortion providers in the country. Heartbeat International, a network of more than 1,100 CPCs, claims that its affiliates receive $125 million in donor support. Funding for the centers isn’t limited to individuals and large Christian groups, though, but also includes many millions in state and federal grants. The federal government has been funding CPCs since 1996, when welfare reform made $50 million
available to abstinence-only programs, which in some states included CPCs. CPCs receive funding from a pot of more than $100 million annually through allocations to “abortion alternatives” programs that are often matched by state grants, like Minnesota’s 2005 Positive Alternatives Act, which distributed $5 million to nonprofits that encourage women to not have abortions, or Pennsylvania’s 2004 budget allotment of $4.3 million to facilities that counsel against abortion. California even designated a portion of its tobacco tax to CPC support. Additionally, CPCs benefit from pro-life fundraising mechanisms such as the popular “Choose Life” license plates sold in twenty-eight states, the sale of which through state DMVs has helped support CPCs to the tune of $16 million nationwide over eleven years. But even in this program, which purports to fight abortion a few dollars at a time, there is evidence of adoption coercion. In Florida, the pioneer state for the “Choose Life” plate program, much of the money raised has languished in bank accounts because, by statute, the funds were restricted not to any woman “choosing life” but only those choosing adoption.