The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (2 page)

Before 2010, if people connected evangelicals and adoption at all, it was probably to consider the rhetorical role that adoption plays in the antiabortion movement: that women who find themselves with an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy should carry to term and give the child up for adoption instead. Aside from Sharon, this was also my introduction—although from the other side. I learned about the women who had relinquished children for adoption through “crisis pregnancy centers” and
maternity homes dedicated to ensuring that women “choose life” and then, ideally, choose adoption as well. I heard how many women not only grieved their child’s adoption profoundly but sometimes experienced it as a loss worse than a loved one’s death.

But the Christian adoption movement had a larger vision than just promoting adoption as an “abortion alternative.” It envisioned a new, compassionate role for conservative Christians in addressing what has become known as the global “orphan crisis”: the idea that there are hundreds of millions of orphaned children across the world who are in need of American help and waiting to be adopted. An evangelical movement seeking a new way to engage in social issues affirmed this message wholesale, sending tens of thousands of evangelicals overseas to adopt, not so they could start a family in the wake of infertility but instead in answer to a biblical mandate to care for orphans.

The orphans Christians seek to save, however, are a complicated category—most often not children lacking family but rather children whose parents are poor and live in countries where the social services infrastructure for child welfare is limited to orphanages that families may turn to in a season of need. The new Christian adoption movement has so fervently urged evangelical couples to look for orphans to save that it has inspired the creation of more “orphans” to fill that role: children fraudulently passed off as though they have no family, with their personal records laundered to create what reformers call a “manufactured” or “paper orphan.” People with good intentions have become a market, the demand side of an industry that can be as profit-driven as any other, and they have significant cash to spend. The adoption system adapted itself to cater to their demand, but most would-be adopters, wrapped in the enthusiasm of their new calling, didn’t recognize the problems: that children often came into the adoption system through false representations or implied offers of payment to their families, that some children were sent abroad without their parents’ permission, that in an overwhelming number of cases children were relinquished because of poverty alone, when a fraction of the huge sums adopting parents were paying to agencies could have brought birth families out of poverty many times over. By the time many adoptive parents found out that their new children were not the orphans they were said to be, some also realized that gag clauses in their agency contracts blocked them from publicly warning others. What’s more, a new crisis arose that threatens to derail international adoption completely: just as the Christian adoption movement began to gain steam, international adoption entered a period of pitched decline.

My initial questions about what was motivating Sharon led me on an investigation to discover where the larger movement had come from, what was driving it, and what its influence had led to. In the course of my reporting over four years I have conducted more than two hundred interviews, traveled in four countries, and read deeply into the history of adoption.

I looked at the saga of Idaho missionary Laura Silsby, who was arrested shortly after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti for trying to transport children out of the country as well as the very similar efforts of a kindly Alabama pastor who did not make headline news. I covered the evolution of the Christian adoption movement from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky to Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in southern California. I spoke with dozens of US birthmothers who relinquished children in coercive adoptions and who feel that their experiences constitute an invisible chapter in women’s history. In Ethiopia I surveyed a country in the midst of an “adoption boom,” speaking with parties on all three sides of a fraudulent adoption and examining the rising profession of “adoption searchers”—private investigators hired by adoptive parents who suspect that their children’s backstories may be untrue. In Liberia I examined the fallout from a postboom country, where adoptions flourished in the wake of conflict and where children were adopted to homes often tragically unprepared for their needs. In Rwanda I explored a church-state orphan-care collaboration that may defy the traditional “boom-bust” adoption industry model and that points to a cautiously optimistic way forward. And in South Korea I found an unlikely coalition of women who are challenging the root cause of why many mothers give their children up for adoption when they would keep them if they could.

ONE DAY SHARON
got the news she was waiting for and adopted a healthy black baby girl from a mother living in Texas. But soon after the first adoption was finished, she was looking to adopt again. She remained interested in adopting the two children she had looked at from Liberia, periodically sending me updates on her “Liberian kids,” while also keeping her eyes open for other opportunities in the United States. In the end Sharon adopted three children within about a year and a half: the baby girl from Texas, a Liberian boy who came to Sharon’s home after his original adoptive family disrupted his adoption, and a baby boy with extreme special needs, having been born intersexed (with “ambiguous genitalia”)
and facing a plethora of health issues, including spina bifida, club feet, and spinal cord problems. Sharon and her husband depleted their retirement savings on the first two adoptions and completed the third with aid from a Christian ministry that helps fund evangelicals’ adoptions.

In the middle of these adoptions they considered other children as well. They drove across the country to visit an autistic boy in foster care—in the end it did not work out—and took in a disabled child from Washington State who they later had to return due to bureaucratic complications. The boy from the disrupted Liberian adoption cried each time one of the children was sent back. From time to time Sharon would tell me she had “a couple other kids in the paperwork process.” She began speaking about one day opening her own adoption agency or orphan ministry.

At some point the family sent the Liberian adoptee to a home for troubled boys in Missouri, citing his emotional unresponsiveness, his difficult behavior, and his failure to bond with the family. When I visited Sharon in 2011 she spent most of my visit on the phone with doctors, discussing state medical coverage for her youngest son’s unremitting health problems; his breathing was so labored that he seemed unable to concentrate on anything else. She told me the family was eager to adopt an HIV-positive teenager from Ukraine next.

Sharon’s adoption projects were my first introduction to the world of the Christian adoption movement, a movement that was evolving and becoming increasingly important in many Christian denominations even as I was reporting on it. But looking back now, Sharon’s experiences already illuminated a number of the troubling outcomes of making adoption a faith-driven cause: the urge to push adoption on women with unplanned pregnancies, often amounting to coercion that treats single mothers as the source of a product; a rush to trending countries where adoption has become a boom industry, creating an incentive for child finders to recruit “orphans” from intact families; involvement with agencies, sometimes unlicensed, that place their mission above the laws of sovereign nations; and an enthusiasm to “rescue” as many children as possible that may outpace a family’s ability to give them the best care, often leading to the tragic dissolution of yet another home for an already traumatized child.

Although not all evangelicals who follow the call to adopt take it as far as Sharon did—and many others go far further—all of them are entering an industry that even adoption professionals describe as an ethical “Wild West”: a field in which humanitarian concerns are intertwined with and frequently overridden by business imperatives and where naive would-be
parents enter agreements in blind trust, certain they’re saving the life of an orphan.

Adoption is often described as a “win-win” solution—for a child in need of a home and for adoptive parents longing for a son or a daughter to raise. However, in the fuller equation adoption is too often a zero-sum game, in which the happiness of one family comes at the expense of another, particularly that of birthmothers and birth families, both in the United States and overseas, whose choice to relinquish for adoption is sometimes no choice at all. Despite the varied but largely altruistic motivations of evangelical adoption advocates, as a movement it is directing hundreds of millions of dollars into a system that already responds acutely to Western demand—demand that can’t be filled, at least not ethically or under current law. What that can mean for tens of thousands of loving but impoverished parents in the developing world is that they become the supply side of a multi-billion-dollar global industry driven not just by infertility but now also by pulpit commands.

The Christian adoption movement’s rapid rise and the complicated scandals it has been party to provide lessons that are not limited to the faith-based sphere. This book focuses on evangelical Christians as the dominant group in adoption today, promoting an agenda that shapes larger trends. However, many of the same complexities are present in all adoptions, domestic and international, religious and secular. Although the Christian movement has led to particular problems and may be more blinded by the certainty that what they are doing is right and even divinely ordained, the movement’s failures reflect the broader problems in the adoption industry as well as the intricate moral balance of how Americans and Westerners should engage in child welfare missions on the global stage.

“If you want to look at what’s wrong with international adoption, state adoption, and Christian adoption,” one agency director told me, “it all has to do with how they treat birthmothers. The common denominator in all of these is that the birthmother is invisible.” When you get that, one adoptive parent wrote, it changes everything. Or, as another told me, “It’s like the Wizard of Oz. You open the door and either you have to accept it’s a house of cards or you stay in denial. There’s absolutely no middle ground.”

When I titled this book
The Child Catchers,
I thought of the tension between two possible interpretations of that phrase: a savior catching a child
falling in midair and bringing him to safety or the darker image of someone’s offspring being snatched away from her family and home. It’s the same tension that underlies the dueling narratives about the institution of modern adoption, often viewed as an unqualified good or an unqualified evil, purely rescue or purely theft. The truth, as usual, probably lies somewhere in between, a different answer from case to case. But the rise of the Christian adoption movement threatens to tip that balance, bringing millions of new advocates on board to fight on behalf of an industry too often marked by ambiguous goals and dirty money, turning poor countries’ children into objects of salvation, then into objects of trade. That’s not always the story, but in the movement’s short history, the sense of mission has frequently obscured the harm the industry can do, excusing missteps as the cost of doing God’s work. It doesn’t have to be that way, but figuring out how to do better means understanding what has gone wrong.

CHAPTER 1

New Life

O
n January 12, 2010, just before 5:00 in the afternoon, a 7.0 Richter earthquake rocked Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. The streets of Port-au-Prince rippled like a blanket being shaken out. Cheap concrete buildings pancaked in on themselves, with broken bodies and phantom screams trapped within the suddenly stacked floors. The air was white with dust and debris, and bloodied victims, both alive and dead, lay everywhere. The second story of the presidential palace slid and shattered upon its own front steps. Major figures in the dominant Catholic Church, opposition politics, and international development were killed. Soon the smell of the dead—as many as three hundred thousand of them—filled the streets. Another three hundred thousand were estimated injured, and a quarter of a million homes were destroyed, leaving more than a million Haitians newly homeless. In the weeks that followed, tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of victims were interred, by necessity, in mass graves dug into the hillsides surrounding the capital. It was a catastrophe of historic proportions, unlike anything seen in modern times: the death toll of the 2004 South Asian tsunami rolled into one country with a population just above that of New York City. But when the US media arrived, many came to talk about adoption.

Newspapers around the United States honed in on American parents who before the earthquake had been in the long process of adopting children from Haiti—parents who had been stymied for months or years while negotiating Haiti’s complicated and greased-palm bureaucracy and now said they were in a state of “joyful panic” as their adoptions were
expedited, with the help of a joint US State Department and Department of Homeland Security program designed to get children who had been “in the adoption pipeline” out of the devastated country quickly.

Headlines drove home the earthquake’s silver lining: “Hope and Heartbreak in Haiti,” “Happy Endings for Some of Haiti’s Children,” “Daughter’s Arrival Fulfills Family’s Dreams.” Stories about the earthquake were set in suburban homes in Texas or Maryland, as reporters pored over details of earthquake orphans’ adjustment to life in the United States: running water, no rats in the bathroom, microwavable bacon.

At some point a shift happened, and the silver lining to Haiti’s tragedy became the main story. Members of the media became involved in actively helping to generate more silver linings—more orphans brought “home” to the United States. To read the stories was to see a massive reimagining of where these children came from. Children were written about as though they had no unique past, no personal history deeper than their evident need. They were born again in tragedy, with the story of their “new lives,” as newspapers routinely phrased it, beginning at the point when US parents intervened, at the crack of the earth’s crust.