The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (20 page)

In addition to CPCs, affiliated maternity homes, like the one described above, have also made a comeback in recent years. According to Heartbeat International, there are at least three hundred homes in the United States today and likely a number of smaller, independently run houses that aren’t counted.

In contrast to the warehouses of the Baby Scoop Era, modern-day maternity homes tend to be run on a smaller scale and incorporate life-skills training or educational opportunities. Some advertise having almost luxurious living facilities, as in the boast of one home run by the mammoth Texas adoption agency Gladney Center for Adoption, whose former president Michael McMahon told a British paper, “Here the birth mother is queen. If what she wants is at all possible, she gets it.” Others still incorporate the isolationist tactics of decades past, keeping young women away from outsiders and limiting phone calls and contact with friends, family, and, especially, boyfriends.

In 2007 three teenage girls made headlines when they forced an escape from the New Hope Maternity Home in Kanab, Utah, where their parents had sent them and they were pressured to make adoption plans for their children. In desperation the girls assaulted home director Jana Moody with a frying pan, tied her up along with another pregnant resident, and stole the home’s van to flee the state. One of the girls’ mothers suspected that her daughter had escaped because she didn’t want to relinquish her baby for adoption.

Even without draconian rules, though, the pressure for adoption can be subtle and strong. As one Ohio home, Harbor House, simply declares, “Single-parenting does not fit God’s perfect plan for the family.” Many homes reserve their beds strictly for women planning to relinquish their children for adoption or keep only a fraction for women who choose to parent. Although in some ways this may appear a straightforward market exchange of room and board for women providing the agency with an adoptable infant, these centers frequently advertise their services as free, church-based help for women in trouble and only begin the hard sell for adoption after a woman has moved in.

Other groups seamlessly blend advertised services of crisis pregnancy counseling with domestic and international adoption services, like Last Harvest Ministries, a Garland, Texas, crisis pregnancy center with ties to antiabortion extremist Flip Benham. At Last Harvest pregnant women are advised that adoption is “the only WIN-WIN solution a young teen mother can really make.” On the flip side of their ministry, Christian couples are invited to list their family profile on a website,
MayWeAdopt.com
, “where birth mothers are going to find you and your dreams come true!”

This kind of situation is one that is “ripe for coercion,” said Ann Fessler, who describes adoption coercion as much more subtle than that of the Baby Scoop Era but still prevalent. Women who encounter pressure from CPCs to relinquish can face a process that Fessler likens to stepping on a conveyor belt, funneled from CPCs to maternity home or host family situations to adoption agencies, urged to make “the right decision” and sometimtes subjected to both moralistic and financial intimidation if they waver. Sometimes women are warned that if they don’t give up their babies, they’ll have to repay the financial help or housing they have received. Women are routinely given a façade of legal representation in the form of a lawyer paid by the agency and the prospective adoptive parents in an obvious conflict of interest that the American Bar Association’s ethics committee has explicitly condemned. Most information women receive comes from people with an agenda, said Fessler. “There’s no uninterested party in adoption.”

Although women may have more access to do their own research today, critics note, the drumbeat of information from maternity homes and adoption agencies amounts to propaganda, telling women that they will only feel a little sadness at relinquishing or that giving a child up to a wealthier family is the truly loving choice. “Part of the big picture for a young woman who’s pregnant is that there are places to go, people holding out their hand, but the price of admission is giving up your child. If you
decide to keep your child, it’s as if you’re lost in the system, whereas people fight over you if you’re ready to surrender. There’s an organization motivated by a cause and profit. But it’s a pretty high price to pay: give away your first born and we’ll take care of you for six months.”

SUCH WAS THE CASE
of a woman I’ll call Carol Jordan, who became pregnant as a twenty-one-year-old living in South Carolina in 1999. She called Bethany Christian Services, the largest adoption agency in the country, which had advertised crisis pregnancy services in her local phone book. Within hours of calling Jordan received a call back offering her free boarding and medical care in a single mothers’ home. After several counseling sessions she was instead convinced to go to one of Bethany’s volunteer “shepherding families,” where, away from the influence of her family or friends, she could decide what to do. Instead, she found herself isolated in the home of conservative, homeschooling evangelicals in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, hundreds of miles from her home, where the only people she knew were agency staff that were pressuring her to relinquish to one of Bethany’s hundreds of waiting prospective adoptive parents, who advertised their families through elaborate scrapbooks and birthmother letters. “I was never an ‘expectant mother,’ a ‘mom-to-be,’ or even ‘Carol,’” said Jordan. “I was simply one of the agency’s ‘birthmothers,’ although I hadn’t signed a thing. I felt like a breeding dog . . . a walking uterus for the agency.”

When Jordan went into labor, the room was crowded with people from Bethany, including the couple she had chosen, her shepherding mother, and Bethany’s counselor. The couple was handed the baby—a girl—first, and when Jordan requested to keep her daughter in the room, the Bethany staff objected. The next day, as Jordan was having second thoughts, she asked the shepherding family if they would allow her to return to the house with her daughter or at least bring Jordan her savings from a local part-time job so she could get herself and the baby back to South Carolina. The shepherding father brusquely refused, telling her she was on her own if she kept the baby. The counselor called the prospective adoptive couple to warn them that Jordan was reconsidering, and they came to the hospital immediately, sobbing at Jordan’s bedside. The counselor told her that she would end up homeless and that social services would take the baby anyway. “My options were to leave the hospital walking with no money—just enough saved to stay two nights in a hotel in Myrtle Beach in high season. Or there’s a couple with Pottery
Barn furniture and a car seat already. You sacrifice yourself, not knowing it will leave an impact on you and your child for life.”

The next morning a nurse who served as a notary public rushed Jordan through signing her relinquishment papers. As soon as she had signed, Jordan was told to hand over her daughter. The adoptive parents left quickly, and five days later Jordan used her last $50 to buy a bus ticket home. Back in South Carolina Jordan struggled for weeks to get in touch with a local Bethany postadoption counselor, as her milk came in and she rapidly lost more than fifty pounds in her grief. When she called Bethany’s statewide headquarters to voice her hurt, she was surprised one night to hear her former shepherding mother working the hotline and shocked at the woman’s cold response. “She told me, ‘Carol, you’re the one who spread your legs and got pregnant out of wedlock. You have no right to grieve for this baby.’”

CPCS HAVE
frequently been accused of misleading women seeking abortions through deceptive advertising and clinic names; locating themselves in or near the same building as abortion clinics; luring patients in with offers of free help and an ultrasound, then inundating them with antiabortion literature and graphic videos of late-term terminations instead. Many have been accused of misinforming clients that abortion increases their risk of breast cancer, depression, and suicide—claims that are not accepted by the medical establishment. Other CPCs have been documented misleading women about when they can legally obtain an abortion or emergency contraception, withholding results of pregnancy tests while showing clients antiabortion literature or films, telling women to come back repeatedly for confirmation pregnancy tests, encouraging minors to hide pregnancies from their parents, and even lying about how far along in pregnancy a woman is—all stalling tactics employed in hopes that a woman will wait until it’s too late to legally abort.

These tactics seem to be in the centers’ DNA, passed down from the founder of the first CPC, Robert Pearson, who created his Hawaii facility in 1967 after the state abortion ban was lifted. Pearson authored the 1984 manual, “How to Start and Operate Your Own ProLife Outreach Crisis Pregnancy Center,” which suggests that followers adopt some of the tactics he had found useful, such as using misleading but technically neutral names like “Abortion Advice” or “Pregnancy Problem Center.” “Obviously, we’re fighting Satan,” he argued in a later speech, rationalizing giving
women misinformation. “A killer, who in this case is the girl who wants to kill her baby, has no right to information that will help her kill her baby.”

Pearson’s blanket blessing on deception has led to a variety of confusion and intimidation tactics. On Crisis Pregnancy Center Watch, a prochoice watchdog site that collects testimonials from women who encounter manipulative CPCs, some women claim that CPCs called their parents to tell them their daughters were sexually active or pregnant; one woman who had an abortion after going to a CPC said she received annual birthday cards spattered with red paint on what would have been her due date. Another described how a friend went to a CPC that allowed her to believe she had scheduled an appointment for an abortion and instead strung her along for several weeks, repeatedly rescheduling her appointments until she had passed the state’s legal cutoff for elective abortions. She ended up having to carry the baby to term and relinquish it for adoption—a choice that left her with severe depression and guilt.

A 2006 congressional report requested by Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, found that around 87 percent of CPCs that received federal funding provided false information about the long-term health effects of abortion. The report prompted both federal and local lawmakers to propose legislation to mandate truth-in-advertising standards for the centers. But four years later little had changed. A 2010 investigation conducted by NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia Foundation found that out of fifty-two clinics they visited or called, 67 percent still misrepresented the services they provide or gave false information about the safety and effectiveness of contraception and abortion, including one CPC that told a client that abortion would pull out her uterine lining.

Another legacy early CPCs left is their history of coercive adoption practices. Leslee Unruh is a key antiabortion campaigner who helped draft South Dakota’s unenforceable 2006 abortion ban (which voters ultimately overturned) as well as the founder of Abstinence Clearinghouse, the most prominent abstinence-only sex education group in the country. In 1984 Unruh established a crisis pregnancy center called the Alpha Center in the basement of her South Dakota home. Three years later the state attorney’s office investigated her over complaints that she had offered young women money to carry their pregnancies to term and then relinquish their babies for adoption.

“There were so many allegations about improper adoptions being made [against Unruh] and how teenage girls were being pressured to give up their children,” then–State Attorney Tim Wilka told the
Argus Leader
in 2003, that “Gov. George Mickelson called me and asked me to take the case.” The Alpha Center, which Unruh estimates offers counseling to more than five thousand women per year and was the first of fourteen sister CPCs around the country, pled no contest to five counts of unlicensed adoption and foster care practices. The center, which later called Wilka’s allegations “baseless” and ideologically motivated, paid a $500 fine in a plea bargain to drop nineteen other charges, including four felonies, involving her alleged offer of payments to pregnant women. Unruh, however, was unrepentant, protesting in court, “If saving babies is against the law, then I’m guilty.”

A decade after Unruh founded the Alpha Center, the
Village Voice
’s Marc Cooper investigated several California CPCs under the umbrella CPC network Care Net—the largest CPC association in the country, with eleven hundred CPCs with ties to maternity homes, adoption agencies, and clinics—that were sued for coercively counseling pregnant women or new mothers. Among the accusations were allegations that CPC staff had held an infant under false pretenses while they hounded its unwed parents to relinquish, detained a woman in labor in the CPC offices for four hours in the same effort, pressured new mothers to sign unidentified papers while they were under heavy medication shortly after they gave birth, failed to provide legal counsel for surrendering parents, and badgered one young couple with pressure tactics that a psychiatrist compared in court testimony to brainwashing. Many of the children adopted went to born-again Christians who had donated to the CPC. The cases Cooper covered were among nearly twenty lawsuits brought against CPCs between 1983 to 1996 in nine different states.

Though the agency where the worst abuses occurred was closed, many others have taken up the tradition of frightening unmarried pregnant women with predictions of poverty, making a causative argument against single parenthood as though the mere fact of being unmarried creates poverty and not the backgrounds that many unmarried mothers are already coming from, in which systemic poverty and lack of support services are facts of life. Conservative politics reinforces these arguments as well. In February 2012 Wisconsin State Senator Glenn Grothman, a Republican, introduced legislation that would officially label single parenthood a risk factor for child abuse. In Grothman’s brief on the legislation, he lamented that too few out-of-wedlock births had resulted in adoption and raised the specter of Reagan’s “welfare queens”—unwed mothers allegedly having so many children on the public dime that married taxpayers have to restrict themselves to bearing just one or two kids,
because they are so overburdened by paying for tax-funded public assistance that supports single moms.