The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (22 page)

But biased counseling is exactly what some adoption advocates call on CPCs to do. Despite the enthusiasm to transform CPCs into the means to save domestic adoption, relatively few women make the choice. CPC directors commonly report that they have little success convincing women to choose adoption. “They say, ‘I would never do that to my child,’ even as you’re explaining how adoption is an act of sacrificial love,” lamented Robin Marriott, head of Your Choice Pregnancy Resource Center, a CPC in Kansas City, Kansas.

The fact that pregnant single women refuse to relinquish their babies is a source of irritation for antiabortion advocates like Flip Benham, director of Operation Save America, an extremist protest group that broke off from other extremists at Operation Rescue. “We could adopt a child in a second. We have everything available. . . . But [the women] aren’t going to do that,” Benham told me. “Because they’re selfish.”

Benham suggested there was an exception to the poor results CPCs are having. Angela Michael, a fifty-seven-year old former registered nurse and frustrated CPC volunteer in Illinois, has taken a different approach to crisis pregnancy work. Instead of directing women to a separate CPC, four days every week Michael parks herself—literally, in a customized RV—in front of an abortion clinic in Granite City, Illinois, a despairing strip of crumbling steel mills, prairie, and scrap yards a few miles upriver from East St. Louis. As a result, she claims she’s stopped forty-two hundred women from having abortions and has facilitated forty-two private adoptions in the last several years—a number that staggers other CPCs—including two children she and her husband Dan have adopted themselves.

Her approach is guided by the same principles as traditional CPCs, but she is obstructionist in a way that many other centers are reluctant to
be, as many CPCs have official regulations prohibiting staff or volunteers from participating in so-called sidewalk counseling (what antiabortion protesters call their efforts to stop women from entering abortion clinics). But Michael draws no such lines, and when she stops women, she brings them into her RV, where she keeps two upper cabinets stuffed with nearly forty profiles of would-be adoptive families. Michael estimates that she saves adopting parents at least $30,000, as she’s doing all the legwork, leaving only an approximately $3,000 fee for the adoption attorney. And she is so confident that she can find enough adoptable babies for prospective adoptive parents that she and Dan put advertisements in church bulletins and once even aired a TV commercial on local Saint Louis stations, showing Michael holding a baby “saved from abortion” and soliciting potential adopters.

DESPITE THE SMALL-SCALE
success of Michael’s on-the-ground ministry, few CPCs are likely to follow in the footsteps of such a high-commitment endeavor. For the others, there are more systematic efforts in place to increase adoption numbers.

In 1996 Frederica Mathewes-Green, a syndicated columnist, author, and veteran antiabortion advocate, wrote about the need for more adoptions in an essay for the Heritage Foundation, “Pro-Life Dilemma: Pregnancy Centers and the Welfare Trap.” The “dilemma” at hand was the dearth of women among America’s “seemingly endless supply of pregnancies to unwed mothers” who would relinquish those babies for adoption. Although CPCs had an honorable track record in helping women make “life-affirming” choices, wrote Mathewes-Green, the babies they were saving also deserved “a better life than welfare and single-parenting can offer. Pregnancy centers, which have already done so much to better the prospects of women and children, need to expand their vision one more time. They should do far more to encourage mothers to consider adoption.”

Others in the antiabortion movement saw a similar problem, and four years later the right-wing Christian group Family Research Council (FRC) released its 2000 research paper, “The Missing Piece: Adoption Counseling in Pregnancy Resource Centers,” which critics have described as the “CPC Bible.” “The Missing Piece” was designed to address why less than 1 percent of women who entered larger CPCs were relinquishing for adoption. Its author was Curtis Young, a Maryland pastor who had directed the Christian Action Council, the CPC umbrella network that was later renamed Care Net. Young had also founded the Protestant “Sanctity
of Human Life Day” in January, when many churches formally protest the anniversary of
Roe v. Wade
, and had previously written a market research report for the FRC on choosing the most appealing names for CPCs.

“The Missing Piece” was based on additional market research conducted by Charles T. Kenny, whose Tennessee marketing firm, Right Brain People, purports to study consumers’ “subconscious emotional motivators” so that companies can “leverage their brands as never before.” The brand that Kenny was trying to optimize in his research for “The Missing Piece” was adoption, or rather the idea of women relinquishing children for adoption. Kenny, himself a personal benefactor of the National Council for Adoption (NCFA), studied the emotional reactions of fifty-one women who had had unplanned pregnancies as well as twelve Christian CPC counselors to figure out why so few women relinquished. He found that the women largely resisted adoption because they worried it would be unbearably painful or that it constituted a form of abandoning their children.

Based on this research, Young suggested a new CPC communications strategy that would “chip away at those associations and establish new ones,” presenting adoption as an expression of birthmothers’ selfless love as well as a means of redemption—a way for mothers to “[defeat] selfishness, an ‘evil’ within themselves.” Women who kept their children were described as immature and emotional, peevishly holding onto babies they didn’t really want and whom they would later neglect or harm. Women who chose adoption, however, were described as expressing “a higher and less selfish form of love.” Young suggested that counselors help women see relinquishment as a step in their own spiritual development, with a woman “proving her character by relinquishing her child.” Young recommended a new national CPC strategy that would promote adoption as a “heroic,” “courageous and loving” choice, “associating adoption with the grace of God, who gave his own Son for the life of the world.” He suggested that CPCs get over any fears of appearing that they were engaging in “baby-selling” so they could create a streamlined path between their center and local adoption agencies.

In 2007 the FRC and the NCFA went beyond overlapping mandates to collaborate directly on the joint publication of a follow-up report, “Birthmother, Good Mother: Her Story of Heroic Redemption.” Authored this time by Charles Kenny and intended to “deliver the message through birthmothers that sometimes choosing adoption is what it means to be a good mother,” this publication targeted “potential birthmothers”—that is, women who weren’t yet pregnant—so they would see adoption as a good
option if they did become pregnant outside of marriage down the line. This seemed to contradict CPCs’ abstinence focus, unless, as some adoption critics wryly suggest, the abstinence movement is indeed functioning properly to provide more women with unplanned pregnancies and, thus, potentially more babies available for adoption.

For “Birthmother, Good Mother,” Kenny’s team interviewed fifty-one women in Texas and Illinois who had relinquished children, including a number of mothers from the Baby Scoop Era. Drawing on the “bitter feelings” of those women whose relinquishments took place fifteen years or more earlier, the report sought to identify what had turned women away from adoption in the past, using Right Brain People’s methodology of “visualization, relaxation and repetition.” At least some women in the market research pools didn’t know what the research was for when they were paid a small amount to participate in the study. For some, it felt like a second violation. “They had to find out what it was that made it ok for us to have surrendered,” said Baby Scoop Era mother Sandy Young. “What came from that is teaching these mothers that they’re heroes for surrendering. . . . It really burns the Baby Scoop Era mothers up, that they continue to use us to refine their strategies. The more we talk, the sharper they are.”

But this wasn’t the first time Baby Scoop Era mothers’ experiences were used to figure out how to increase adoptions. Birthmother experiences were also tapped to develop the Infant Adoption Awareness Training Program, a Department of Health and Human Services initiative passed in 2000 to teach adoption education “best practice guidelines” to public and private employees who may come in contact with pregnant women. “Birthmother, Good Mother” author Kenny and other religious conservatives, including members of the National Council for Adoption, helped develop the program. Since 2002 the program has been used to train more than twenty thousand individuals—including staffers at schools and state health facilities as well as crisis pregnancy centers, domestic violence crisis centers, and immigration health centers—on how to present adoption as a positive option to women with unplanned pregnancies. The NCFA was picked to administer more than $6 million in federal grants to conduct the trainings for the first few years of the program’s life. They frequently subcontracted out to partners like Bethany Christian Services and other adoption agencies, many of which were religious.

Unsurprisingly, the trainings were sometimes biased. The Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research group, charged that although the program stipulates “nondirective counseling” to help women explore their options
without pressure, some attendees at the trainings still found them coercive: discouraging abortion, overpromoting adoption and suggesting “tips and techniques . . . about how to work against [women’s] resistance, make them proud of their decision and convince them that adoption is a good choice”—words that could have come directly from the “CPC Bible.”

SOME BIRTHMOTHERS
think their experiences sparked yet another adoption industry innovation: the promise of open adoption. One of the strongest improvements adoption agencies cite when comparing today’s adoption system to the “bad old days,” open adoptions offer birthmothers some degree of ongoing contact with the adoptive family. In meetings with prospective birthmothers, this is often a key selling point: promising the woman that she will be able to choose the family that adopts her child, receive updates, and have continuing contact with the family and possibly regular visits with her child as he or she grows up. Some agencies even suggest that birthmothers will be able to name their child and effectively become a part of the adopting family themselves. A 2012 study found that 95 percent of all domestic infant adoptions in the United States are now, to some degree, “open.”

Although advocates of open adoption point to many pairings that work out well, in which the adoptive and birth parents find a workable harmony in raising the child, at other times open adoption can turn out so poorly that birthmothers later regard it as a ploy that was used to secure their cooperation. A significant problem with open adoption is the fact of its unstable legal footing. In most states in the country open adoption is not legally enforceable and depends almost entirely on the continuing commitment of the adoptive parents, some of whom drift away or cut off contact abruptly and others who may have never knowingly agreed to such contact in the first place.

Karen Fetrow, a cheerful but shy forty-two-year-old Pennsylvania computer technician, used to be a firm supporter of adoption. A lifelong evangelical and pro-lifer, Fetrow said she briefly slipped from her family’s conservative Christian principles and became pregnant at twenty-four with the man who would later become her husband. After a childhood of listening to Christian ministries, Fetrow knew that the answer to her situation was a Christian adoption agency. “For years, the seed had been planted in my head that unplanned pregnancy equals adoption,” she said. “Before I even got the pregnancy test back, I thought, there are all these families out there that need my baby.”

It was 1994, and Fetrow turned to the local Bethany Christian Services branch outside Harrisburg. Although Fetrow was in a committed relationship with the father, now her husband of nineteen years, who wanted the two of them to raise the child as a family, Bethany told her that women who sought to parent were on their own. Fetrow had been primed to believe that adoption was the only ethical option for an unwed mother, so she didn’t argue.

After Fetrow relinquished her son, her experience with Bethany quickly soured. She received no postadoption counseling beyond one checkup phone call. Three months later, around the time her boyfriend proposed, Bethany called to notify her that her legal paperwork was en route but that she shouldn’t read it or attend court for the adoption finalization because “the language was harsh” and she might find it painful. In reality, the adoption wasn’t yet final, and if Fetrow had attended court, she could have changed her mind.

Although for thirteen years Fetrow couldn’t look at an infant without crying and grappled with secondary infertility—a not-uncommon affliction for birthmothers who feel intense anxiety about getting pregnant again—she continued to support adoption and CPCs. However, when she later sought counseling—a staple of Bethany’s advertised services—the director of her local office said he couldn’t help. Incredibly, he said he couldn’t think of any books she could read or counselors she could talk to or advisers he could refer. But Fetrow’s harshest realization came when the adoptive family of her son stopped sending pictures or updates after he turned five. Fetrow had been led to believe that the adoptive parents would keep in touch until her son turned eighteen and could make contact with her himself. When she asked Bethany about it, they stalled for three years before admitting that the adoptive parents had only agreed to five years of contact, producing an unsigned document that Fetrow had no recollection of ever reading before.

In 2007 the local Bethany office attempted to host a service at Fetrow’s church, “painting adoption as a Christian, pro-life thing.” At a friend’s urging, Fetrow told her pastor about her experience. The pastor hosted a three-way meeting with the Bethany director, who called Fetrow angry and bitter and implied that she was obsessive for bringing in documentation of her case. In a particularly insulting move, the director asked Fetrow’s husband whether she could be trusted with pictures of their son, insinuating that Fetrow might use them to hunt the child down.