The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (42 page)

In Arizona Juntunen was speaking alongside Dan Cruver, editor of
Reclaiming Adoption
and head of the Christian adoption movement group Together for Adoption. The event was the first of Together for Adoption’s new “house conferences”—small-scale meet-ups to mobilize adoption advocates at the local level. And the choice of Juntunen to launch the campaign was telling.

Juntunen, a former pro quarterback now in his early fifties and the adoptive father of three Haitian children, is a new and somewhat rogue figure in the adoption world since he founded the Both Ends Burning Campaign in 2010. He tells a folksy story about how he got involved in adoption advocacy after going through the process himself. As Juntunen’s story goes, he and his wife, Kathi, had retired early after he had sold a consulting firm serving the tech market at the end of the ’90s dotcom boom, and he had retired to a life of golfing and house parties between Arizona and Colorado. Leisure left him feeling “chronically empty” and disillusioned with his lifestyle. When a golfing buddy talked about adopting his own children from Haiti—telling Juntunen, “Think of the worst place you have ever seen. Haiti is much worse than that”—Juntunen was moved to imitation. “Haiti is the antithesis of this,” he told his wife, meaning their present life.

He visited a Haitian
crèche
, or orphanage, in the mountains and found one boy he described as “the pick of the litter,” who hadn’t been chosen for adoption because his photo on the agency website was unattractive, as well as a little girl who did a silly walk that reminded Juntunen of himself. Then, while on a business call to another orphanage with his crèche’s director, Juntunen encountered a sickly infant who would become his and Kathi’s third child.

Visitors to orphanages in Haiti, which are often considered among the worst children’s institutions in the world, frequently describe it as a radicalizing experience, and that seems to have been the case for Juntunen. “Until you see it and smell it, it’s hard to describe,” he told me. “If we’re tolerating this as a society, we should be ashamed of ourselves.”

After his adoptions Juntunen self-published a book about the experience,
Both Ends Burning
, which he describes as “the
Marley and Me
of adoptive parenting,” tracing the transformation of his kids into “alpha dogs.” He and Kathi would go on to start a foundation, Chances for Children, to support an “underperforming” crèche in Haiti—meaning one that was not producing enough adoptions—and to support increased international adoptions generally. Along the way Juntunen realized that what he had initially thought was a “demand problem”—a lack of willing adoptive families to take in these children—turned out to be a “process problem”: an inefficient system, marked by unnecessary delays, expenses, and restrictions, such as age limits for adoptive parents that Juntunen finds discriminatory. He also came to learn about what he sees as ideological opposition from international NGOs. “We have families knocking on our door, and we can’t put those two things together because of some sort of government rule, some sort of dispassionate policy?” he said to me. “I see that as a tragic social mistake. Really, these governments are the ones that are wrongfully detaining these children.” He figured if the US government could move quickly to get kids out of Haiti after the earthquake, there was no reason they couldn’t move like that every day.

Both Ends Burning hired strategy consultants from Bain & Company (the same corporation that 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney helped found; a Bain management consultant educated at the Mormon Brigham Young University is on Juntunen’s board of directors) to help propose a new adoption system that would cut costs and wait times while increasing safeguards. The organization aimed to gather one million signatures on a petition to the UN to demand policies that promote international adoption as well as plan a Summit of Nations meeting to launch the new adoption system Bain helped the group devise.

The launch of
Wrongfully Detained
, or
Stuck
, advertised with a picture of two golden-skinned toddlers peering from behind the barred windows of an orphanage, would be a key selling point for the plan, featuring families in the adoption process in Ethiopia, Vietnam, and other countries with broken adoption systems. In the well-produced film, released in 2012, pipeline families wander at farmers markets and sadly open the doors to rooms they’ve furnished for children they thought would be here by now. Further in, an adoption attorney from Both Ends Burning’s board of directors coaches a family to present the human face of stalled adoptions while on a lobbying trip to DC, and Senator Landrieu bemoans her role in passing the Hague, apologetically saying she had thought it would increase adoptions, not the opposite. In a newsletter update Juntunen described filming on location, in an unnamed country that seemed to be Ethiopia, when an adoptive family was told their paperwork would require additional scrutiny and that the three-year-old boy they wanted to adopt would have to return to the orphanage until the process was complete. On hearing the news, the mother fell to her knees crying in the parking lot of a government office, Juntunen wrote, while he focused in on the little boy, who looked scared and confused.

Another mobilizing moment was meant to be a planned 2011 march on Washington, “The Empty Stroller March,” also later rebranded as the “Step Forward for Orphans March.” It was to be comprised of prospective adoptive parents pushing empty baby strollers that were wrapped in red tape from the Children’s Carousel at the National Mall up to the Capitol. The march was canceled because of bad weather—it fell on the weekend of Hurricane Irene—but Both Ends Burning’s influence was growing, however fitfully. Juntunen acknowledged that many adoption experts find his tactics and his proposed solutions naive, particularly at a time when few adoption programs are functioning without scandal, but his common-sense frustration appeals to others.

In March 2011 Juntunen addressed the elite Adoption Policy Conference at New York University Law School, an annual gathering for academics and policy experts hosted by the Center for Adoption Policy and focused on adoption law. It was generally a pro-adoption crowd, charging that “cultural ideologues” are harming adoption, but still a wonky crowd, making its prescriptions in policy terms too arcane for many lay activists to follow. Juntunen, a comparative naïf, spoke alongside a bevy of adoption lawyers, academics, and multiple State Department officials, including Ambassador Susan Jacobs, whom Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had appointed in 2010 to the newly created role of special advisor for
children’s issues. Jacobs admitted the obvious, “Adoptions have decreased. There’s no getting around that fact,” before offering the official State Department position on the falling numbers: “We don’t believe there’s any right number for ethical adoptions.”

When Juntunen later addressed the crowd during the lunch session—donning a pair of glasses for the presentation and his hands trembling slightly as if he had found himself in the belly of the beast—he launched in with self-deprecation, acknowledging the awkwardness of “an ex-quarterback speaking to a room full of lawyers.” “That said,” he continued, “simple ideas do lie within the reach of complex minds.”

Delivering what seemed like a corporate motivational speech, Juntunen diagnosed the inability of the conference’s attendees to rescue adoption as a problem of battle fatigue, a “can’t-do attitude,” and a failure of creativity. “International adoption is still in the Dark Ages from a process standpoint,” he had explained to me. “That’s because we have continued to look at it in bureaucratic terms, and I’m suggesting we begin to look at the process in entrepreneurial terms [instead].”

The entrepreneurial approach he suggested was vague and consumer oriented: streamlining the process of approving adoptive parents and confirming children’s orphan status with simple electronic background checks, harmonizing each country’s distinct adoption requirements to create uniform standards, trimming redundant safety checks, speeding up results, and eliminating high costs. It was an adoptive parent’s wish list—no matter if it disregarded the failure of many adoptions despite the current, more onerous safety checks in place, or the fact that tracing children’s family status was so time intensive that, in the first year after the earthquake in Haiti, UNICEF’s project to track whether institutionalized children had living relatives had only managed to clear fewer than one thousand kids. Not to mention that Juntunen’s plan essentially called for countries around the world to change their individual child protection laws to better accommodate US adoptive parents.

In Juntunen’s description of the plan to me, he suggested a goal of adoptions costing just $5,000 and taking only months to complete. When he spoke of this plan at NYU, he preempted any titters in the crowd with a posture of defiance. “As I look out amongst you, I see headshakes. . . . Many of you have already told me that [creating a uniform global system] will never work. Many of you have said that my vision of this central place, where process could be more efficient, is unrealistic. I used to tell employees that no one gets to greatness thinking in realistic terms,”
Juntunen said. “Gandhi said ‘First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.’ Since I’m up at this podium, I guess I’ve passed the ‘first they ignore you’ phase.”

He shifted to an equally bombastic conclusion, describing his adopted daughter’s recent book report on Rosa Parks and how he viewed the slow adoption process today as an equally outrageous injustice. He looked in the audience for UNICEF’s Susan Bissell, who had spoken earlier that day, once again defending UNICEF from allegations that they were blocking adoptions from Ethiopia. “I say with respect to Dr. Bissell that on January 19, 2010, a UNICEF spokesperson said that the last resort [for Haitian children] is international adoption. Hopefully one day our society will look back at those who held that belief and think they were dead wrong, just as wrong as those who believed that Rosa Parks belonged at the back of the bus.” Around the room some members of the audience looked at each other with raised eyebrows and quiet smirks. But when Juntunen finished his speech, others in the audience broke out in enthusiastic applause, and several gave him a standing ovation.

In part the enthusiasm might reflect the other plan Juntunen has in mind: that the bottleneck created as newly mobilized evangelicals enter the constricting adoption market will spark outrage that will transform the system. To hear him tell it, that “chokepoint” is actually a strategic stage in getting laws to change. “So we’ve created this culture of adoption, and now more and more people want to participate in adoption and are left frustrated because they’re denied the opportunity to pursue what they want to pursue,” Juntunen told me. “Well, that’s where social change happens. I think that . . . this culture of adoption, and this idea that more and more families are going to be raising their hands, that’s going to be the catalyst for change.”

Since his speech he’s won the ear of other adoption proponents: on his board sits Kim Brown, CEO of Holt International Children’s Services. (Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet has been on the board since 2010.) The
Washington Times
’s pugilistic adoption columnist championed Both Ends Burning, highlighting Juntunen’s thoughts on how adoption will lead to the end of racism through the “cross-pollination of races and cultures.” The Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute (CCAI) joined a planning call for Juntunen’s Empty Strollers March in 2011. And in 2012 CCAI Executive Director Kathleen Strottman urged Christian advocates at Saddleback Church to help
promote Juntunen’s film,
Stuck
, to teach outsiders about the “underbelly” of the adoption world, by which Strottman meant not corruption but rather families caught in the pipeline.
*

Stuck
was completed with a half-million-dollar donation from Foster Friess, the conservative evangelical multimillionaire who sustained Rick Santorum’s 2012 primary campaign and suggested that women keep an aspirin between their legs as a means of contraception. “It’s not my money,” he benevolently declared at the film’s July 2012 premiere, hosted by Senator Landrieu at the US Capitol Visitor’s Center Theater. “It’s God’s money.”

ALTHOUGH MUCH
of the adoption movement charges ahead with the narrative outlined by Both Ends Burning, some evangelical advocates admit the system needs another kind of overhaul. In 2012 Jedd Medefind told me bluntly that he thought the movement had misstepped in emphasizing adoption over other forms of orphan care. “One of the mistakes I think the US movement made early on was in terms of it being focused primarily on the beauty of adoption rather than the beauty blended with the difficulty and complexity that comes with adoption,” he said. But since then, he said, the movement is increasingly “maturing” to present a more holistic vision of the “continuum of care” needed to address children’s varying needs—international adoption for some, local adoption for others, family preservation for most.

To that end he said the Alliance had hired a new staffer to promote adoption within developing nations rather than international adoption and had supported a conference in Ethiopia in 2011 to encourage local
Ethiopian Christians to adopt. Likewise, in the United States he hoped Christians would shift to adopting or fostering from their own communities as well. “It might not be as ‘exotic’ as international adoption,” Medefind told me, “but the need is every bit as pressing on the other side of the tracks as it is on the other side of the world.” In the summer of 2012 Medefind released his white paper, pushing back against the use of the misleading “orphan crisis” numbers like 143 million. He continues to highlight noninternational adoption in his writing and speaking.

In other corners of the orphan-care movement, a smattering of churches were beginning to focus on helping communities care for their own children by addressing the root causes that lead to children being put in orphanages, like The Ethiopia Aid Mission Network (TEAM), a group of Baptist churches in Texas that works on development projects like drilling wells or providing training for local leaders instead of volunteering in orphanages. (These exist in addition to the significant aid work evangelical groups do outside the adoption and orphan care movement.)