The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (52 page)

A companion bill, passed in 2011, provides further protections for unwed mothers. It stipulates that by 2015 adoption agencies will no longer be allowed to run unwed mothers’ facilities, that mothers must have a week after birth before they can relinquish, and that single mothers should receive more support in parenting.

Choi warns that although there have been changes in policy, much of the stigma around single mothers remains. Her son, Junseo, is now a
seven-year-old boy, and when I spoke to her via Skype in 2012, he came running into view, chattering happily, from a monthly group dinner for KUMFA and its allies. But it took nearly seven years for Choi’s own family to invite her and Junseo to come to a family holiday. Further, although Junseo’s father has become an active presence in his son’s life, he chastises Choi for taking a political stand—just by being out as an unwed mother—that may harm her son’s future prospects. So there’s more work to do, she said.

“Korea has to become a society where, even if you don’t get married, you can be treated with respect as a mother. That being an unwed mother raising a baby isn’t seen as a radical thing to do,” said Choi. If Korea could create a culture in which women are actually as free to choose to parent as they are to relinquish, she said she would have no problem with adoption. “But the problem is that we’re nowhere near that now. The majority of women who are ‘choosing’ adoption actually have no choice at all.”

Adoption advocates aren’t letting go of South Korea’s adoption program easily, fearing the broader implications its closure could have. Some have criticized the South Korean coalition of adoptees, birthmothers, and single moms as having latched on to unwed mothers’ rights to cover an ideological opposition to adoption, and they suggest that single mothers may not really want to keep their children after all. In September 2012 the US House of Representatives passed a bill allowing for pilot programs to adopt North Korean children living in China or neighboring countries, where some women refugees from North Korea have married local men. To reform advocates like Kwon Dobbs, the bill seems like yet another avenue to simplify more adoptions from more groups of marginalized women under the guise, once again, of giving help to children of war.

But despite these continuing challenges, the successes of the reform movement in South Korea have been revolutionary. Compared to the resistance reformers have encountered in the United States, where Trenka said the only successful adoption legislation is that which protects the interests of adoptive parents, the role that adoptees and mothers were allowed to play in Korean reforms was unprecedented. “The whole time I kept thinking to myself, this could never happen in the United States,” said Trenka, “that it’s so awesome that we can be here, because we don’t have any power in the US.”

IN THE UNITED STATES
advocates like Trenka are often dismissed as too emotional or embittered to have an accurate perspective on international adoption. When adoption law and policy is developed, the voices
of adoptive parents and their lobbyists drown out those of adoptees and certainly birth parents or single mothers. For too many parents seeking to adopt, the stories of coercion or unnecessary or failed adoptions—stories that reflect the unintended harmful consequences of Americans’ good intentions—amount to information they don’t want to know. For many adoption professionals these stories have simply become the cost of doing business in the child-rescue industry.

The actions and consequences of the Christian adoption movement offer lessons relevant to a community much broader than only US evangelicals. Just as South Korea’s adoption program, founded as an explicitly evangelical project, developed to become the longest-standing international adoption program in the world, so has the mission-driven perspective of Christian adoption advocates come to infuse the entire culture of modern adoption. The language of rescue and salvation—language that has its genesis and its most literal interpretation in evangelical adoption efforts—now also colors how adoption is discussed in secular society as well. But when even South Korea’s adoption program, hailed as the global “gold standard” for ethical adoptions, actually exists because most adoptees’ birthmothers have no real choice but to give them up, this religiously infused cultural understanding of adoption as child rescue is hard to rationalize.

Changing this reality in South Korea as well as the circumstances of coercive or fraudulent adoptions in many other countries will require extensive individual reforms in law and oversight. But perhaps most importantly it requires a shift in understanding from those on the demand side of this industry. Change begins with prospective adoptive parents’ willingness to look deeply into any agency they’re planning to do business with and to take seriously the experiences of other members of the adoption triad who came before them. Would-be adoptive parents must reassess the conception of adoption that has for decades been informed by the myth of heroic Western parents saving “orphans.” For adoption to become a more ethical system, everyone engaged in that system must understand that for most children growing up in poor communities, the answer is not adoption but rather sustainable development, that the best interests of the child don’t always mean a family with more money, that Western parents are not so uniquely qualified for parenthood that any untrained couple can take on three or six or ten new adoptees and make the children’s lives better than they had been before, and that approaching the difficult task of raising children from another culture who may be traumatized from whatever causes brought them into adoption will require more than food, shelter, and love.

Adoption may be a wonderful outcome for many families and many children, but much more often than we acknowledge, this win-win scenario is not the case. Well-meaning people can enable tragedy with their good intentions or their lack of understanding of what an adopted child needs. For adoptions undertaken without preparation, for serial adopters who may be attending to their own emotional needs rather than those of the children they adopt, or for those driven by a sense that adoption is a good deed—or a biblical calling—for which they will be rewarded, the outcomes are often painful. And as those secondary adoptive parents who have picked up the pieces of failed adoptions can attest, for the child a bad or an unnecessary adoption can be worse than none at all.

IN 2011
Trenka wrote a brief history of how her coalition had begun to win change in South Korea, of how the various groups had come to collaborate to reform the larger adoption system. What began for many of the participants as a story of dislocation, even when adoptive parents had the best of intentions; of pain, even if adoptees were sent to loving homes; and loss, even if there were later happy reunions, became a story of movement building instead. What the coalition had achieved was unique: a voice in the political process for society’s fallen women and the eternal children that adoptees are often dismissed as. Trenka wanted to leave a record of how the coalition had formed, how its members learned to overcome the differences that separated them, and how they grew to understand the system that bound them together.

Trenka published the paper with an introductory note, stating that she hoped her movement’s history might be useful for the rising generations of adoptees who had come and were still coming from other countries—from China, Ethiopia, Haiti, or Vietnam—and who might try to replicate the South Korean coalition’s work in their own homelands. Like older brothers and sisters, one of the first generations of international adoptees offered to the future what they had learned as a roadmap and a guide for their younger siblings, who might also one day seek to get back home.

______________

*
Informal, undocumented domestic adoptions in South Korea are believed to occur at as high as three times the rate of those that are documented.

*
Not only embarrassment over adoption rates but also the emergence of a troublingly low birth rate drove the government in these more recent efforts. After years of fearing overpopulation, today South Korea faces the threat of depopulation and a country imbalanced on both generational and gender lines. In 2007 and 2008 the country had the lowest birthrate in the world—attributable in part to the fact that illegal abortions are so prevalent that they nearly equal the number of Korean births each year and perhaps occur at a much higher rate—and that international adoption remains the standby solution for most remaining unwed pregnancies. (Ironically, as adoption reform activist Jane Jeong Trenka notes, the department in charge of addressing the country’s low birthrate also oversees the country’s adoption programs.) Although antiabortion advocates have frequently used depopulation threats in other countries as an excuse to crack down on women’s reproductive rights, arguing that a dearth of babies justifies a return to patriarchal sexual morality, the experience of South Korea instead starkly illustrates how systemic gender discrimination has left many modern women in the country with no real options besides illegal abortion or secretive adoption.

*
Sometimes the tension goes beyond power dynamics. A number of adult adoptee activists I spoke with have received hate mail, including death threats, or personal harassment and worse over their criticism of international adoption.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book owes itself to the help of many people, first and foremost that of Susan Weinberg, Lisa Kaufman, Rachel King, and many others at Public Affairs, as well as my agent, Kathy Anderson.

The research and reporting for this book could not have taken place without the support of Esther Kaplan and the Nation Institute Investigative Fund; Diane Winston and the Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion; and Tom Hundley and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Many thanks are due to the MacDowell Colony and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center for the gift they provide of time and space to think and write.

Portions of this book first appeared or were conceived in association with several magazines, including the
Nation
, the
Daily Beast
,
Ms.
, and the
Atlantic
. I’m grateful for the direction and help I received along the way from editors and staff there, including Max Fisher, Betsy Reed, Kathy Spillar, and Tom Watson. I’m also grateful to past and present colleagues at Religion Dispatches and the Revenue Watch Institute for their support and flexibility through this long process.

Many friends and colleagues generously gave their time to read and help improve early drafts of these chapters, including Lindsay Beyerstein, Katherine Don, Mark Engler, Robert Eshelman, Adam Federman, Kiera Feldman, Michael Fox, Joseph Huff-Hannon, Chris Kyriakos, Ann Neumann, Erica Pearson, Sarah Posner, Dania Rajendra, Robert Ruby, Beth Schwartzapfel, Jeff Sharlet, Meera Subramanian, and others.

I’m also extremely grateful for help with research assistance or fact checking by Laura Bolt, Katherine Don, Connor Guy, Chris Rodda, Pam Veazie, and Elizabeth Whitman; for help navigating reporting in other
countries and translation help to Nat Bayjay, Sam Gasana, Yosef Girmai, and Shannon Heit; for transcribing work by Ashley Baxstrom, EllaRose Chary, Abigail Ohlheiser, Holly Samson, and Katie Toth. A number of other friends and colleagues have provided crucial advice in various aspects of this project, including Ruthie Ackerman, Michelle Aldrege, Eve Burns, Anthea Butler, Elizabeth Castelli, Prue Clarke, Leila Darabi, Evan Derkacz, Emily Douglas, Vyckie Garrison, Michelle Goldberg, E. J. Graff, Mary Ann Jolley, Maggie Keady, Courtney Martin, Andy McKinney, Mac McLelland, Jina Moore, Rebecca Morse, Quince Mountain, Molly Page, Jana Prikryl, Erin Siegal, Anna Sussman, Lisa Webster, Ariel Woods, Josh Zeman, and many others.

I interviewed more than two hundred people in the course of my reporting, and while I can’t thank them all here, I owe them an immense debt of gratitude for sharing parts of their lives with me. I give particular thanks to those for whom revisiting painful or complicated memories was difficult and to those who spoke to me although we came from different perspectives. I am particularly grateful for the help of “Johanna,” “Samuel,” Tom Benz, Heather Cannon-Winkelman, Caleb David, Lisa Veleff Day, Maureen Flatley, Marley Greiner, Jessie Hawkins, Peter Heinlein, Jaya Holliman, Tarikuwa Lemma, Jedd Medefind, Karen Moline, Reanne Mosley, Jessica Pegis, Gina Pollack, Evelyn Robinson, David Smolin, Jo Anne Swanson, Kate Thompson, Jane Jeong Trenka, Pam Veazie, Doug Webb, and others I can’t name here.

Lastly, love and thanks to my family and friends and particularly my parents, Mike and Bonnie Joyce, and my partner, Chris Kyriakos, for listening to me throughout the four years I worked on this project, keeping me sane and helping me make sense of what I found.

NOTES

“*”
Indicates sources whose real names were not used.

Chapter 1: New Life

This chapter drew on news articles, websites, blog posts, or publications from
ABC News, AC360
, Adoptees of Color Roundtable,
AFP, AlterPresse
, the
Albany Times Union
,
AlbertMohler.com
,
Alibi.com
, the
Amarillo Globe-News, Americas Quarterly, Aspen Daily News, Associated Baptist Press, Associated Press
, the
Auburn Villager
,
AWAAblog.org
, Baby Love Child, the
Baptist Press, BBC News
, Bridges of
Faith.com
, the
Canadian Press, CBS News
, ChattahBox, Christian Alliance for Orphans blog,
Christian Examiner, Christian Science Monitor, Christianity Today, CNN, Congressional Quarterly, Courier-Journal
, the Daily Bastardette, the
Dallas Morning News, Digital Journal
, Eastside Baptist Church website,
eloranicole.wordpress.com
,
Faith Radio in Alabama
,
theglobalorphanproject.org
, the
Guardian, Haiti Vox
, the
Houston Chronicle, Huffington Post, Idaho Statesman, KTVB
, the
Montgomery Advertiser
, the
Miami Herald, Mission News Network, NPR, News Observer
, the
New York Times
,
143million.posterous.com
, Opelike-Auburn News, O Solo Mama,
Pittsburgh Magazine, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Racialicious
,
Randybohlender.wordpress.com
,
Reuters, Rightwing News
, the
Root
, the
Salt Lake Tribune, My San Antonio, San Francisco Bay View
, SOS Children’s Villages Haiti, the
Telegraph, Time
, the
Times of London
, Vision Forum,
Voice of America, WALB
, WBKO,
WFAA, WSFA
, the
Wall Street Journal
, the
Washington Post
, the
Washington Times, World-Herald Bureau
, and
World Magazine.