By Kathryn Joyce
First published in The Nation
Research support for this article was provided
by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
In late March Craig Juntunen told a group of Christian adoption advocates
assembled at a Chandler, Arizona, home about his plans to increase international
adoptions fivefold. Just over a year before, the world had been riveted by the
saga of Laura Silsby, the American missionary arrested while trying to transport
Haitian children across the Dominican border. But the lessons of that scandal
seemed far from Juntunen’s mind as he described his “crusade to create a culture
of adoption” by simplifying adoption’s labyrinthine ethical complexities to
their emotional core. Juntunen, a former pro football quarterback and the
adoptive father of three Haitian children, has emerged as a somewhat rogue
figure in the adoption world since he recently founded an unorthodox nonprofit,
Both Ends Burning. He has commissioned a documentary about desperate orphans in
teeming institutions, Wrongfully Detained, and proposed a “clearinghouse model”
that will raise the number of children adopted into US families to more than
50,000 per year.
Juntunen acknowledges that many adoption experts find his proposals naïve,
particularly in a year that witnessed scandals in Haiti, Nepal and most recently
Ethiopia, where widespread irregularities and trafficking allegations may slow
the once-booming program to a crawl. He met a chilly reception recently at the
Adoption Policy Conference at New York Law School when he spoke alongside State
Department officials. But Juntunen insists that his ideas for increasing
adoption constitute a social movement, akin to the civil rights movement, and
that the force of a growing “adoption culture” will help them prevail.
In this expectation, he may be right. In Arizona, Juntunen was speaking with
Dan Cruver, head of Together for Adoption, a key coalition in a growing
evangelical adoption movement. The event was the first of the organization’s new
“house conferences”: small-scale meet-ups bolstering an active national movement
that promotes Christians’ adopting as a way to address a worldwide “orphan
crisis” they say encompasses hundreds of millions of children. It’s a message
Cruver also emphasizes in his book Reclaiming Adoption—one in a growing list of
titles about “orphan theology,” which teaches that adoption mirrors Christian
salvation, plays an essential role in antiabortion politics and is a means of
fulfilling the Great Commission, the biblical mandate that Christians spread the
gospel.
Yet while Cruver and his colleagues have inspired thousands of Christians to
enter the arduous and expensive process of international adoption, the adoption
industry is on a steep decline after years of ethical problems and tightening
regulations around the world. Since the mid-’90s, eighty-three countries have
ratified the Hague convention regulating international adoption. By 2010 there
were 12,000 such adoptions in the United States (including 1,100 exceptional
“humanitarian parole” cases from post-earthquake Haiti)—almost half those at the
peak in 2004. If evangelicals heed Cruver’s call en masse, it could mean not
just a radical change in who raises the world’s children but a powerful clash
between rapidly falling supply and sharply inflating demand.
* * *
Adoption has long been the province of religious and secular agencies, but in
the past two years evangelical advocacy has skyrocketed. In 2009 Russell Moore,
dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and
author of the 2009 book Adopted for Life, shepherded through a Southern Baptist
Church (SBC) resolution calling on all 16 million members of the denomination to
become involved in adoption or “orphan care.” Last year at least five
evangelical adoption conferences were held, and between 1,000 and 2,000 churches
participated in an “Orphan Sunday” event in November. And in February, the
mammoth evangelical adoption agency Bethany Christian Services announced that
its adoption placements had increased 13 percent since 2009, in large part
because of the mobilization of churches.
“We expect adoptions will continue to rise as new movements within the
Christian community raise awareness and aid for the global orphan crisis,”
Bethany CEO Bill Blacquiere said.
One result has been the creation of “rainbow congregations” across the
country, like the congregation Moore helps pastor in Louisville, Highview
Baptist. An active adoption ministry has brought 140 adopted children into the
congregation in the past five years. These children don’t recognize the flags of
their home countries, Moore proudly noted at a 2010 conference, but they can all
sing “Jesus Loves Me.”
* * *
After the Haiti earthquake, the evangelical adoption movement sprang into
action. Next to longstanding religious relief orphanages, upstart evangelical
missions appeared. Some flung themselves into adversarial activism, decrying
international aid organizations like UNICEF for obstructing the speedy adoption
of Haitian children.
In the United States, evangelicals and sympathetic politicians led the charge
for expanded, expedited international adoption for what they had claimed before
the earthquake was the country’s 400,000 or more orphans—a figure repeated
widely, despite a UNICEF clarification that likely only 50,000 children had lost
both parents. (Identifying which children fit this description is a matter of
painstaking investigation.)
Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat and staunch adoption advocate,
argued ferociously to expand a “humanitarian parole” program that expedites
adoptions in progress: “Either UNICEF is going to change or have a very
difficult time getting support from the US Congress,” she told the Associated
Press.
Others used the emotional language of rescue; a Mormon mission president said
he had “negotiated the release” of sixty-six children bound for Salt Lake City
homes.
But what most people will remember about adoption in Haiti is the saga of
Laura Silsby and nine other Southern Baptists who were jailed after trying to
transport thirty-three “orphans”—most solicited from living families—to an
unbuilt orphanage in the Dominican Republic, to await prospective evangelical
adopters. Throughout the scandal the group members maintained they were simply
“ten Christians who obeyed God’s calling.”
* * *
Silsby’s claims to divine guidance attracted scorn from the media—one outlet
accused her of “baby-snatching for Jesus”—but her language resonates with
now-commonplace Christian adoption rhetoric.
The movement cuts across evangelical distinctions, with the Southern Baptists
taking a doctrinal lead; charismatic prayer warrior Lou Engle, co-founder of
TheCall, praying for “the most outrageous adoption movement to be released
through the church”; and Rick Warren declaring that members of his Saddleback
Church will adopt 500 children in three years.
Individual ministries abound, like Orphan’s Ransom, which helps evangelicals
pay international adoption fees that can range from $20,000 to $63,000. Churches
report a “contagious” “adoption culture” in which even small congregations have
adopted dozens of children in just a few years. Movement leaders say this viral
effect is key to building the movement. “Get as many people in the church to
adopt, and adopt as many kids as you can,” said one speaker at the 2010 Adopting
for Life Conference, noting the particular power of a pastor’s example.
Following that advice, in June the SBC joined with Bethany Christian Services to
begin subsidizing Southern Baptist pastors’ adoption costs.
Observers from adoption lobby groups mention two watershed moments for the
movement: Warren’s entrance into the orphan care field in 2005 and President
Bush’s decision in 2008 to name Jedd Medefind, a former Republican staffer in
the California legislature, as head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and
Community Initiatives. Medefind is now the affable president of Christian
Alliance for Orphans, a coalition of eighty Christian groups, and Warren’s
church is helping to set up an adoption program in Rwanda.
“It was kind of a perfect storm,” reflects Tom DiFilipo, president of the
Joint Council on International Children’s Services (JCICS), an influential
secular adoption advocacy group that has sought to partner with the evangelical
movement. “We hit that moment when a movement really starts to ramp up and get
the attention of the public.”
The movement’s influence was on display in September in a closed-door meeting
with UNICEF—frequently cast as “anti-adoption” for raising ethical concerns
about adopting from disaster- or poverty-stricken nations—leveraged by six key
evangelical adoption groups in an effort to find common ground.
As a way for conservative evangelicals to reclaim the social gospel message
from liberal churches, adoption is a perfect storm, too, seemingly defining
antiabortion activism as more truly “prolife”—or “whole life,” as one Bethany
staffer coined it—while providing a new opportunity, as recent orphan theology
texts explain, to spread the gospel. In Reclaiming Adoption, Cruver bluntly
declares, “The ultimate purpose of human adoption by Christians, therefore, is
not to give orphans parents, as important as that is. It is to place them in a
Christian home that they might be positioned to receive the gospel.”
In person, Russell Moore denies that invoking the Great Commission means
adoption is a vehicle for evangelism. But in Adopting for Life, he calls
adoption “evangelistic to the core,” since Christian adoptive parents are
“committing to years of gospel proclamation.” Likewise, although Medefind
dismisses the idea of proselytizing through adoption, the Alliance membership
agreement envisions “every orphan experiencing God’s unfailing love and knowing
Jesus as Savior.”
Followers appear to have taken the message at face value. Last winter, in the
wake of the earthquake, the Rev. Tom Benz announced his plan to “airlift 50 to
150 [Haitian] orphans” to a place called BridgeStone, a 140-acre retreat center
owned by his Alabama church. Benz, a jolly pastor who runs an evangelical summer
program for Ukrainian orphans next to the Black Sea, explained that the Haiti
program would host children for ninety days, during which volunteers would teach
them English, “immerse them in the gospel” and “incubate adoptions” with local
church families.
Benz originally planned the program for Ukrainian orphans, but once he
announced his Haiti plans, he says, he was overwhelmed by volunteer support and
donations. Miles of new plumbing and electrical wire were laid for the center’s
twenty-two cabins, and construction began on three permanent staff “lodges” (one
for Benz’s family), almost all with donated materials and labor. Benz was
optimistic that he could wrangle the system, with the help of a friend with
State Department connections, by representing his plan as a foreign studies
program.
“It’s not like we’re taking the kids permanently,” he said. “We’re taking
them for ninety days, and then they’re going back.” Reminded of the adoption
mission, Benz chuckled. “Well, that’s absolutely part of our agenda, but you
know, that’s not the thing we’re going to emphasize to the Haitian
government!”
Over the spring and summer of 2010, months wore on and passports for the
Haitian children were not forthcoming. The only progress made was on the
BridgeStone estate. After months of delays, a September fundraising missive
asked donors for continued patience as Benz sought to “bring children out of
darkness and suffering into faith and life in Jesus Christ.” Shortly thereafter,
Benz’s Haiti blog came down, and he sent an announcement of the retreat center’s
pending open house for the launch of its adoption program for Ukrainian
children. By March it had resulted in eight adoptions that, Benz promised, would
help the children “grow into mighty men and women of faith.”
* * *
For many adoption reformers, the Silsby affair changed the script for how
adoption is discussed. Karen Moline, a board member of the watchdog group
Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform, says Silsby “put a face to the worst part
of what international adoption can be, which is entitlement,” meaning American
parents’ sense of entitlement to developing nations’ children.
Susie Krabacher, an American and devout Christian, is director of Mercy and
Sharing, a Haitian orphanage founded in 1994 to care for severely disabled,
abandoned children, which does not perform adoptions. She says there is enormous
economic pressure on Haitian parents to relinquish children. Many orphanages in
Haiti provide for children whose parents can’t afford to feed them but who
remain involved and visit often. But Haiti also has a history of unethical
adoption programs. Post-earthquake, Krabacher says, they have become “the
biggest money-making operation in Haiti.” Indeed, many orphanages, mindful of
high international adoption fees, tell struggling parents that they should give
up one of their children. The financial desperation in Haiti is so intense and
the coercion so pervasive, Krabacher says, that the vast majority of Mercy and
Sharing’s 181 employees “would have to look at the option of giving up a child
if they didn’t have a job.”
This gets at the central problem in how most evangelical adoption ministries
define the scope of the worldwide “orphan crisis.” As with the misleading
estimates of Haitian orphans, the global numbers most frequently
mentioned—ranging from 132 million to 210 million—paint an inaccurate picture,
willfully misconstruing UNICEF tallies of developing nations’ vulnerable
children, a category that includes children who have lost only one parent or who
live with extended family.
Susan Bissell, UNICEF’s chief of child protection, says no good estimate
exists of the number of orphans worldwide, but a 2004 UNICEF report calculated
that there were at least 16 million children worldwide who had lost both
parents.
“There are not 145 million kids out there waiting for someone in America to
adopt them,” says Paul Myhill, president of the evangelical orphan ministry
World Orphans, which he calls a “black sheep” in his field for its
prioritization of in-country orphan care over adoption. “It’s unfair to bat
these statistics around without using all the qualifiers.”
But those numbers have their effect. In July, Bethany Christian Services
announced that “three of the largest Christian-based adoption agencies,”
including itself, were “seeing record numbers of adoptions.” Bethany attributes
the increase to the evangelical adoption movement as well as the crisis in
Haiti, which inspired nearly 20,000 inquiries from across the United States,
even though Haiti, post-quake, was quickly closed for new adoptions. Agencies
like Bethany explained that they easily redirected this outpouring of enthusiasm
to more open markets, like Ethiopia.
The problem is that Ethiopia, which last year was poised to become the
world’s top “sending country,” is beset by numerous ethical scandals. In 2009
and 2010, investigations by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and CBS News
found evidence that Christian World Adoption—a US agency whose slogan is “God is
in control of our agency and your adoption”—had recruited and allegedly even
bought children from intact families, some of whom didn’t understand the
permanency of adoption. (CWA claimed that these cases were misunderstandings and
charged that it was being persecuted for its Christian beliefs.) In January the
State Department hosted a conference call to discuss ethical difficulties
surrounding Ethiopia’s adoption program. Just weeks later came the announcement
that the license for Minnesota-based Christian agency Better Future Adoption
Services had been revoked by the Ethiopian government over accusations of child
trafficking. And in March, Ethiopia’s government announced it was cutting the
rate of new adoptions by 90 percent.
Just after the Haiti earthquake, the Christian Alliance for Orphans
advertised that its sixth-annual summit would produce a “long-term response” for
Haiti’s orphans. By late April 2010, when nearly 1,200 Christians gathered for
the summit at a megachurch outside Minneapolis, organizers had to contend with
the shadow Silsby had cast. Even Moore worried that the scandal would “give a
black eye to the orphan-care movement.”
“We’re killing ourselves with these ethical lapses,” says Chuck Johnson,
president of the secular adoption lobby group the National Council for Adoption
(NCFA). “I think Christians are the worst at this sometimes, about the ends
justifying the means. ‘I will do anything to save this one child’s life’; ‘I
will falsify a visa application if I have to.’”
In early 2010, Johnson told me, NCFA held an online ethics seminar that drew
roughly twenty-five representatives from religious and secular adoption
agencies. As part of the webinar, NCFA took a blind poll of participants’
responses to various ethical situations. Either through ignorance or a
willingness to bend the rules, 20–30 percent of agency representatives gave
answers that were tantamount to committing visa fraud or other serious
violations. “You’ll hear people saying, I’m following God’s law, not man’s
laws,” Johnson says.
Brian Luwis, founder of the evangelical agency America World Adoption and a
Christian Alliance board member, says ardent adoptive parents can wreak havoc
for those coming after them. “I call them ‘adoption crazies,’” he says. “They’re
such strong advocates, they’ll do things in desperation to have a child they
think is theirs. Some are really unlawful, falsifying an adoption or something
like that. Many won’t get caught, but once you get caught, what have you done to
the system?” It’s not hard to imagine how movement rhetoric that casts
international adoption as emergency rescue and spiritual battle could inspire a
willingness to use any means necessary.
There are indications that such rule-bending occurs at the top levels of
government. Blogging about the 2010 Adoption Policy Conference in New York for
The Huffington Post, sociologist Philip Cohen reported a troubling statement
made by Whitney Reitz, an official at US Citizenship and Immigration Services
(USCIS)—the Homeland Security agency that oversees the entry of international
adoptees. Reitz, who is credited with crafting last year’s “humanitarian parole”
program for Haitian children, told the crowd, “The idea was to help the kids.
And if we overlooked Hague, I don’t think I’m going to apologize.”
Chris Rhatigan, a USCIS spokesman, explains that the comment was made during
a closed-door session not meant to be open to the media and in the context of a
devastating natural disaster, “where very extraordinary measures were taken.”
“Our main goal at the time was to save those children,” says Rhatigan. “I think
they did everything they possibly could.”
* * *
Despite the Silsby affair, the Haiti earthquake helped accelerate the rise of
the evangelical adoption movement, and increased its influence. At the Christian
Alliance summit, JCICS’s DiFilipo implored the audience to advocate for less
restrictive adoption policies, pointing to the drop in international adoptions
from nearly 23,000 in 2004 to a projected 7,000 by 2012.
These numbers underlie a feeling among adoption advocates that even though
demand is increasing, international adoption is under siege. “The days of a
large sending country are over,” Johnson has said.
The decrease is often attributed to the closure of Guatemala and the slowdown
in China. DiFilipo says the threat is far broader, with eight or nine countries
“functionally suspending” intercountry adoption within the past three
years—something he attributes to “institutional bias” against international
adoption rather than documented ethical lapses.
As the numbers have dropped, the adoption industry has constricted, with the
closure or merger of 25 percent of US agencies since 2000. The shuttering of
Guatemala in 2008—what Luwis called “the gravy train” for many agencies—was a
major factor. JCICS felt the squeeze too. In an internal 2009 document, the
organization described financial shortages that forced it to halve expenses and
staff in recent years.
“In the last few years, a bunch of top placing agencies in the US met
together kind of clandestinely,” recalls Luwis. “To me it was a ‘saving our
rear’ meeting. I take no salary. But for some of the others, this is their
livelihood. They place thousands of kids; this is the way they’ve done it,
they’re not going to change.”
Even as adoption numbers decrease, advocates maintain substantial bipartisan
support. A key ally is Senator Landrieu, a founding member of the Congressional
Coalition on Adoption Institute and sponsor of numerous pieces of pro-adoption
legislation—many in collaboration with hard-right senators.
Landrieu was scheduled to address the Christian Alliance summit but was
waylaid by the BP oil spill. In her place spoke fellow Democratic Senator Amy
Klobuchar of Minnesota, another advocate who has made common cause with
right-wing senators like Sam Brownback and James Inhofe. Klobuchar told me how,
as part of the first senatorial delegation to Haiti, she urged President René
Préval to revise the country’s adoption and parental rights policies. In a
September letter to the State Department, she interceded for US families whose
pending adoptions from Nepal were halted after indications that the country’s
newly reopened program was again processing trafficked children.
It’s an illustration of how temporary were the lessons from Haiti, and how
common the underlying problems its scandals exposed. “Congress’s slant is that
international adoption is good, so let’s get those kids out,” says Moline of
Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform. “They don’t understand what the business
aspect of it really means, and they must answer to their constituents’
demands.”
One of the most significant recent initiatives on Capitol Hill is the
Families for Orphans Act, drafted by the Families for Orphans Coalition, whose
executive committee includes DiFilipo, Luwis and Johnson. The bill, which
Landrieu’s office will reintroduce this year, would create a special State
Department office to oversee adoptions and offer—critics say
condition—developmental aid to countries that help obtain permanent parental
care for orphans, including through international adoption. In an op-ed
published in the Washington Examiner in March 2010, co-sponsors Landrieu and
Inhofe dangled the promise that the office could facilitate the placement of
tens of thousands more Haitian children with US families.
Juntunen of Both Ends Burning believes the chokepoint created as newly
mobilized evangelicals enter the tightening adoption market will spark outrage
that will transform the system—cutting red tape, and possibly needed safeguards,
along the way. “We’ve created this culture of adoption, and now more and more
people want to participate 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 movements happen. I think that this culture of adoption will be the
force, the catalyst, for change.”
And the pressure won’t be coming just from evangelicals. In June, Together
for Adoption and other evangelical leaders will meet with Juntunen and his
network of secular adoption advocates to discuss ways to reverse the
international adoption freefall.
After a year of headlines concerning improperly adopted children, from Haiti
to Nepal to Ethiopia, evangelical advocates admit that the system is troubled,
but they insist that expanding international adoption is necessary and, if done
right, beautiful. “There’s always going to need to be tremendous vigilance that
compassionate intentions lead to compassionate outcomes,” says the Christian
Alliance’s Medefind. “But if you’re not willing to deal with complexity, it
would be wise to stay away from efforts to address the world’s needs.”
Despite the altruistic motives of many evangelical adopters, the size and
wealth of their movement is likely to tip the balance of a system that already
responds too blithely to the moral and humanitarian concerns raised by poor
countries and all too readily to Western demand.
