The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (10 page)

The summit is the culmination of a year’s worth of work for Jedd Medefind, the Alliance’s thirty-seven-year-old president. A tall, thin man in jeans and a checkered shirt, Medefind has an angular face, a headbobbing affability, and a slightly hesitant smile. He was chief of staff for Republican California Assemblyman Tim Leslie for six years before he
served as special assistant to President George W. Bush and acting director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

Medefind’s program in Bush’s White House was one of eleven federal agencies channeling government funds to private church and religious groups to address social issues ranging from prison reentry to drug abuse to the global AIDS epidemic. The faith-based initiatives program, started under President Bill Clinton and prioritized under Bush, has been controversial since its inception. During Bush’s expansion of the program it was widely criticized for inefficiently privatizing social services, funneling money to ideological allies of the administration that were unprepared for serious social welfare work, and leaving employees and clients open to unwelcome evangelism and religious discrimination.

But on the whole this background in tapping churches for social service work is fitting experience for Medefind’s current job—rallying Christians to address what has come to be known as the “orphan crisis,” the idea that there are between 143 and 210 million orphaned children in the world and the implication that many, if not most, are in need of adoption.

A California native, Medefind asked the audience in Saddleback’s worship center to take off their shoes and stretch before he began to speak. He then delivered a pointed message about making orphan care stand out in an era of information overload, making it a “touchable” gospel as tangible as a burning bush or, in the vernacular of this movement, as sharp as a baby’s cry. Medefind called for a gospel that demonstrates how Christians still act on biblical commands: to help the least of these (Matthew 25:40), to be a father to the fatherless and set the lonely in families (Psalm 68:5–6), and to help widows and orphans (James 1:27). He asked everyone to hold hands as he brought a small baby on stage, clad in a pink pullover, with a purple ribbon tied around her head, which was tilted acutely to one side. A father of five, including one adoptee, Medefind held her expertly and confidently as he prayed, “Let us praise the God who made himself as present to the senses as this little baby; who is feel-able as these little fingers and toes; who smells like spit-up. As salty and warm as blood, as audible as a baby’s cry at 2 a.m.” He kissed the infant’s head and walked offstage.

IT’S NOT THE FIRST TIME
that adoption has been part of a grand project of salvation. From 1854 to 1929 between 100,000 and 250,000 children were sent west from New York and other East Coast cities to be “adopted”—though not necessarily adopted as we understand it today—
by Protestant farming families in what would become America’s heartland. The project, known as the “Orphan Train” initiative of the Children’s Aid Society (CAS), working with the New York Foundling Hospital, facilitated the placement of many homeless, abused, and abandoned children as well as children recruited from poor immigrant Catholic and Jewish families from the slums of New York City.

The children rode trains to farm towns as near as New Jersey and as far as the frontier territories of the Great Plains and, later, the West Coast. As they arrived at each destination they were displayed at church meetinghouses, where families looking variously for a new son or daughter or a cheap source of labor for the emerging agricultural industry looked them over and made their pick. “The main goal of the Emigration Plan was to remove children from slums, where opportunities were scant and ‘immoral influences’ plentiful, and to place them in ‘good Christian homes,’” wrote Stephen O’Connor in the seminal history of the movement,
Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed.

As many as 25 percent of the “orphans” had two living parents, and fewer than half were orphans with two dead parents. But this wasn’t an accident. Among the immoral influences that CAS founder Charles Loring Brace saw waiting for children in New York City were the children’s parents themselves. Brace, an abolitionist and a nineteenth-century progressive, also authored a book called
The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them,
which described Brace’s appraisal of his era’s urban poor. His orphan train efforts were driven in part by a fear that the children of the poor were “growing up almost sure to be prostitutes and rogues!” as he wrote his sister in one letter. His orphan trains were sometimes filled after CAS representatives went into New York’s tenement neighborhoods to recruit “orphans” from immigrant families. As for those families, O’Connor wrote that Brace “dismissed contemptuously those parents who stood in the way of what he thought were a child’s best interests, including the removal of the child to a ‘better’ home.”

This in itself was not without precedent. In the 1830s to 1850s devout Congregationalist missionaries from abolitionist churches in the Northeast—the same background Brace hailed from—began adopting children from the mission field in Jamaica, where slavery became illegal in 1838, said Gale Kenny, a religion scholar at Barnard College. Frustrated with the persistent influence of Baptist practices among the Jamaican adults they were evangelizing, the missionaries decided that “the only way they
can have a real impact is if they focus on converting children, separating them from their parents and their culture to bring them up in their own homes,” explains Kenny. The movement treated adoption as a civilizing project, assimilating Jamaican children who were born of freed slaves who had labored on sugar estates, into white, Christian culture. In one instance children were separated from their families to be raised at a missionary school built on a converted sugar plantation, where they farmed sugar cane in exchange for their tuition—perhaps a dubious improvement over the past.

Likewise, the orphan train movement’s efforts to place children in families that would treat them as kin instead often resulted in placements that resembled employer-employee relationships or, worse, indentured servanthood. CAS had an extremely limited capacity to check up on placements, leading to many stories of abuse and runaways. The organization later performed a statistical analysis that found that only one-fifth of children placed from orphan trains had a family experience comparable to today’s understanding of adoption.

But Brace’s argument ran deeper than simply charity. In CAS fundraising appeals he stirred both his readers’ sense of Christian philanthropy and their middle-class fears of a rising generation of poor, urban children taking over New York. These children, Brace wrote, “will soon form the great lower class of our city,” influencing elections and bolstering the ranks of criminals. CAS promised that they were “draining the city of these children, by communicating with farmers, manufacturers, or families in the country” who could put these junior members of the dangerous classes “in the way of an honest living.” It was an argument for adoption that sounds similar to some adoption rescue pitches today. In fact, Brace’s
The Dangerous Classes
is a recommendation in the Christian Alliance for Orphans’ online resource library.

After the orphan train program began in 1854, it grew increasingly popular until eventually, by the 1870s, it had spawned similar programs in other cities. O’Connor wrote that among genteel organizations, “the idea of rescuing ‘friendless’ children by finding homes for them became almost fashionable.” One prominent women’s magazine even regularly featured descriptions of poor and orphaned children, asking readers to take them in.

In the slums, however, there was a widespread suspicion that CAS was engaging in a Protestant plot to destroy the Catholic faith of Irish or Italian immigrants—akin to a form of ethnic cleansing. “Practically from its foundation, the Children’s Aid Society was one of the Protestant relief
organizations most hated by Catholics, largely because of its Emigration Plan, which was commonly seen as little more than institutionalized child snatching,” wrote O’Connor. “A multipaneled cartoon in an Irish American newspaper portrayed one of the society’s agents as a dour ghoul who only smiles when a westerner gives him $20 for a frightened Catholic newsboy.” The final panel of the cartoon showed the newsboy transformed into a grown man, a Baptist minister nearly identical to the CAS agent who “rescued” him.

By contrast, Catholic relief programs that gained steam during this period emphasized helping poor children by aiding their impoverished parents to keep them. (Though at least one Catholic order running a hospital changed the names of abandoned Jewish children to present them as Catholic in their own form of conversion by fiat.)

In time, a preference for adopting young children and babies supplanted interest in older children whom the orphan trains had farmed out as a source of labor. By the late 1920s, as the movement was slowing down, most orphan train riders were infants, toddlers, and even newborns. After the orphan trains stopped running, another child-saving project began to gain more prominence: the effort to Christianize Native Americans by forcibly enrolling them in boarding schools, a mission that had been in place since the late 1800s, would become more aggressive from the 1950s through the ’70s as the Child Welfare League of America’s Indian Adoption Project. This project would relocate between 25 and 35 percent of all Native American children from reservations into the homes of white American adopters, orphanages, and foster homes. The blatant assimilationist aims of the Indian Adoption Project (similar to the forced mass adoption of indigenous children in Australia) resulted in the 1978 enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act, which now severely restricts the adoption of Native American children outside their communities.

Eventually, as the drive to save children through adoption was directed overseas, the history of international adoption also became inextricably linked to Christian evangelism. In 1955 adoption first went beyond US borders in a significant way with the mission of Harry and Bertha Holt, evangelical farmers from eastern Oregon and an aggressively humble couple, he in overalls, she in long braids pinned to her crown. In 1954 they were moved while watching a film made by the evangelical relief group World Vision about Korea’s “Amerasian” war orphans: the shunned and often abandoned biracial offspring of Korean mothers and US or British soldiers during and after the Korean War. Several months later Harry Holt found himself at the Grand Hotel in Tokyo, spending the
night before boarding a connecting plane. He was halfway between his home in Creswell, Oregon, and his destination in a war-racked South Korea, where he was going to pick out eight orphans to raise.

After watching World Vision’s movie, the Holts, deeply conservative Christians who were involved in child evangelism through the Good News Club, an organization that hosts after-school proselytizing meetings for elementary school children, wanted to help the Amerasian children in a more profound way than simply sending cash. They looked around their farmhouse and decided that, by squeezing their six biological children together, they had room for eight more.

In the hotel room Holt wondered and worried about where to begin his search for the children he and his wife would adopt. As his resolve wavered and he began to doubt his mission, he performed an exercise in bibliomancy common to many Christians in times of uncertainty or challenge. Kneeling in the dark beside the hotel bed, he opened his Bible at random and let his finger point the way to whatever message God had for him. It landed, incredibly, on Isaiah 43:5–7, which began, “Fear not for I am with thee.” In a letter home to his wife, Holt emphasized the scripture’s shocking relevance, italicizing key lines in the rest of the verse: “I will bring
thy seed from the east,
and gather thee from the west; I will say to the
north,
Give up; and to the
south,
Keep not back: bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth; Even every one that is called by my name: for I have created him for my glory, I have formed him; yea, I have made him.” Just two years after the armistice ending Korea’s civil war, which had lasted from 1950 to 1953, the reference to north and south seemed to resonate. In light of his larger undertaking Holt reflected on how the mandate to gather the “seed from the east” might mean more than just his eight children-to-be.

The verse would become perhaps the most important passage of Scripture to Holt and his wife for the rest of their lives; Bertha even went on to write three books that referenced it:
The Seed from the East, Created for God’s Glory, Bring My Sons from Afar.
It would also forever change not only the lives of the approximately two hundred thousand Korean children adopted overseas and the families they joined in the United States and in Europe but also international adoption itself.

In rescuing these children, the Holts became America’s first celebrity adoptive parents. Media gave their story heavy play not just for the spectacle of the grandfatherly Harry returning to the United States with eight babies and toddlers in tow but also for the legal mountains he and Bertha had moved to make it possible: lobbying for a special act of Congress
permitting them to adopt four times as many children at once than was legally allowed. Their story was retold in television specials, a photo spread in
Life
magazine, and myriad newspaper articles. A senator’s wife nominated Bertha Holt as Oregon’s “mother of the year” (though she was disqualified because her biological children were too old, in 1966 Bertha did receive the national “American Mother of the Year” award from the American Mother’s Committee). Journalists in Korea trailed Harry, a darkhaired man who often wore overalls or suspenders, and photographed him lying on the floor with a bevy of sweet-faced children crawling around him or as he led the toddlers in a line up a picturesque Korean hill. The couple was sure that the message Holt had received through Isaiah 43 wasn’t limited to their eight adoptees but that “God was telling Harry” to do something more, “to assume the responsibility of getting the rest of those children into these homes that so obviously are open to adopting them.”