The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (13 page)

Medefind makes the same argument. In the broad span of the evangelical community, he told me, the Great Commission mandate means different things. “Some groups emphasize the importance of sharing the gospel in every encounter, and others would take the line [attributed to] St. Francis: ‘Preach the gospel always, use words when necessary,’ meaning that to show love could be giving a cup to a thirsty child.”

In any case, Moore told me, evangelicals are not “adopting in order to evangelize children” any more than they are “having babies in order to evangelize those children.” Almost all parents, whether Christians or secular humanists, will try to pass their values on to their kids, he argues. But squaring this broader definition with the driving emphasis in so much of the movement’s literature—that evangelizing, in the commonly understood sense, is part of the plan—is difficult. In fact, the SBC adoption resolution cites one justification for adoption in the denomination’s historical concern “for the evangelism of children—including those who have no parents.” And despite Moore’s warning to advocates in a
Christianity Today
article that adoption is not “just a backdoor route to child evangelism,” evangelism is there in abundance in Moore’s own writings: when he says that adoption is “evangelistic to the core,” as Christian adopters are “committing to years of gospel proclamation”; or that there is no dividing line between churches’ adoption ministries and their evangelizing missionaries; or that adoption even opens up a new, “untilled” missionary field in witnessing to “unchurched” adoptive parents. “Through these ministries, you may find children being adopted on the earthly plane and parents being adopted in the heavenly plane,” he wrote. In one anecdote in his book Moore clucked over a church that had established an annual mission trip to introduce orphanage children to potential US parents but wasn’t, to his mind, being evangelistic enough. Their misunderstanding was tragic, Moore wrote, because “What better way is there to bring the good news of Christ than to see his unwanted little brothers and sisters placed in families where they’ll be raised in the nurture and admonition of the Lord?”

The larger adoption movement is infused with the same philosophy. Moore’s colleague Randy Stinson, dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s School of Church Ministries and president of the antifeminist Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, discussed his and his wife’s adoption of two Taiwanese girls as a means of “rescuing” the girls from “a situation of worshipping their ancestors.” The ABBA Fund’s mission statement calls adoption “‘missions in reverse,’ because it provides an opportunity to reach into our own cities and across the globe to bring children into homes where Jesus is present and the Gospel is proclaimed.” Hopegivers International, a member of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, aims “to rescue one million orphaned, abandoned, and at-risk children who will be sharpened as Arrows for God, and launched back into society to proclaim the Good News of Jesus to the world.” And the very membership agreement of the Alliance states its vision as “Every orphan experiencing God’s unfailing love and knowing Jesus as Savior.”

As might be expected, the subtleties of Moore’s or Medefind’s parsing of the Great Commission do not inhibit lay followers. Some simply proclaim adoption as a great way to make converts. Adoption is better than simply sending money, followers have suggested, because adopting gives an opportunity to save a soul that aid alone will not. As one Christian blogger wrote when arguing against simply sponsoring children in their home countries, “You cannot make a disciple out of a child you barely see.”

Cheryl Ellicott, an evangelical foster care proponent, goes further yet in her book,
This Means War.
A foster mother to more than fifty, Ellicott wrote, “
Your main goal is not to raise well-adjusted children, but rather to bring the life-changing message of the Gospel to lost souls.
If you work with a troubled, damaged child and he never becomes a successful or productive citizen, but he believes the Gospel and has a saving faith in Jesus Christ, you have succeeded. Adoption is a ministry to unsaved souls.”

WALKING DOWN 55TH
Street in New York City in 2011, I passed a young woman in her twenties wearing a T-shirt that read, simply, “143 million.” To many New Yorkers the message might have been obscure, but in Nashville or Orange County or the suburbs of Minneapolis, it would have been old hat. Everyone in evangelical-dom knows about the orphan crisis and the significance of 143 million. In fact, for many this woman’s T-shirt would be considered outdated. “143 million is old news,” proclaimed Johnny Carr, national director of Church Partnerships for Bethany
Christian Services, in 2010, continuing, “163 million is the new number.” Soon a new figure would upstage Carr’s tally: 210 million orphans.

The numbers—whichever estimate is used—have become such an effective rallying cry for Christians involved in the adoption movement that the figure itself has become shorthand for a belief system: belief in the idea of the “orphan crisis” and a solution that prioritizes international adoption. As prospective adoptive parents routinely put it when announcing that they’re adopting or that their child is “coming home,” their adoption’s larger significance is “143 million minus one.”

But there’s a problem with these numbers, just as there had been in the bloated estimates of Haitian orphans after the earthquake: they don’t reflect reality. And that problem runs to the foundation of the Christian adoption movement. Initially, 143 million was a figure taken from a UN tally of “orphaned and vulnerable children” around the world, a category that doesn’t represent the number of children living without parents but rather all children who have lost one parent or both and who are thus categorized as “vulnerable.” Many of these children live with their surviving parent or with extended family in situations that, if they occurred to American kids, we would not refer to as orphanhood. The UN and USAID have estimated the current number for 2012 to be 153 million total orphans and vulnerable children worldwide, which again means mostly “single orphans”—those who have lost only one parent and most likely still live with their immediate or extended family.

Only about 10 percent, or 17.8 million children in this figure, are “double orphans”—children who have lost both parents—but many of them likely live with their extended family. To complicate things further, many children counted in orphanages around the world are in fact still connected to their families, who may use the institutions as boarding schools during a dry season of poverty or a period of intense work, like an agricultural harvest. One Save the Children report found that 80 percent of children in orphanages worldwide have living family members. To complicate things even more, in the other direction, the numbers do not include many children who have living parents who do not care for them, like street children. But what is clear is that the numbers, at least when they’re interpreted as an indication of children waiting to be adopted, are a complete fiction. What that means for the Christian adoption movement is that those flogging 143 (or 210) million on their chests, their blogs, or at conferences are laying claim on ideological grounds to tens or hundreds of millions of children who live with a parent or other family,
ignoring the distinction between unparented “double orphans” and the much larger number of “vulnerable children,” and implying that they all belong in American homes. “As soon as anyone quotes that figure,” said Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform’s Karen Moline, “you know they’re the enemy of reality.”

The idea of the crisis these numbers pose is so abstract that the actual figures have come to mean almost nothing. One adoptive father in the movement made the astonishing claim to the
Tuscaloosa News
that another 12 million children become orphans every single day. If this was true, then the 143 million figure would double in under two weeks and result in 4.4 billion orphans by the end of a single year—more than two-thirds of the world’s entire population. To be fair, the father quoted was a lay follower of the movement and was repeating, probably incorrectly, a statistic he had heard somewhere along the line. But the fact that he passed it on without digesting its impossible meaning and that the newspaper printed it without question or comment gives an idea of the dimension in which discussions of the orphan crisis often take place.

In the popular imagination these hundreds of millions of orphans have become a mass of potential adoptees and a source of indignation when efforts to adopt a child are slow going or thwarted. How can it be so hard to adopt, prospective adoptive parents wonder, when there are hundreds of millions of children, waiting to be saved?

Susan Bissell, UNICEF’s head of Child Protection, said that no good estimate exists of the actual number of “orphans” as Westerners think of them. “To my knowledge, there really is no accurate number of a child with no parents, no grandma, no aunty, all alone in the world,” Bissell told me. “And you probably won’t find one in the future.” The task of identifying and estimating the number of orphans exists within a larger scenario, a crisis of documentation, in which 220 million children under the age of five across the developing world, not counting China, do not even have a birth certificate, making further attempts to track their histories and parentage a grueling and individualized process. But Americans, moved by the idea of the orphan crisis, and hoping to grow their own families, want fast and true numbers of children available for adoption. “I think the crisis that relates to adoption has this very murky definition that needs to be sorted out,” Bissell continued. “If we had a definition that allowed us to ‘datify’ children who have no parents or extended family, you would have yourself a ‘true orphan’ in how that’s understood. But the international community’s definition of single and double
orphans has evolved, and it’s very confusing to all of us and to the public.” “I think the crisis is something else,” Bissell continued. “We have a child protection crisis, we have a violence crisis. It’s a crisis of humanity.”

Some members of the Christian orphan-care movement will acknowledge that the numbers are misleading. “There are not 145 million kids out there waiting for someone in America to adopt them,” said Paul Myhill, president of the evangelical orphan ministry World Orphans, which he calls a “black sheep” in the field for its prioritization of in-country orphan care over international adoption. He calls the “143 million” rhetoric an example of “manipulative numbers.” “The numbers
are
high,” Myhill said, “but I think it’s unfair to portray them to a world that doesn’t understand the difference between a ‘single orphan’ and a ‘double orphan’ or an orphan in care and not in care. It’s unfair to bat these statistics around without using all the qualifiers.”

To complicate matters further, even this much smaller category of children who truly are in need of adoption often fall outside the parameters of what international adoptive parents are looking for. Most adoption demand in the United States continues to be for healthy infants or young children, whereas most of the children who are legitimately parentless or in need of an adoptive home are older, sicker, or more damaged from trauma than most families are willing to take. UNICEF estimates that 95 percent of the global orphan population is made up of children who are five years or older, but the overwhelming adoption demand is for children under five—long accounting for at least 85 percent of all adoptions.

Although a number of adoptive parents, particularly Christians, have declared a calling to adopt specifically older or special-needs kids—discussed in greater depth later in this book—the bulk of demand is still for young children, and aside from some groups’ targeted advocacy for foster care adoptions, in general the larger movement does not distinguish between the types of children their followers are adopting. The misleading numbers continue to be used because they are effective in promoting both the cause and the business of Christian adoption, in which each child generates total adoption fees of around $20,000 to $35,000—and sometimes ranging as high as $50,000 or $60,000—to agencies and middlemen. In this light the 143 million rallying cry is tantamount to a free, industrywide advertisement.

David Smolin, a constitutional law professor at Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama, who studies adoption fraud, said the gap between adoption rhetoric and the realities of international adoption is a particular problem in the evangelical community. There, the rapidly
growing demand for adoptable children is dwarfing the supply of young, healthy children and babies that most people want. “I’m told by people who work for agencies that evangelical Christian clients are often the most difficult to deal with,” Smolin said, “because they really believe there are huge numbers of orphans who need to be adopted, and they just don’t understand what the problem is: why is it taking so long? Why can’t they get a child quickly? They just don’t get it because of what they’ve been told.”

Observers from the broader adoption community say the Christian movement, with its rhetoric of orphan rescue, has reinforced preexisting bad ideas about adoption. “It really permeates everything,” said Shari Levine, executive director of the independent Oregon and Washington adoption agency Open Adoptions & Family Services. “A lot of the religiously affiliated agencies start from the adoptive parents’ perspective and cast them as saviors and angels.” The role of religious agencies pushing this perspective in the larger industry can be overwhelming, continued Levine, who said that religiously affiliated agencies, many advancing an explicitly evangelical mission, completely dominate some regional adoption events she attends. On the national scale some watchdogs estimate that roughly half of the entire US adoption industry is composed of evangelical agencies, although Smolin found the tally to be lower in his 2011 survey of around two hundred accredited adoption service providers. But even if numerically they don’t constitute a majority, he said, the biggest and most powerful agencies, such as Bethany, are evangelical. And even agencies that don’t explicitly identify as Christian use Christian imagery and reinforce the same mission-driven sensibility.