The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (17 page)

“I cannot even imagine the heartache that you have gone through. I can say that God has again shown me the truth in all of this,” Reanne wrote. “I am terribly sorry for all that has been done to you.” The Butlers wrote her back, thanking her for the apology and offering to provide photos as time went on, but Reanne said only a few more came, and she would never be invited to visit Jason again.

In the days and weeks after, the New Beginnings staff mobilized to send Reanne on a six-month mission trip with their parent organization, Youth With A Mission’s Discipleship Training School in Hawaii. There, they hoped, Reanne could transform her grief into a pro-adoption testimony on the tough but right choices that New Beginnings helps unwed mothers make, and then become an ambassador for the home. “They
wanted me to be the girl out front, convincing all their other girls to choose adoption,” she said.

A letter from a Discipleship Training School staffer in Tacoma lobbied to have the program take Reanne on short notice based on recent events “that led us to believe that we were [to] do everything possible to get her in a DTS immediately.” An accompanying recommendation from Debi Musick, written in calligraphy, recommended Reanne on the basis that “she has been diligent to follow God’s plan for her life” but that now “she needs to be separated for a while to seek God—and fulfill the call of God in her life.”

After New Beginnings pulled strings for her to get into the program, they helped her write a fundraising letter to pay for it; the Butlers contributed $200. But although Reanne got to Hawaii, she didn’t transform into a spokesperson for New Beginnings. Instead, she said, the solitude in Hawaii allowed her to realize that the sacrifices she had made at New Beginnings had nothing to do with her understanding of God. She left the program early and came home. Explaining her decision to the Musicks was the last time she ever spoke to them. The Butlers, once they knew Reanne wasn’t coming around, cut off contact, closing the adoption.

REANNE BEGAN
a years-long fight for her son that has involved court battles as well as restraining orders against both her and one of her inlaws, who have accompanied her during attempts to confront the Butlers at their home and church. The Butlers have told law enforcement officials that they’ve moved to evade Reanne’s efforts to get news about Jason.

In conventional wisdom a story like this is usually framed as adoptive parents’ worst nightmare—an angry birthmother appearing on their doorstep, demanding her child back. The scenario has been well worn on TV and film, where birthmothers are often depicted as unhinged, addicted, or gold diggers, fighting for a child they don’t really deserve. But there’s another side to the story.

Several months after Reanne dropped out of YWAM’s discipleship training program, in April 2002, she wrote the Butlers a lengthy letter, describing the coercion she felt while at New Beginnings:

I feel as through the decision to place my baby was forced upon me. I was made to feel that I could not take care of him in the way that he needed to be taken care of. I was in complete distress at the time and everyone around me was making me feel as though I was doing the
right thing and that God would bless me for what I have done. . . . I was made to feel sorry for you because I had already told you that I was going to place him with you and in doing this I would hurt you both. . . . Scripture was used to make me feel as though I was doing something that God wanted.

When she sent the letter, it was a month after the time when she could have conceivably brought a court case to contest the adoption on the grounds of coerced consent (were she to argue for a longer window of time based on the child’s Native American heritage). By the time Reanne belatedly got legal advice, she realized how little recourse she had left. Despite her understanding that she had agreed to an open adoption—a significant matter in Washington, one of the very few states where open adoption agreements are legally enforceable—no legal agreement mandating ongoing contact with her son or updates from the Butlers had ever been written into the adoption papers. At nineteen and estranged from her parents, Reanne hadn’t realized that the attorney New Beginning suggested was not there to protect her interests and said she hadn’t fully understood what she was signing.

In 2009 Reanne filed a complaint against Dennis Casey with the Washington State Bar Association, charging that he had violated professional ethics by appearing to represent her as well as the Butlers, a charge she backed up by noting that the Musicks had taken her to his office before she had ever met the Butlers. A letter from Reanne’s mother, with whom Reanne reconciled in the years after Jason’s birth, testifies that she had thought the same. “If we had known Mr. Casey was not acting on her behalf as legal representation,” she wrote the Bar, “we most certainly would have hired an attorney to represent Reanne. . . . We feel very much ‘ripped’ off and cheated that Reanne was lied to and betrayed.”

In documents Casey supplied in his defense, he claims that he had told the nineteen-year-old Reanne that he did not represent her but rather the adopting parents and that she had a full forty-eight hours after her child’s birth to change her mind—both claims that Reanne disputes. Casey filed as supporting evidence the pages the Musicks took from Reanne’s journal, the “dear son” draft letter offered as proof that Reanne hadn’t been misled. “Reanne’s reaction to the adoption is very sad,” Casey wrote to the Bar. “She had a good relationship with the Butlers until she began accusing them of defrauding her. . . . [Jason] will be ten years old in March. It is time to put the case to rest.” Reanne said the Bar later told her that they were unable to find proof that Casey had
represented them both. To me the Bar’s disciplinary council could only confirm that no disciplinary record existed for Casey, indicating that Reanne’s complaint was dismissed.

Reanne and her mother-in-law, Cynthia Mosley, made several attempts to confront the Butlers to get the updates and pictures that Reanne had been promised, including showing up twice at the Butlers’ house in 2004, with Cynthia Mosley at one point waving a large white “prayer flag” and shouting that Reanne’s baby had been stolen. Reanne said she knew she would never get Jason back at that point, but she wanted updates and assurance that Jason would not grow up thinking that she had abandoned him. “I just kept writing to them for my own sake, and to have documentation to show my son that no matter what, look how hard I tried. I want to be able to show him, for how many years I did come at these people. They’ll have no room to say she didn’t want you.”

The Butlers filed a police report. Jeff Butler stated he “was very concerned for the safety of my family and the threat that Reanne will never stop fighting for our son.” They requested a permanent thousand-foot restraining order for their home and church; a less restrictive, temporary order was granted. Not until Reanne went to court in response to the restraining order did she learn that she did not have an open adoption. “The first thing out of Dennis Casey’s mouth was ‘We don’t have a formal adoption agreement,’” she said. “He was so quick to say it. I asked the judge, if we don’t, then why do I have pictures with my son, why did I see him for the first year of his life? Why do I have their phone number, that I talked to them all the time? The judge looked over at them disgusted, but he said ‘I don’t have the power to do anything for you.’ He just kept saying that over and over.”

On another visit to the court, during which Reanne tried to gain access to Jason’s adoption records—in most states laws mandate closed adoption records, a matter of long-standing protest by adoptees and birthmothers—a judge advised her to get a lawyer to take her case to Superior Court. But when Reanne contacted the three lawyers the judge suggested, she was told that it would cost as much as $100,000 in all—far more than she could afford.

Reanne wrote the Butlers’ pastor to request that he help mediate some agreement with the family, then visited the social worker who had signed off on her adoption. The social worker called the Butlers and returned to Reanne with a message: they didn’t want an open adoption or to send any photos, but “They said to tell you, ‘Thank you for the gift.’”

IN 2010,
in a suburban town near Tacoma, Reanne and Cynthia Mosley slowed down their car, then drove past the Butlers’ house. Outside they saw Jason, a ten-year-old boy with olive-colored skin, riding a bike in the driveway. A number of his eight siblings—the Butlers went on to have another biological child and adopt six more—played nearby. It was the first time Reanne had seen him since he was one.

Inside the car Reanne and Cynthia conferred about whether they were going ahead with their plan. Reanne knew that Jason was aware that he was adopted—the Butlers are very public about their adopted children and their adoption advocacy—but she didn’t know if he had ever been told about her, as the Butlers had promised. They waited five minutes and drove back, stopping next to the driveway as Jason slowly rode up to them. Reanne opened the door and said, “[Jason], I’m your mother.” The boy looked at her and almost fell off his bike, then turned and pedaled toward the house.

Up the driveway Jeff Butler looked at the car and promptly called the children to come inside. “My name is Reanne Mosley,” Reanne yelled, as the children filed into the house, “and I always wanted you.” Within moments another car pulled up behind the two women, and then a police car—seemingly a demonstration of an emergency plan of action prepared, Reanne laughs grimly, in case “the psycho” showed up. “I’m sorry if they think I’m crazy,” said Reanne, “but if you felt like your child was stolen, you’d show up too.”

Reanne said Jeff Butler asked the police officer to sit inside with the children while the adults talked, for nearly two and a half hours, in the driveway. At one point Jason came back out of the house and sat on a basketball in the driveway, watching, until Butler told him to go back in. They asked Reanne to write an e-mail that Jeff’s wife, Chris, could read when she returned home, to consider whether she would agree to meet. A couple days later they did meet, in the empty pews of the Butlers’ church, where Reanne said Jeff apologized for the restraining order and Chris hugged Reanne, tearfully saying she had thought it would be easier for Reanne to move on if she didn’t have to see pictures of her son growing up.

Reanne said Chris told her, “You never told us you didn’t want to do it,” to which Reanne replied with a question: why, then, had Chris cried during the ride to the prenatal checkup, after Reanne had voiced her misgivings, then called Debi Musick, triggering the avalanche of pressure that came afterward?

They gave her pictures of Jason and said they were eager to meet Reanne’s other children. But after the meeting the Butlers again stopped responding to Reanne’s e-mails. The last time she was in Washington she asked them to meet, but they told her they weren’t comfortable with it and that they weren’t going to introduce her to Jason unless he asked them to. “It’s hard to say if I’d played the game and stayed silent, and said, ‘This is what God wants for [Jason’s] life,’ whether I’d have kept on receiving pictures and being a part of his life,” Reanne said, reflecting on the reality that many adoptive parents close open adoptions, later claiming that the process has become confusing or painful for the child. “They still could have found any reason to cut me off because it became uncomfortable to them.”

“They knew they were part of coercing me,” Reanne believes. “Sure, they didn’t hold a gun to my head and force me, but that’s not the only way it’s done. It’s a lot more tricky, and it’s done in a way that’s hard to prove, by getting you to believe that what you’re doing is right.”

In an old video on the New Beginnings website, Chris Butler, her oldest daughter and baby Jason sit on a couch, with the side of someone else’s arm just sticking into the frame. The video was originally made of the three of them plus Reanne, but almost all of Reanne has been cropped out of the picture. In what remains, Chris said that New Beginnings is “a wonderful ministry that God uses to bless lots of lives and make new beginnings of lots of lives.”

In what Reanne remembers about making the video, she testified that adoption was wonderful, while constantly looking down at her son, sitting in his new mother’s lap. “I looked like a wreck and I kept looking at him, saying, ‘This is the best thing ever.’”

THE FACT THAT
as recently as 2000 women could be pressured so severely to give up a child to atone for an unmarried pregnancy is hard to believe. If it sounds like something from another era, in a way that’s because it is. In the decades between 1945 and 1972, when abortion was illegal and single motherhood taboo, women who became pregnant out of wedlock faced a small range of options: a shotgun wedding, raising the child alone in the face of overwhelming social condemnation, risking death or maiming through illegal abortion, or “going away” to homes for unwed mothers for the duration of their pregnancy, where they were pressured to relinquish their babies for adoption and return home as
though nothing had happened. Overwhelmingly, women chose—or were forced to choose—the latter.

Some estimates hold that, during the era, a fifth of all children born to never-married white mothers were relinquished for adoption. In the general population 9 percent of unmarried women who became pregnant gave their children up. For women who were sent to maternity homes, that rate increased exponentially, with nearly 80 percent of residents relinquishing. In real numbers, during that era anywhere from the 1.5 million mothers officially documented to higher estimates of between 6 and 10 million relinquished their infants. Today most adoption agencies speak of that time as “the bad old days.” Adoption reform advocates have a more biting name, calling it “the Baby Scoop Era” for what they see as the massive theft of millions of children.

Ann Fessler, a documentary historian and author of
The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade,
has meticulously chronicled the lives of women of the Baby Scoop Era. Fessler is herself an adoptee who came to the subject after first meeting a birthmother from the era at the age of forty and hearing about the lifetime of worry and grief the mother had endured since relinquishment—not knowing what had happened to her daughter or whether she would ever find out. Fessler considers the period a missing chapter of feminist history. “Despite the fact that I was invested in women’s issues and considered myself part of the women’s movement,” she said, “this had never been brought up: women who wanted to be mothers, but didn’t have that choice.”