The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (39 page)

AFTER NANCY CAMPBELL’S
early adoption promotion, the cause slowly grew in more mainstream churches, where the story of the failed
Above Rubies
adoptions was long forgotten or never known. In 2010, at Russell Moore’s Adopting for Life conference at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the fifteen-child Ahlers family of Kentucky, profiled years earlier in
Above Rubies
for their five Liberian adoptees, performed for a crowd of hundreds and were lauded as “heroes” of adoption. Meanwhile, disrupted adoptions have become such a common occurrence in the Christian adoption community that the panel on disruption at the 2012 Christian Alliance for Orphans Summit drew one of the event’s largest crowds to discuss how disruption fits into God’s plan for children to find families—sometimes an indirect route, advocates say, that goes through one or more failed adoptions first.

The rate of failure made even dedicated adoptive parents scornful of the movement that was treating adoption as a form of mission work. “Adoption is supposed to be about giving a child a family. When that happens, adoption becomes this amazing thing. But when adoption is not about the child, then it becomes very twisted and disgusting,” said Johanna, who had become one of the secondary adoptive parents enlisted to clean up after the wave of disruptions. “Adoption isn’t wrong, but adoption done wrong is worse than nothing at all.”

LIBERIA IS FINALIZING
its Reform Adoption Bill, and when the country reopens, children will be processed under much more stringent requirements. Only three agencies have been approved so far to work in the country, including Cheryl Carter-Shotts’s AFAA and Acres of Hope, which now partners with a licensed agency. Anglin anticipates that tight regulation will likely keep the number of adoptions to around one hundred per year, but the agency has since moved on to other opportunities as well: in 2011 Acres of Hope announced that it is beginning adoptions from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where fighting continues in its own fifteen-year civil war.

But even in Liberia the process remains in question. Winant said that when he started at the embassy in 2009, after the moratorium was in place, there were thirty-five “pipeline” adoption cases on the books that would still be allowed to go through. “Since then,” he said, “we’ve processed over eighty,” including cases they had never heard of before.

My first full night in Liberia, as I ate at a hotel restaurant popular with ex-pats and development workers, a Lebanese logging executive, several drinks into his evening, came to my table to tell me about famous and accomplished Lebanese Americans. When I told him why I was there, he asked if I wanted to adopt a child, and offered to take me the next day to the interior, where he would help me find a baby to bring home. I declined, but he was excited by the prospect, and already forming a plan. “They all need adoption,” he said, his eyes growing misty at the beauty of the idea. “It would be viewed as a miracle.”

______________

*
On her adoption paperwork, CeCe (whom the Allisons named Selah) says she was incorrectly listed as fourteen, a year older than she really was.

*
These ages, given by Kula and Alfred, are different from those reported by
Above Rubies
, which listed Kula as fourteen and Alfred (whom the Allisons renamed Jabin) as thirteen.

*
Williams’ death led to the establishment of a Washington state panel called the Severe Abuse of Adopted Children Committee, which released a 2012 study on fifteen abuse or neglect cases in the state in 2010 and 2011. In 2012, Ethiopia’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs, the entity in charge of international adoptions from the country, temporarily suspended the licenses of two more US agencies, International Adoption Guides and Adoption Advocates International, the latter of which had conducted Hana Williams’ adoption, over concerns about abuse of adopted children. (In December 2012, the suspension on the other agency, IAG, was lifted.)

*
There are other practitioners in Evergreen who follow different models of RAD treatment.

*
“Rehoming” is a euphemism for all disruptions, not just those that go to these sorts of homes.

CHAPTER 6

Pipeline Problems

I
n 2008 Caleb David and his wife, Becca, young missionaries from Tulsa, Oklahoma, adopted their first Ethiopian child, an infant daughter they named Sakari. Caleb and Becca, who are both biracial—he half-Indian and she half-Mexican—had always intended to build their family through adoption, figuring it would be easy to further “internationalize” their family and believing that having biological children was selfish when there were so many orphans in need. At first they worried that, because they were adopting just one child, they weren’t making a real difference. They grew to believe that “changing the destiny” of their daughter was important enough, and it was an example they could share with others: that if everyone helped one child, the orphan crisis would end.

After they brought Sakari home, Caleb, a hip thirty-two-year-old in a checkered keffiyeh scarf, with artfully mussed hair and an open smile, got a tattoo to mark the occasion. In lower-case letters across the back of his neck, it reads “adopted.” Not because Caleb was adopted in the way his daughter was but for his adoption by God.

The couple also began a ministry upon their return, the One Child Campaign. They had previously made their living organizing short-term international mission trips for thousands of young Christians through Tulsa’s Big World Ventures. In 2010, however, they quit to work full time on their new ministry, offering mission trips of their own. Today, One Child brings groups to Ethiopia to raise awareness about the orphan crisis in the hope that visiting US Christians, who pay roughly $1,500 per trip
plus airfare, will return home not just with Facebook photos from a “poverty tour” but also a commitment to stay involved.

Caleb has another tattoo, a lyric inked in cursive on the soft part of his forearm that he took from an Australian Christian rock band and put to further use as a One Child T-shirt slogan: “Break my heart for what breaks Yours.” “They’re as addictive as adoption,” Caleb joked of his tattoos when I met him in Addis Ababa in June 2011.

He was there with Becca, thirty-seven, and Sakari, four, for the family’s second adoption, this time of an eleven-month-old infant they had named Huxley. On a warm morning late in the month I met Caleb and his driver at an Addis supermarket, then drove with them to the transition home their agency, America World Adoption, runs. At the home, a cozy, gated compound on a quiet side street, a dozen US adoptive parents in their thirties and forties played soccer with older kids in the driveway or lounged on the front porch, watching children’s laundry dry on a clothesline strung over a painted jungle gym. The adults were a casual group. They all knew each other and the children they were each adopting. AWA staff walked through cheerfully, stopping to get signatures on paperwork or confirm appointments families had scheduled with local bureaucrats. Sakari, a bright-faced girl with a toothy, mischievous grin, darted between her parents and the home’s “baby room,” wearing a T-shirt with an image of Africa and the words, “Go. See. Love.” that her parents had bought to support a friend’s adoption.

The Davids had conducted a similar fundraiser, appealing to Facebook friends to sponsor a painted wall hanging for Huxley’s room, “Hux’s Canvas of Love,” at $20 per square inch. Through it they had raised more than $11,000 of their adoption fees. But though the process of funding a $30,000 adoption had become somewhat smoother in the United States, as Christian families creatively crowd-source the small fortune each adoption costs, the process of actually completing an adoption was becoming harder in the wake of 2011’s adoption slowdown. When I met the Davids they had already been in Ethiopia for nearly six weeks since receiving a rejection letter from Ethiopia’s Ministry of Women’s, Children’s and Youth Affairs (MOWA) over a technicality in their adoption application. Theirs was a negligible problem—an expired notary signature on one page of their home study paperwork—but overriding the objection took weeks in the midst of Ethiopia’s adoption processing slowdown. After having changed flight plans for all three once already, the family couldn’t afford to reschedule flights for the entire family yet again, so Becca and Sakari
were reluctantly preparing to fly home to Oklahoma that week, leaving Caleb to wait on the court.

The Davids had met Huxley’s mother—a fiery and empowered woman, Caleb said—and after a frank conversation about expectations, they were confident that she hadn’t been coerced into adoption. And although the problems with adoption agencies operating in Ethiopia were certainly widespread, child protection experts privately praised the agency they were using for behaving more ethically than most.

Still, Caleb and Becca recognized the broader problems behind the slowdown and their own delays. They weren’t really comfortable with what the adoption movement had become: self-glorifying in the United States and an enabler of corruption abroad. They had seen problems even in the organizations they had ties with: a forty-five-child orphanage One Child supported had been found diverting donations, including a cow Caleb had bought to supply milk for the children, as well as offering to US parents children whose families had never expressed interest in giving their sons or daughters up. “[The orphanage director] was promising kids from his community,” Caleb said incredulously. One adoption agency Caleb had spoken to continued to partner with this organization despite knowing these details, because of the agency’s conviction that “the kids needed to get out.” “If you place a child that’s not really an orphan, then you’re just making a family’s dream come true. And it’s not just about that.” He sighed. “It used to be so easy, and Ethiopia was the easiest.”

ETHIOPIA WASN’T
the only place where the adoption process was slowing down; other countries’ programs were floundering as well. The growth of the evangelical adoption movement has occurred against the backdrop of a global fall in international adoption rates. From a peak of nearly 23,000 international adoptions to the United States in 2004—America consistently accounts for about half of all intercountry adoptions worldwide—numbers have plummeted to just 9,319 in 2011 and a projected 7,000 in 2012.

As country after country has slowed or shut their programs, adoption advocates have rallied around families “stuck in the pipeline”—those who are waiting in bureaucratic limbo after adoption programs have been suspended. Parents got “stuck” in nations like Guatemala, where abuses ranging from DNA fraud to kidnapping were legendary; Kyrgyzstan, where officials were accused of bribery and observers feared adoptive parents weren’t being
adequately vetted; and Nepal, previously shut down over child-trafficking charges and then stalled again, just months after reopening, over State Department suspicions that 90 percent of “orphans” offered for adoption had been bought and sold. Many of them appeared frequently in the media, describing how the closure of long-troubled programs had caught them off guard and how they had become stranded in a foreign country, unwilling to leave without their children. Christian adoption advocates dismissed the specifics and lauded these “pipeline families” as martyrs of the movement, referring to them in the same terminology used to describe jailed political dissidents: the Kyrgyz sixty-five, the Guat nine hundred.

Sympathetic politicians pled their cases both to the United States and foreign governments, asking them to make exceptions and speed grandfathered or pipeline cases through. Senator Mary Landrieu, an adoptive mother and co-chair of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute and sponsor of at least seven adoption bills, has been among the most active. She traveled to Guatemala four times after its adoption program closed in 2008 as well as to countries in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe where US adoptions have faltered.

The larger context for these individual stories is the overall decline in adoption numbers, which may be the real problem with the Christian adoption movement. Assured by leaders like Southern Baptist author Russell Moore that “there are more children needing homes than loving Christian parents who are willing to take them in,” thousands of Christian families have sought to adopt. In fact, however, the international adoption industry is drying up. The drop is often attributed to changes in a few “big” countries: the closure of Guatemala over corruption charges and the concurrent slowdown in China, which is becoming a wealthier country with substantial domestic demand for its own adoptable infants.

Professor and author Kay Johnson, who has written extensively about adoption from China, told me that although Chinese orphanages filled up during the ’90s because of the government’s One Child Policy, these days there’s a dearth of children available for adoption in the nation, and middle-class Chinese are rightfully at the front of the line. International adoption agencies continuing to work in China are now turning to special-needs children, mirroring developments in numerous countries where adoptions have slowed.
*
“Any healthy child that’s adopted internationally is now
being taken out of the arms of a waiting Chinese adoptive family—leaving aside how it was separated from its birth family,” Johnson said. “It’s long past time to stop this international adoption program. And it will happen because the supply of children will vanish.”

Similar shifts to limit international adoption programs are taking place in other countries, many not just in response to increased domestic demand but also to problems that have arisen in adoption ethics or the care of adopted children once they arrive in the United States. Russia has voiced increasing anger over numerous reports of adopted Russian children being abused, sent into foster care or ad hoc respite programs, or, in a few cases, repatriated to Russia. After several years of scandals out of
Ethiopia, Liberia, and other African countries, the African Child Policy Forum in 2012 called for a halt to adoptions from Africa as well.