The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (40 page)

“I think the days of a large sending country, like we had in the past with Russia and China and now Ethiopia, are over,” said National Council for Adoption (NCFA) President Chuck Johnson. “I don’t think we’re going to see that anymore.” Tom DiFilipo, president of the Joint Council on International Children’s Services (JCICS) described a broader collapse, of eight or nine countries either closing or functionally suspending adoption programs in recent years, whether through actual policy or as the result of increasing bureaucratic restrictions.

But adoption advocates don’t see the falling numbers as a result of the recurring controversies around intercountry adoption. Instead, they blame familiar scapegoats, like UNICEF or recent reforms, like the Hague Convention, because countries that suspend their programs to implement the Hague standards often will reopen, if at all, to perform far fewer adoptions at much slower rates and prioritize domestic adoptions over international.

In a 2010 paper Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet, perhaps one of the most polemical adoption advocates in the field, charged that “International adoption is under siege” by child protection groups citing ethical abuses as well as by misinformed nations asserting “rights to hold onto the children born within their borders.” Bartholet argues that a child’s right to a family should trump issues of state sovereignty and that instances of
corruption should be handled individually by punishing perpetrators instead of shutting down a country’s entire adoption system. Bartholet expanded her argument in 2012, arguing to the Associated Press that the implementation of the Hague Convention guidelines was another reason for falling adoption numbers, that although the Hague “should have been a real step forward,” it had instead become a pretext for the US government to shut down adoptions from countries that are not compliant.

The idea that adoptions are declining not because of corruption but because of an overzealous response to corruption has become a common refrain. At major evangelical adoption conventions leaders continue to insist that there are no real problems with international adoption, but that forces ideologically opposed to adoption are falsifying, fabricating, or exaggerating stories of corruption. “Despite all the things you read in the media and the different international claims to the contrary, the process of international adoption is generally working very well,” said Chuck Johnson at Saddleback Church in 2012, arguing that claims of fraud had been blown out of proportion. “We have no indication of real, true corruption.”

What that leaves room for instead is an enemy, and Johnson proceeded to indict one: people who think that children shouldn’t be adopted. Although Johnson is frequently described as a moderating force at the NCFA, a man who has helped shift the group from its hard-right associations with the Family Research Council to a more even-handed approach, he was all red meat at Saddleback; directly after discussing adoption critics who don’t want some children to be adopted, he added, “We have to realize as Christians that there is evil in the world and there are forces that take great delight in the suffering of children.”

It was a stunning escalation of rhetoric, from describing adoption critics as misguided to suggesting they might be evil and antichild. But by 2012 adoption had unambiguously become its own culture war issue. That spring the evangelical
Christian Post
published a series of articles on the international “adoption crisis,” arguing that adoptive parents were facing hurdles “that could only have been created by either incompetence or an intentional desire to reduce adoptions.” These hurdles were unsurprisingly blamed on the familiar trifecta of UNICEF, the State Department, and Hague. When a family’s adoption from Vietnam was halted after the child’s birth family was found, the family complained to the
Dayton Daily News
that “State Department officials believe that all international adoptions are human trafficking.” In December 2011 the
Washington Times
, which had developed an international adoption column for its largely conservative Christian readership, called for a
boycott of UNICEF’s holiday cards on the grounds of UNICEF’s alleged adoption obstructionism.

UNICEF chief of Child Protection Division, Susan Bissell, dropped her head in her hands when I asked her in 2012 about criticism the organization routinely faces over adoption, and in exasperation she protested that UNICEF doesn’t control sovereign nations’ adoption policies. UNICEF’s mandate is to work on overarching child protection systems that impact exponentially more children than the handful who get adopted overseas. But the adoption wars consistently overwhelm that larger conversation. “It’s pitched as though it’s a battle. It’s very sad because it’s incredibly time consuming to have to focus on that when we should be focusing on building systems and making sure that those who are available for adoption can access that in a transparent way,” Bissel said. “If you really want to help children and you really respect the sovereignty and democracy and good governance and the rule of law that we enjoy in our home countries [in the West], why wouldn’t you want the same for other countries?”

But instead of suspending countries’ adoption programs so they can implement the Hague and other national reforms, most advocates call to prosecute wrongdoers individually while keeping adoption programs going—to not punish the families, they say, let alone the children, for the mistakes of a few unethical players. As Senator Landrieu quipped to
Newsweek
in 2005, after US missionaries caused an uproar trying to adopt Muslim children following the Southeast Asian tsunami, “When someone robs a bank you don’t shut down the entire international banking system.” Or as Bartholet echoed to
The Globe and Mail
seven years later: “We don’t shut down the stock market because of Bernie Madoff.”

But Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme didn’t arise in a vacuum, and neither do the cyclical headline scandals regarding international adoption, as is evident in the very durability of Landrieu’s and Bartholet’s common defense. As each adoption scandal erupts, painfully similar to those that have occurred before, advocates rush to make the same defense, repeated year after year: that the problem is a few bad apples, not systemic weaknesses in the adoption system.

The analogy is instructive in other ways, though. As Madoff thrived in a culture of deregulation that rewarded risk and turned a blind eye to wrongdoing, so have international adoption agencies benefited from an industry regularly compared to a legal Wild West, where wrongful, corrupt, or failed adoptions have come to be viewed as the human cost of doing business.

PART OF THE REASON ADOPTION
is so inadequately regulated is that adoption agencies, through their representative trade groups and advocacy organizations, have had a heavy hand in crafting the laws and institutions that govern their own behavior, amounting to what critics call systematically weak oversight: the fox guarding the henhouse.

For most politicians adoption issues exist primarily as a concern of constituents who have adopted or want to. Eager to please voters with a warm story about helping to bring families together but with little understanding of the complexities of adoption ethics, many legislators sign on to help make adoption easier. The experts who get called in to guide them, quite often, are trade groups representing the adoption industry.

“Whenever you allow an industry to dictate public policy, there’s an inherent conflict of interest,” said child welfare advocate Maureen Flatley, who has lobbied the government extensively for adoption reform and helped pass “Masha’s law” after a Russian adoptee was used extensively in child pornography by her adoptive father, a single man who was allowed to adopt her after specifying the looks he wanted the child to have. “We’re not turning to oil companies to draft the safety regulations, but in adoption and child welfare it’s always the industry that gets called on. So there’s no oversight, no accountability, no real penalties for anything.”

Adoption bills have also provided a rare opportunity for bipartisan cooperation. So many Democrats are partnering with right-wing Republicans to support what seems on the surface a benign “profamily” issue that adoption legislation seems to have become a covert conservatizing force. Joint declarations that adoption is a common ground solution to entrenched abortion debates bolster Democrats’ credibility with “values voters,” who see adoption as a “life” issue. In the process, however, Democrats also implicitly confirm conservative definitions of family. Adoption agencies have hitched a ride on this political calculation, winning featherweight regulations for an industry that purports to work on children’s behalf.

As Niels Hoogeveen of Pound Pup Legacy notes, the easy optics of supporting groups that “help orphans” is too appealing for many legislators to turn down, even when the reality is far more complex. “People don’t think critically when children are involved,” Hoogeveen said. “Everything that is being done for children is good, even when it’s actually bad.”

In 2000 the US Congress passed the Intercountry Adoption Act, legislation cosponsored by Senator Landrieu with the hard-right North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms that implemented the Hague Convention.
Before its passage, however, adoption agencies and lobbyists, including the JCICS, argued for and won a substantial number of provisions that functioned as loopholes to proper enforcement of Hague principles. The bill as edited by adoption lobbyists held that adoption agencies could not be held responsible for what their foreign partners, contractors, and employees did; that there would be no consistent cap on money associated with international adoptions, making international adoption more lucrative than finding local solutions for children; that it was permissible to make payments for the purpose of locating children for adoption, thereby essentially legalizing the role of child finders; that agencies are not liable for misinformation given to clients; and, most significantly, that Hague rules simply don’t apply to adoptions coming out of non-Hague countries, from which adoptions were not only permitted to continue but account for approximately two-thirds of all intercountry adoptions to the United States. Added to the fact that US law does not recognize or track trafficking for adoption as a crime, these loopholes are large enough to accommodate the proverbial truck and make it easy for agency misconduct to go unpunished. As a State Department staffer speaking off the record to an adoption reform group remarked, the government’s hands are largely tied when it comes to preventing corrupt adoptions.

In the adoption lobby community that helped craft these exemptions, there’s substantial crossover between the Christian adoption movement and supportive politicians. Kerry Marks-Hasenbalg, the co-founder and former executive director of Senator Landrieu’s Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute (CCAI), a nonprofit organization composed of hundreds of members of Congress that bestows annual “Angels in Adoption” awards on adoption industry figures and parents, went on to become an early partner of the Christian Alliance for Orphans. Her husband, Scott Hasenbalg, is executive director of Steven Curtis Chapman’s Show Hope and a past Christian Alliance board member. CCAI regularly supplies staff to speak at Christian Alliance for Orphans events, frequently including current CCAI Executive Director Kathleen Strottman, a former Landrieu staffer.

“There are a lot of fingers moving into each others’ organizations,” JCICS’s Tom DiFilipo told me, noting that the Joint Council has significant formal and informal partnerships with the Christian Alliance for Orphans and Hope for Orphans on different advocacy goals. “There’s a lot of synergy.” In 2010 the Christian Alliance began a campaign called Bloggers for Orphans, asking Christian bloggers to repost their articles, including
policy notices from JCICS that call for action on proposed adoption legislation the Joint Council had helped draft.

ADOPTION ADVOCATES’
urgency about falling adoption numbers isn’t due just to the lost opportunities they envision for children finding a family; they’re worried about business losses as well. As the numbers of adoptions have dropped, the adoption industry has constricted, and 25 percent of US agencies have closed or merged since 2000, according to the National Council for Adoption. The shuttering of Guatemala in 2008—what America World Adoption’s Brian Luwis called “the gravy train” for many agencies—was a major factor. “In the last few years a bunch of the top placing agencies in the US met together kind of clandestinely,” Luwis told me in 2010. “To me it was a ‘saving our rear’ meeting. For me, it’s different: I’m not invested financially. But some of the others, this is their livelihood: they place thousands of kids. This is the way they’ve done it, and they’re not going to change. Ninety-some agencies closed [in 2009]. I think it’s squeezing a lot of people out.”

In the new, leaner international adoption market adoption lobbyists have felt the squeeze as well. In internal meeting minutes leaked to the website Pound Pup Legacy in 2009, Tom DiFilipo’s Joint Council described financial shortages that had forced them to halve expenses and reduce staff by 60 percent and that they warned could lead to their closure altogether if the numbers continued to fall. (The leaked minutes also pointed to larger problems with JCICS’s public image: that they were seen by policymakers, NGOs, and potential partners as serving adoption agencies’ interests only, as a trade organization that harbors unethical agencies; and they suspected these perceptions may have cost them valuable partnerships with respected nonprofits and philanthropies. The minutes suggested strategic reconfigurations of the Joint Council’s leadership so they could instead rebrand themselves purely as a child welfare advocacy organization.) The internal documents laid out a path to survival: highlighting “the collapse of IA” (intercountry adoption) as “a public policy issue requiring significant and effective advocacy”—that is, raising the alarm about a new crisis: a crisis in adoption itself. “If the Joint Council is still here,” JCICS wrote to their member adoption agencies, “we can help you be here.”