The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (41 page)

They carried a more alarmist message to their public supporters, however. “If we don’t change the environment in which we’re trying to
serve children,” DiFilipo told an audience at the Christian Alliance for Orphans Summit in 2010, urging them to activism, “we won’t be able to serve children.”

A compact, energetic man who sometimes bubbles over into hotheaded passion, at the 2012 summit at Saddleback Church DiFilipo was even more forceful. He appeared at the gathering’s annual advocacy panel alongside Chuck Johnson, Brian Luwis, and CCAI’s Kathleen Strottman, suggesting to the Saddleback audience that without some form of financial incentive, tying foreign aid to pro-adoption policies, international adoption might sink into obscurity. He appealed to the audience to mobilize behind an initiative that would limit US foreign funding through donors like USAID to groups that had a stated policy that “all children belong in families”—a seemingly innocuous piece of language that could be used to promote international adoption in countries with substantial “orphan” populations.

Without such a policy, he threatened, adoptions numbers are “crashing and burning this year.” He warned families adopting from non-Hague countries in Africa that their adoptions would likely fall through and that those countries would “close” within a few years. “Country after country, that’s our projection. Within a few years you won’t have hardly any adoptions out of Africa anymore.”

“[If] you value families, based on the gospel, [then] move it from theory into ‘touchable grace,’” he continued. “Use your passion to demand, not ask for or suggest, that the US government establish a policy that children belong in families. I’m talking about international aid money, whatever it is related to. Can’t we have as a core principle that money should be used to put children in families?”

It sounded reasonable, but DiFilipo didn’t mean just any families. He warned adoption advocates not to be appeased by alternative forms of orphan care that focus more on development and antipoverty work than solutions explicitly about family “permanency”—a word that adoption advocates almost universally interpret to include international adoption. “If you hear that [an aid group is] ‘doing family preservation,’” he said, referencing the term for keeping families together to prevent the need for adoption, “by building schools or putting in water wells—which does help keep kids in schools—I get that, but it’s not based on policy.” Implicitly he was arguing that efforts to serve poor children by serving their families and communities—helping create the conditions that could prevent many children from being placed for adoption in the first place—are not targeted enough to deserve the Christian adoption movement’s support.

It wasn’t the first time that adoption advocates had proposed that the US government create policies that would effectively promote more international adoptions under the guise of vague language about all children deserving homes. One of the most significant such proposals that gained attention in the wake of the Haitian earthquake was the 2009 Families for Orphans Act (FFOA), drafted by the Families for Orphans Coalition, a startup organization led by several familiar faces: Brian Luwis, Tom DiFilipo, and Chuck Johnson. The bill, which ultimately did not pass, would have created a special office in the State Department, the Office for Orphan Policy, Diplomacy and Development, to oversee adoptions. It would also offer developmental aid to countries that help provide permanent parental care for orphans, including international adoption. In a joint op-ed the bill’s Senate cosponsors, Senator Landrieu and right-wing darling James Inhofe, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, argued that such an office could have facilitated tens of thousands of additional adoptive placements from Haiti—and beyond.

One of the key aims of the legislation was enshrining adoption advocacy principles into US foreign aid: in the wording of the bill, to “ensure that all aid efforts receiving funding from the United States recognize and support the need for the preservation and reunification of families and the provision of permanent parental care for orphans.” It was the same sort of open-ended language that DiFilipo used in his call to condition foreign aid on countries’ policies on orphan permanency, and adoption reform groups worried that it would be interpreted solely to mean intercountry adoption. Words like “permanency,” a child-protection term used since the 1980s to indicate getting a child into a permanent family situation, whether by reuniting them with their family or placing them for domestic or intercountry adoption, have been used in the past to emphasize adoption over family reunification. It seemed more than likely that the term would again be interpreted to privilege adoption over broader community aid, like the wells and schools DiFilipo disparaged, that could keep children from being given to orphanages in the first place.

Adoption reform groups, including PEAR and Ethica, worried that the bill would cut financial aid from countries that couldn’t meet its requirements, such as conducting a biennial orphan census, and would enshrine an overly broad definition of “orphans” that seemed to make any child living in an orphanage available for adoption, including many children who had parents. “The Families for Orphans Act, if passed, would give the United States unilateral power to develop global child welfare strategies by providing financial incentives for other countries
(including through debt and trade relief) to send their children abroad for international adoption,” argued a statement from Ethica. “This bill augments existing financial incentives for countries to favor international adoption by offering additional financial incentives, including technical assistance, grants, trade, and debt relief from the United States, which may sacrifice established child welfare principles by favoring international adoption over local solutions.” Niels Hoogeveen of Pound Pup Legacy believed that the real impetus for the bill was an effort to stop the decline of international adoption—as well as the collapse of the adoption agencies whose trade groups, like JCICS and NCFA, helped draft the legislation. The makeup of the bill’s drafters—adoption industry insiders all—convinced Hoogeveen that the bill was an adoption bill masquerading as broader orphan care. “We give you ten million in foreign aid, and you give us one hundred children for adoption,” he said. “That’s not aid; that’s trade.”

“The Families for Orphans Act de facto means the United States is going to pay foreign countries to provide orphans for the American adoption market if these bills are signed into law,” he argued on his website.

The Families for Orphans Coalition responded to criticism by pointing out that the bill only mentioned international adoption six times. Di-Filipo elaborated to me that the bill did not require countries to actually do intercountry adoption to get aid but rather make more of a symbolic acceptance of adoption, agreeing that it was one of a range of services needed to place children in permanent homes. Likewise, he said, the expanded definition of orphans was never intended to be legally enforceable for immigration purposes but only for broadening the pool of children qualified to receive services. Despite the fact that both aspects of the bill seem more or less a legalistic bait and switch, DiFilipo dismissed critics’ concerns as hysterical. “The fact that people are seeing international adoption and therefore assuming the whole bill is about international adoption means they didn’t read it.”

Indeed, as DiFilipo and Johnson eagerly pointed out, other pro-adoption advocates, who felt the bill didn’t sufficiently prioritize international adoption, challenged the legislation as well. The American Academy of Adoption Attorneys, which drafted a letter signed by Bartholet, suggested revisions to the bill that added close to sixty additional references promoting adoption and restricting references to reuniting biological families. If the bill was being criticized on both sides, the adoption lobbyists suggested, that must mean they had gotten it just right.

While the Families for Orphans Act did not pass before the close of the 2010 session and the bill finally died in committee in 2012, the idea behind it seemed destined to live on.

ALTHOUGH THE ADOPTION
movement went on the offensive with regard to the “adoption crisis” in 2012, its leaders hadn’t always been so unwilling to acknowledge their own role in international adoption’s slow death. Just two years before, adoption advocates had expressed concerns that their own movement might be spiraling out of control.

In 2010, when the Christian Alliance for Orphans held its summit in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, at the Grace Church, the recent lessons of Laura Silsby and her fellow missionaries arrested in Haiti seemed to have chastened participants. In an overflowing classroom at the summit’s advocacy panel, audience members raised their hands to ask how they could avoid hiring an unethical agency or how they should respond to the growing association of international adoption with child trafficking.

Speaking from the audience, DiFilipo responded that parents’ own adoption demand can exacerbate corruption. He gave the example of some adoptive families who recklessly partnered with unethical agencies in Guatemala in the last few months before that adoption program closed, even after most other agencies had ceased operations in the country, the government had issued warnings, and the handwriting was clearly on the wall. “Let’s say you’ve been referred a child from any country, and then you start to suspect that things aren’t on the up and up,” DiFilipo later said to me. “What do you do? Do you walk away, do you report it, or do you close your eyes and pray that nothing is really going wrong? In some instances we know that families have closed their eyes.”

DiFilipo wasn’t alone. “We’re killing ourselves with these ethical lapses,” Johnson told the crowd. Before he worked at the NCFA, Johnson ran an adoption agency in Alabama, where he gained a reputation as a straight player who tried to separate adoption from profit as much as possible, with the intent of transforming it into a pro-bono mission. In conversations with me he had noted that many adoption agencies are marked by an “imperialistic colonialism” that rationalizes improper adoptions with their belief that “to be an American or to be prosperous is better than to be poor and in another country.” In the Grace Church classroom, so full that some audience members were sitting on the ground, he offered the audience another hard truth. “I think Christians are the worst at this
sometimes,” he said, “about the ends justifying the means. ‘I will do something to save this one child’s life, no matter what it costs everyone else.’ We saw this in Haiti, we see it everywhere: ‘I will rescue this child.’ . . . ‘I will falsify a visa application if I have to.’”

Brian Luwis agreed, telling me that ardent adoptive parents can wreak havoc for those coming after them. “I call them ‘adoption crazies.’ They’re such strong advocates, they’ll do things in desperation to have a child they think is their child. Some are really unlawful, falsifying an adoption or something like that. Many won’t get caught, but once you get caught, what have you done to the system?”

Before the Minnesota summit, in early 2010, the NCFA held an online seminar on adoption ethics for agencies, both religious and secular, that representatives from the State Department also attended. As part of the webinar, NCFA took a blind poll of participants’ responses to various ethical situations. Through either ignorance of adoption law or a willingness to bend the rules, 20 to 30 percent of the agency representatives participating gave answers that would be tantamount to committing visa fraud or other serious ethical violations. With State Department staff watching, it was embarrassing. “And these are good agencies,” Johnson told me sadly. “It’s really one of the most hurtful issues we’re facing today. You’ll hear people saying ‘I’m following God’s law, not man’s law,’” he continued. “In the heat of the moment, people will feel led to break the rules, which is a feeling I encourage them to question, because it really is hurting the process.”

Despite this capacity for more measured self-reflection, after Ethiopia began to shut its doors, the Christian movement seemed to shift to more strident activism, highlighting the stories of parents encountering obstacles in their adoptions and sinking its teeth into the idea of adoption as culture war.

TO JEDD MEDEFIND
of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, the fact that adoption numbers are falling just as the ranks of prospective parents are surging is a “tragic irony.” For adoption critics like Hoogeveen, however, the timing is more suspicious. “It begs the question,” Hoogeveen wrote, “why the Christian Alliance for Orphans keeps inflating the demand for adoptable children, when at the same time there already is a declining supply. This doesn’t seem fair to all those people being made enthusiastic about adoption, while knowing the increased demand can never be fulfilled.”

Part of the rationale can perhaps be found in the strategy of an upstart adoption advocacy group dedicated to the very idea of the “adoption crisis.” In late March 2011 Craig Juntunen came to a Chandler, Arizona, home to tell Christian adoption advocates about his plans to increase international adoptions fivefold. In an online video of the meet-up Juntunen, a tall, broad-shouldered man with a darkly tanned face and a neatly trimmed beard, stood in the living room of a Christian adoptive family, between an immense flat-screen TV and a white board covered with a “trinity diagram” depicting the relationship of God to adoption. International adoption is in “a freefall,” he told the audience, as though breaking the bad news. But he was on a mission to fix it by embarking “on this crusade . . . to create a culture of adoption.” As part of that crusade, his organization, Both Ends Burning, was creating a documentary called
Wrongfully Detained
(later retitled to the pithier
Stuck
) to simplify adoption’s labyrinthine ethical complexities to their emotional core: showcasing “the full depth and breadth of the tragic crisis in international adoption” with emotional stories about orphans consigned to teeming institutions after adoption programs shut down. The solution Juntunen proposed was a new “clearinghouse model” for international adoption that would raise the number of children adopted into US families to more than fifty thousand per year.