The child catchers: Rescue,trafficking,and the new gospel of adoption,Kathryn Joyce

Reviewed by: Cheryl A Hyde, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

One hot day in March 2008, I stood in a crowded waiting room in the American Embassy in Guatemala City. I juggled a packet of papers and a 10-month-old girl who grinned and drooled simultaneously. Like the other adults, some single and others with a partner, I was there to finalize a lengthy international adoption. Anxiety and anticipation saturated the area. By that afternoon, well over 100 families had been formed with the vast majority of parents being white Americans. All I understood at that moment, however, was that this beautiful child was now my child, and I was her “forever” mom.

It was, therefore, with some trepidation that I read Kathryn Joyce’s The Child Catchers, the purpose of which was to demonstrate how “adoption is an industry driven largely by money and Western demand, justified by a misguided savior complex that blinds Americans to orphans’ existing family ties and assumes that tickets to America for a handful of children are an appropriate fix for an entire cultural living in poverty” (p.6). Joyce is a journalist, not a social scientist, who wants to expose and provoke. And she more than succeeds by providing thorough and disturbing accounts of adoptions that destroy families and communities.

While Joyce raises concerns regarding international adoption, in general, her primary target is the Christian evangelical adoption movement. These efforts are framed as “finding souls for Jesus” and many evangelicals spare no time, money, or effort in pursuing mass adoptions designed to expand Christian families. Christian families are exhorted to make room in their homes in order to save a young soul and in the process more thoroughly engage in their Christian duty. To this end, conservative Christian churches have established adoption agencies that “locate” birth mothers and children, perform home studies for “suitable” Christian families. It is a complete package, and Christian families are encouraged to engage in serial adoptions in order to increase their “soul count.” Eager couples are convinced that they are rescuing vulnerable and impoverished children from horrible, and non-Christian, fates, and through adoption, everyone is (quite literally) saved.

Within this world, adoption is approached by all Christian parties with a missionary zeal. And perhaps not surprising, such zeal results in abuse. Joyce is best when she documents, often with heartbreaking detail, what happens when adoption at all costs is the goal. Birth mothers are bribed or threatened, and many report signing documents that they thought were for temporary fostering arrangements only to learn too late that they had relinquished their parental rights. Adopting parents exhibit little desire to learn about their child’s homelands; indeed many seem bent on erasing all reminders of what once was. Evangelicals swoop into disaster areas, such as post-earthquake Haiti, gather the children under the banner of humanitarian aid, and then arrange for mass adoptions of these “orphans,” most of whom had at least one living parent. Using their church affiliations to circumvent international law and custom, evangelical adoption facilitators, in affect, are trafficking children. Some have been arrested or detained, yet if Joyce is accurate, many more succeed with their mission.

Joyce wants her investigation to be a full indictment of all international adoptions and her lack of nuance is a weakness of the book. Yes, international adoption has become an industry, at least in the United States. There are, for example, camps for every nationality that help adopted children get in touch with their culture and “homeland” tours that plan (script) visits to the areas from which a child was adopted. Adopting parents are encouraged to design “life books” that detail the adoption odyssey and observe endless international holidays. Fundamentally, however, adoption of any type is emotionally, financially, and culturally complex, and Joyce seems to have little sympathy for those families that negotiate this terrain in meaningful and thoughtful ways. And while there certainly are abuses by nonsectarian adoption agencies and personnel, as well as a naïveté on the part of many adopting adults who uncritically believe their actions are essentially beneficial and benign, there isn’t the ideological underpinning of building a Christian army that so permeates the evangelical adoption movement. Perhaps this is self-rationalization on my part, but I believe that is an important difference.

That said, she raises critically important concerns not just for adoption, but also for the child welfare system in general. If nothing else, she fully exposes the cultural hubris of those individuals and organizations that assume that “their way” is morally superior, all the while cloaking their views in the language of spirituality. Moreover, Joyce delineates how the Christian right has so thoroughly permeated the human service sector and policy arena. This is a significant contribution, and builds on her earlier book (Kathryn, 2010). Taken together, these works provide a blueprint for how Christian evangelicals see society functioning: rigidly traditional gender roles, large families in which all members are warriors for Christ, and complete obedience to the church. Evangelical adoption, then, is just one of many strategies for transforming the United States into a fully Christian theocracy. So convinced are they of this goal, that many evangelicals simply cannot comprehend how others (including other Christians) might differ in aim or approach. And they are closer to their goal than we may realize.

There are moments, especially around my daughter’s birthday, that I wonder how her birth mother is doing. Does she remember this child on this, or other days? Does she regret her choice or does she believe that she was giving this child a chance that her other children (my daughter’s half-siblings) weren’t given? What would she have provided my daughter that I cannot, and are there things I can uniquely give? I have no answers for these questions and can only be open to any exploration that my daughter chooses to do. I have uneasy questions that I ask of myself even if I was as diligent as I could be to ensure that this was an ethical adoption.

These questions, on a much larger scale, swirl around and through Joyce’s book. Child Catchers deserves a wide audience. It needs to be discussed and debated. It is not a perfect study of international adoption, but it is a thought-provoking one that uncomfortably connects a highly personal decision with broad, troubling public actions and consequences.