The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (24 page)

The mounting number of controversies that have arisen in recent years led a Utah state lawmaker, Democratic Representative Christine Watkins, to propose two bills in 2012, providing that pregnant women or recent mothers intending to relinquish infants younger than six months old must give explicit notice to the expectant fathers and that adoption agencies that make fraudulent representations related to adoption be sanctioned.

Utah, however, isn’t the only state that tries to disenfranchise birthfathers. At the tail end of 2000 a Midwestern nurse and grandmother who asked to be identified as “Ann Gregory” (not her real name) fought doggedly for her son, “Colin,” a Navy enlistee, to retain parental rights over the baby boy he had had with his girlfriend, “Kara,” the daughter of conservative evangelical parents. When Kara became pregnant her parents brought her to a local CPC affiliated with their megachurch and tightly connected to an adoption agency. The agency told Kara not to talk to the Gregory family or Colin, that they would handle them. That they did, contacting Colin, who was splitting his time between home and boot
camp, and pressuring him to “be supportive” of his girlfriend by signing adoption papers and to make out extensive budgets to demonstrate his inability to support a family. “They said if he didn’t sign papers to give the baby up for adoption,” Gregory remembered, “it would mean that he wasn’t being supportive of [Kara]. They said they’d fight him in court, and made him feel this was cruel to [his girlfriend].”

Documents on the agency’s website, which Gregory has asked I not name to protect the privacy of her grandson, explain its status as a longtime “sister organization” to the CPC Kara visited, partnering directly with them for eighteen years before becoming an independent agency. At the time the CPC was in the same office as the adoption agency, sharing an address but with two separate phone numbers. It offered its services to help “work with” women whose partners were not supportive of adoption, and it provided free legal counsel to women who relinquish for adoption through the agency’s lawyer.

Gregory was surprised that the agency’s budget worksheets didn’t account for possible family help and was wary when they called her and her ex-husband, Colin’s father, to say that the young parents were “angels” for relinquishing their child to make another family happy, quoting scripture about how “we’re all adopted children of Jesus Christ.” Gregory told her son, “It’s not your job to be some stranger’s angel.” She then promised both the couple and Kara’s parents that she would provide child care so neither of the young parents would miss out on college or normal life. “We weren’t thrilled about the pregnancy,” said Gregory, “but in our family you express your anger for fifteen minutes if you need to, then pick up the pieces and move on. We didn’t see it as a disaster.”

What followed instead, Gregory said, was “six weeks of pure hell,” as she watched her son and his girlfriend being “brainwashed” into adoption as the agency simultaneously sought to shut the Gregory family out of the decision-making process. “It felt like we were being robbed,” she said. Gregory began researching coercive adoption practices online, corresponding with birthmothers who had encountered similar CPC tactics in the past. “I had these fifty mothers who’d lost children to adoption saying, don’t let them do it.” After hearing the mothers’ stories, she and her exhusband retained a lawyer for their son; the lawyer told them that she received multiple calls each week about exactly these sorts of stories.

When Kara delivered, during a week Colin was in Chicago, the attorney had Gregory notify a hospital social worker that parental rights were being contested to keep the baby from being relinquished, because in adoption, as critics point out, possession often ends up being nine-tenths
of the law. Two days later, as the adoption agency was en route to take custody, Gregory filed an emergency restraining order. The matter had to be settled in court. The legal bill for two weeks came to $9,000—an impossible amount for many birthparents.

Kara went to college, and though she and Colin’s relationship didn’t weather the strain of the dispute, Gregory praises their cooperation in jointly raising their son, now eleven years old. But Gregory is still shaken by the experience and what it took to prevail. “You’ve got to get on it before the child is born, and you’d better have around $10,000 sitting around.”

“They brainwash these kids. Other than their age and the fact that they weren’t settled, there was no reason that these kids had to lose their child. They had resources and weren’t going to fall through the cracks,” said Gregory. “I can’t even imagine how they treat those in a worse position than us. . . . They say they want to help people in a crisis pregnancy, but really, they want to help themselves to a baby.”

FOR CLOSE TO A DECADE
Reanne Mosley’s mother avoided conversations about New Beginnings, motivated, Reanne thinks, both by regret over her involvement in sending Reanne there in the first place and pain over the loss of her grandson Jason. In November 2009, however, Reanne’s mother attempted to contact the Butlers to get news about Jason, but after being quizzed on her beliefs about the biblical basis for adoption, Reanne said they shut her out too.

For their part the Butlers’ deepening commitment to adoption led them overseas to Ethiopia, where three of their seven adoptees (among nine children in total) were born. Reanne said the children are home-schooled, and she has found pictures of them online among Jeff Butler’s frequent writings on adoption, standing in large groups and holding signs that declare a theological message: “We are all adopted.”

The Butlers’ large family and escalating enthusiasm for adoption fit a pattern. After Reanne’s time at New Beginnings the founders of the maternity home, Miles and Debi Musick, created a partner organization, Youth With A Mission’s Adoption Ministry. Through its “Ethiopia project” YWAM collaborates with four orphanages and a US adoption agency to provide Ethiopian children for US Christian adoptive parents and chronicles its work on a ministry blog titled “That We Might Be Adopted.” Joy Casey, the wife of Dennis Casey, the attorney who facilitated Reanne’s adoption, is ministry director for the Ethiopia project and,
in 2012, called for missionaries to travel to Ethiopia and conduct “intercessory prayer” on behalf of Ethiopian adoptions. Jeff Butler himself became program director for yet another spinoff organization, YWAM’s Adoption Ministry 1:27, an offshoot that, ironically, augments YWAM’s adoption focus by supporting local Ethiopian families so they aren’t compelled to give up their children for adoption.

Jeff Butler’s involvement in such an organization seemed like a dramatic philosophical shift from the model of adoption that had separated Reanne from her son. Reanne herself doesn’t know what to make of it, whether “they’re doing this, keeping families together, as some kind of atonement.” In the meantime the Adoption Ministry has also recently begun Ethiopia’s first and only crisis pregnancy center and maternity home, Living Hope, to help begin an antiabortion movement in the country and, likely, more adoptions to come.

Although Reanne was a new Christian during her time at New Beginnings, her faith deepened over the years, and despite the fact that religion was once used to convince her to relinquish her child, she has also found in it a justification for her continuing fight. Once, when her daughter, Reanne’s first child with her husband, was young, the family went to a revival meeting held by an evangelist who does prophesy: “hearing a word” from God about people in his audience. Reanne’s daughter was invited on stage, then the evangelist called for her mother. Reanne walked up and the man asked her, in front of a crowd of hundreds, whether she had lost a child before. On a CD recording of the event that she played for me in her driveway in Temecula, looking past the streets stacked with development houses to the Santa Ana Mountains rising like a distant blue wall, a barely audible Reanne whispered something about adoption.

“So you’re the one God is speaking about tonight,” said the evangelist. “Well, you’re going to leave this building tonight and you’re going to lose something: you’re going to lose that guilt, that lie from the devil. That child was taken from you.” Reanne started to cry heavily on stage. The prophet continued, “They said you weren’t good enough. This is what religion has done over and over. But this is what I hear from God: you are a qualified supermother. And you and your children shall chase, chase, till the point where the law will change.”

______________

*
Under most circumstances birth parents in the state have only a year to contest an adoption they claim was coerced, but Native Americans have two years. Because Reanne’s child had a small portion of Native American heritage from his father, she believes she might have been able to contest it on those grounds, although it’s not clear whether or not the percentage of Native American ethnicity the child has would have been enough to qualify.

*
Although a number of adoption reform advocates take issue with the name “birthmother,” preferring terms such as first mother or mother (or family) of origin, the term has become so commonplace that discussing adoption without it is difficult. For the sake of clarity it is the term generally used in this book.

*
Theologically, Smolin said, in biblical times during the Roman Empire the concept of adoption functioned more as a sort of social promotion for adult males, where rich elites without male heirs sometimes chose a man outside their family to inherit their estate, “adopting” them as sons to leave them their wealth, not as the rescue of a child. Focusing on the latter, Smolin argues, shifts the intended meaning of the Bible’s metaphor.

*
It’s not always a means of reconciliation, though. During the 2012 presidential campaign Republican Congressman Tim Huelskamp, a white Kansan who has adopted four children of color, used adoption as a platform to attack abortion rights, using the old antiabortion canard that Planned Parenthood targets minorities for population control. “I am incensed that this president pays money to an entity that was created for the sole purpose of killing children that look like mine,” Huelskamp said at the right-wing Values Voters Summit in September 2012.

†
The numbers support the idea that adoption is big business even as most adoption agencies are nonprofits. A 2010 investigation by the
Atlanta Journal Constitution
found that $8.4 million out of Bethany’s $9.1 million total annual budget went to management costs or fundraising, and only $694,000 to programs serving children directly.

*
LDS Family Services is one of the largest donors to the National Council for Adoption, and NCFA officials have reciprocated the support, with board members donating millions to the LDS “Temple Fund.”

CHAPTER 4

Inside the Boom

Y
outh With A Mission and the Butlers weren’t the only ones who had come to Ethiopia to adopt. In 2007, in a rural hamlet outside Ethiopia’s southern Kembata region, an American woman named Michelle Gardner led a mass interview with village families, announcing through an interpreter that those who wanted their children to go to America should stand to one side. “If you want your children to be adopted by a family in America, you may stay,” said Gardner, a middle-aged woman with glasses and short blonde hair, to a crowded circle of Ethiopian families. “If you do not want your child to go to America, you should take your child away.”

Gardner, a Washington mother of twelve, including nine adoptees—six from Ethiopia—is founder of a Christian adoption grant-making group called Kingdom Kids Adoption Ministries. But that day she was working on behalf of a US adoption agency, Christian World Adoption (CWA), which proclaims in its slogan, “We believe that God is in control of our agency & your adoption.” The interview process was filmed as part of a larger “DVD catalogue” of potential adoptees that the agency would send to prospective US adoptive parents. In the video Gardner sits with family after family, coaxing toddlers sitting on their mothers’ laps into smiles and describing in English the children’s medical and family situations while the Ethiopian adults wait silently in smiling incomprehension.

The video became infamous in 2009, when it was incorporated into an Australian Broadcasting Corporation exposé,
Fly Away Children
, that accused CWA of engaging in what some government officials and child
protection experts in Ethiopia have come to call “child harvesting.” It’s an unsettling term for adoption agencies’ common practice of recruiting children for intercountry adoption from intact families, often in rural areas and sometimes by exploiting parents’ lack of familiarity with adoption.

The videos were a common practice at CWA, which regularly had its visiting staff record footage of older children to share with potential clients online. Although critics disparaged the practice as a “cattle call,” crassly marketing children as merchandise, agencies responded that it was the only way they could process the many children in need and the only way Western adopters could meet a particular child, fall in love, and bring them home.

AMONG THE VIDEOS
CWA made was one of a seven-year-old girl named Tarikuwa Lemma, and her two sisters, six-year old Meya (originally named Yemisrach) and four-year-old Maree (formerly Tseganesh). The sisters grew up in Wolaita Sodo, or Sodo, one of the larger towns in Ethiopia’s Southern Nations, Nationalities and People’s Region (SNNPR), a lush agricultural state bisected by the Rift Valley where a large proportion of Ethiopian adoptees come from.

In the video, narrated by Gardner, the girls sit on a couch covered in striped cloth at Children’s Cross Connection (CCC), a Christian organization that ran an orphanage in Sodo that partnered exclusively with CWA, meaning that CWA supported CCC, and CCC provided the agency with adoptable children like the Lemma girls. From the striped couch, Tarikuwa, in a faded turquoise shirt, looks at the camera with a slightly confused but willing smile. Next to her is Maree, tiny in a dusty pink jacket, and at the far end of the couch, Meya, smiling with braids coiled on her head. The girls look around as they’re filmed, responding to cues off camera, singing when prompted.