The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (21 page)

Religious women are particularly susceptible to coercion like this, argues Mari Gallion, a thirty-nine-year-old single mother in Alaska and author of
The Single Woman’s Guide to a Happy Pregnancy.
Gallion founded the support group
SinglePregnancy.com
after a CPC unsuccessfully pressured her to relinquish her child, despite the fact that she was college educated and a homeowner. Since then she’s made it her calling to support women with unplanned pregnancies if they decide to parent alone, helping nearly three thousand women find the resources that are available to single mothers—resources that CPCs claim to offer but often fail to provide.

Through this experience Gallion has come to see CPCs as “adoption rings” with a multistep agenda: evangelize women and convince them not to choose abortion; hunt for and exploit women’s insecurities about their age, education, finances, sexual past, or ability to parent alone; then hard sell adoption, portraying single parenting as a selfish, immature choice. “The women who are easier to coerce in these situations are those who subscribe to conservative Christian views,” said Gallion, like Southern Baptists or Pentecostals. “They’ll come in and be told that, ‘You’ve done wrong, but God will forgive you if you do the right thing.’”

To the minds of some CPCs, not only is single parenthood not “God’s plan for the family,” it’s so anathema as to render a child born to a single-parent home an automatic orphan. A flyer from Decisions, Choices & Options, a Christian crisis pregnancy ministry that does adoption-outreach programs in high schools and church youth groups, argues incredibly that, because the biblical definition of an orphan is a fatherless child, all children born to single mothers in the United States are orphans
by definition
, just barely better off than if they had never been born at all. If 43 percent of the six million babies born that year were born to unwed mothers, the ministry reasoned, “that means 2.6 million new orphans last year!”

“With over 2 million couples waiting to adopt and over 10 million wanting to adopt,” the flyer continued, “every child aborted or born to an unmarried mother could have the stability and love of a father and a mother.”

ALL OF THESE NUMBERS
are arithmetic I’ve come across before. In 2010, at the sixth annual Christian Alliance for Orphans’ Summit, held at the fifty-five hundred–member Grace Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, a man named Jim Wright announced that “There are ten million
couples between twenty-two and sixty-four who would adopt if they could, if they had a supply.” Wright, president of a Washington, D.C.-area ministry called Birthmothers, was speaking to an audience of around forty people gathered for an afternoon workshop on “Serving Birthmothers and Birth Families.”

Noting the lack of women relinquishing babies for adoption, Wright said he would love to see that number come up, something he imagined would also lead to the closure of abortion clinics, gone bankrupt without clients, “and we never fired a shot.” To that end, he said, “We employ ladies who will give the love of Christ to these women who don’t feel it in their hearts. . . . If we could save millions of women, how many more babies would be available for adoption?”

Wright’s personal story seemed surprising in the halls of Grace Church. A lifelong hemophiliac, Wright contracted HIV and Hepatitis C from infected blood supplies in the 1980s. In 1989 his wife, Tammy, contracted it as well through a tragic medical accident. The two were trying to get pregnant using a technique called sperm washing, which would allow the couple to conceive without risking infecting Tammy. However, one of her blood vessels was punctured during the procedure. It was then, said Wright, a tall man with a gaunt face and deep bags under his eyes, who still poses for pictures with the confident smile he relied on for years as a Beltway realtor—top broker four times in the ’90s, he told me—that he began thinking about adoption and abortion and how the two were now connected in his mind. “That’s how Birthmothers came to be: because we go to adopt, and we can’t get anybody to do a homestudy”—that is, an agency evaluation of prospective adopters’ fitness to parent—“because we had the plague. I couldn’t pay enough money. . . . Out of that tragedy of hemophilia and HIV/AIDS,” he continued, “Birthmothers was born. Then I was introduced to the concept of adoption and abortion, and I’m going, ‘Wow, this is unbelievable.’”

The “concept of adoption and abortion” Wright means is the clash of two statistics a friend from the National Council for Adoption told him: that when he was seeking to adopt in the early ’90s, there were an estimated 1.5 million abortions performed in the United States annually. “And then there are ten million couples seeking to adopt?” he asked incredulously.

For Wright, this tragedy presented a simple equation: many couples, like he and Tammy, wanted children but couldn’t have them, whereas many pregnancies were being aborted. These two facts seemed like a natural match—the “win-win” situation that so many CPCs describe.
“How can you have all these people seeking to adopt and all these people aborting, and the two aren’t meeting?”

In 1991 Wright and Tammy, who later died, were able to privately adopt their son, A. J., from a teenage mother in Virginia. Five years later Wright turned his experience into a ministry. Partnering with established CPCs like the Sanctity of Life or Care Net franchises, Birthmothers aims to provide a personal mentor, a “Birthmother Friend,” who will be available to pregnant women on a long-term basis—after all, a woman who goes to a CPC might still walk out without having her mind changed, whereas a longer-lasting relationship could have more effect. The ministry has trained 151 “certified” Birthmother Friends—certified by Birthmothers, that is, after courses with adoption attorneys and other experts—who can then be matched with local pregnant women across the country and urge them first to “choose life” and then consider adoption.

When we spoke in 2011, Wright was on the cusp of what he described as a major fundraising push, hoping to raise $100 million in startup capital to hire marketing staff to visit churches across the country and develop Birthmothers chapters there as well as to place national TV spots that would lodge Birthmothers’ name in the minds of teenage girls for years to come. The campaign has been slow going, but for now the ministry spreads the word in a more modest fashion, asking supporters to order and distribute their crisis pregnancy cards around their towns, leaving them with waitresses and cashiers, in dressing rooms, pay phones, and laundromats—“anywhere women may find them.”

“The reason we use ‘Birthmothers’ as our name is because it connotes adoption,” Wright said, even though, he admits, not one of the women they have worked with so far has chosen adoption. Out of one hundred women who have been partnered with a Birthmother Friend, Wright said there have been no abortions but also no adoptions, meaning the women Wright’s ministry is serving are being labeled as birthmothers despite the fact that they have all gone on to parent their children. That makes the organization’s name an aspirational title, to say the least, labeling mothers according to what Wright wishes they had done.

Wright’s casual reflections clearly show that he thinks that more of these women should have relinquished for adoption. “Women want adoption because they’re not able to care for their child, so they make a loving decision,” he said, describing the claim of his own son’s birthmother, that after seeing the babies of teen mothers around her fail to flourish, she had decided to relinquish her son.

In May 2011 I traveled to Wright’s home church in Falls Church, Virginia, a wealthy and conservative suburb of Washington, D.C., for a special “birthmother’s brunch.” It was the Saturday before Mother’s Day, a day recognized in the adoption community as “Birthmother’s Day.” In an open first-floor classroom about twenty people, mostly women, milled and sampled from a brunch buffet table of bagels, Mexican egg casserole, and Waldorf salad before the program began. Introduced by Wright’s fiancée, Cindy Little, a nervous blonde in glasses, three birthmothers got up from a horseshoe arrangement of folding tables to tell their stories of relinquishing children. Two of the three described stories “back in the old days of adoption, where [my son] was sort of stolen from me”—a testimony of ambiguous value for Wright’s mission.

The youngest of the three, a voluptuous brunette in her early forties with flowing dark hair and a canary yellow scarf, had relinquished her son in 1987, when she was a high school senior, to a couple she had met in a local Bible study. She had been suffering from depression and was stuck in a bad relationship. The couple directed her to a crisis pregnancy center for counseling, and there, the woman said, she learned that “there were sin patterns in my life that I refused to stop.”

“I begged God to show me what His will was for the little one I was carrying. After much prayer, God began to show me that adoption was indeed His want. I confess that I struggled tremendously with this. I secretly hoped that He would say, ‘You can keep your baby,’ as any mother would. But I loved God more than I loved my baby.” She quoted Ephesians 1:5: “He predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure,” and John 3:1: “How great is the love the father has lavished on us? That we should be called children of God and that is what we are?”

The small audience at the horseshoe tables was crying when she finished. Jim got up to take her place at the front. “Your story is everything this ministry is about—love, forgiveness, second chances, third chances,” he said. “We think the church should have open arms to us sinners.” He led the room in prayer—for more resources to reach more women, more men, and more families, and, “With the hope of Christ, hope of adoptions.”

THE LARGER CONTEXT
for Wright’s disappointment with relinquishment rates and his push for more women to choose adoption is that
since
Roe v. Wade
was decided in 1973, the number of women relinquishing children for adoption has not just fallen but dropped off a cliff. There are few reliable, current numbers on domestic infant adoptions, in part because states are not legally required to report how many babies are privately adopted within the United States. But among the figures that are tallied, there has been a drastic dropoff in infant relinquishments, from 19.2 percent of unmarried white mothers in 1972 to 1.7 percent in 1995 to around 1 percent ever since. Among never-married black women, the rate of relinquishing infants for adoption has been statistically zero for decades.

What that adds up to in real numbers is disputed. A 2010 report by Jessica Arons for the Center for American Progress found that annual domestic infant adoption rates have dropped so low that they are hard to track, but Department of Health and Human Services estimates have ranged from 7,000 to 23,000 in recent years, with an average of 14,000 per year. By comparison, 1.2 million women choose abortion, and 1.4 million decide to continue the pregnancy and parent their child. (The CAP report notes that abortion is not the cause of lower numbers, as both abortion and adoption rates have fallen while rates of unwed parenting have risen dramatically.) In a fretful 2009 feature, “Last Days of Adoption?” the conservative paper the
Washington Times
put the numbers at their lowest estimate, at 6,800 a year between 1996 to 2002, based on data compiled for the paper by the National Center for Health Statistics.

Whatever the exact figure, these private domestic infant adoptions, so common during the Baby Scoop Era, are now the least common form of adoption in America, falling behind adoptions from the foster care system, within families, or from overseas. But demand for adoptable infants has not decreased with this reduction in supply.

Many of the women who continue to place for adoption come from particularly vulnerable groups, including those from conservative religious backgrounds in which premarital sex is taboo, and marginalized groups like poor women, recent immigrants, and victims of domestic violence. Because of this, the CAP report concluded, “We should be wary of any programs that would propose increasing the number of infants available for adoption at the expense of pregnant women’s interests.”

Yet that’s exactly what is happening, both as an economically driven response to high demand for adoptable children and large adoption agencies’ demanding budgets as well as because promoting adoption has become a popular political compromise, a seeming third way out of the
abortion debates. President Obama said as much in a 2009 speech at Notre Dame, during which he suggested lowering abortion rates by “mak[ing] adoption more available.” In an online debate that same year, Slate columnist William Saletan and Beliefnet editor Steven Waldman made the tin-eared proposal to neutralize the abortion wars by offering unmarried pregnant women a nominal cash payment to choose adoption instead.
*

The pressure to increase relinquishments can impact the services adoption agency counselors offer. In an unsigned post on a forum for birthmothers, a writer claiming to be a former birthparent and adoptive-parent counselor at Bethany Christian Services recalled her efforts to counsel women against the backdrop of a large nonprofit’s financial needs.
†
“The type of work I do not miss are the staff meetings,” the author wrote. “The review of the numbers of placements, adoptive families, prospective birth parents (who of course were not called ‘prospective’). The reality of the revenue . . . the risk of job cuts ‘if the budget’ (read: placement #s) are not met.”

Joan Aylor, the peer counseling director of A Woman’s Touch CPC in Bellevue, Nebraska, gave me an illustration of what adoption-oriented counseling for pregnant women looks like. “We don’t say, ‘Give your baby up for adoption,’ because that’s negative right then and there,” Aylor told me. “We present it as, ‘Would you please think about making an adoption plan? We tell them that God will bless you if you consider adoption, and [that] she is a hero in our eyes.”

The ubiquity of this line of argumentation affects even counselors trying to provide ethical services. “One of the hardest things about being a counselor in this field these days is distinguishing oneself from the powerful forces of religiously and financially motivated ‘counseling’ that is so blatantly biased and yet, understandably, so seductive to women in crisis,” said Anne Moody, an adoption counselor who has been talking to women about their options in an unplanned pregnancy for decades at the independent secular agency Adoption Connections in Washington. “It’s hard to explain when what you’re dealing with on a personal level is some really nice lady, who seems like she’s doing this really nice thing as she goes around and sees all her clients, but she’s leaving all this devastation in her wake, of girls who never should have given up their babies.”