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Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption
PublicAffairs
April 2013
On Sale: April 16, 2013
354 pages
ISBN: 1586489429
EAN: 9781586489427
Kindle: B00BKRW582
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
When Jessie Hawkins’ adopted daughter told her she had
another mom back in Ethiopia, Jessie didn’t, at first, know
what to think. She’d wanted her adoption to be great story
about a child who needed a home and got one, and a family
led by God to adopt. Instead, she felt like she’d done
something wrong.
Adoption has long been enmeshed in
the politics of reproductive rights, pitched as a “win-win”
compromise in the never-ending abortion debate. But as
Kathryn Joyce makes clear in The Child Catchers,
adoption has lately become even more entangled in the
conservative Christian agenda.
To tens of millions of
evangelicals, adoption is a new front in the culture wars: a
test of “pro-life” bona fides, a way for born again
Christians to reinvent compassionate conservatism on the
global stage, and a means to fulfill the “Great Commission”
mandate to evangelize the nations. Influential leaders
fervently promote a new “orphan theology,” urging followers
to adopt en masse, with little thought for the families
these “orphans” may already have.
Conservative
evangelicals control much of that industry through an
infrastructure of adoption agencies, ministries, political
lobbying groups, and publicly-supported “crisis pregnancy
centers,” which convince women not just to “choose life,”
but to choose adoption. Overseas, conservative Christians
preside over a spiraling boom-bust adoption market in
countries where people are poor and regulations weak, and
where hefty adoption fees provide lots of incentive to
increase the “supply” of adoptable children, recruiting
“orphans” from intact but vulnerable families.
The
Child Catchers is a shocking exposé of what the adoption
industry has become and how it got there, told through deep
investigative reporting and the heartbreaking stories of
individuals who became collateral damage in a market driven
by profit and, now, pulpit command.
Anyone who seeks
to adopt—of whatever faith or no faith, and however
well-meaning—is affected by the evangelical adoption
movement, whether they know it or not. The movement has
shaped the way we think about adoption, the language we use
to discuss it, the places we seek to adopt from, and the
policies and laws that govern the process. In The Child
Catchers, Kathryn Joyce reveals with great sensitivity
and empathy why, if we truly care for children, we need to
see more clearly.
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