Womb Warriors:
“Call out the instigators
Because there's something in the air
We've got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution's here, and you know it's right
And you know that it's right”
Thunderclap Newman
Anyone who has seen (or read about) the film Jesus Camp knows that there are Christians teaching children to be soldiers for God to “take back America.” Becky Fischer of Kids on Ministry International who ran the ill-fated camp said in the documentary: “I wanna see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam. I wanna see them as radically laying down their lives for the Gospel as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those different places, you know, because we have... excuse me, but we have the truth!…
“I can go into a playground of kids that don't know anything about Christianity, lead them to the Lord in a matter of, just no time at all, and just moments later they can be seeing visions and hearing the voice of God, because they're so open. They are so usable in Christianity.”
Whatever your feelings about a parents right to indoctrinate their children into their beliefs, there are still bigger plans among conservative religious leaders. At their recent three-day summit in Colorado, they teamed up with Tom Atwood, president of the National Council for Adoption. This is nothing new. Tom is a long-time friend of the religious right and they of him. What is new is a full-fledged propaganda war being waged to recruit Christian soldiers through adoption.
With all the ingenuity and marketing skills available to them, they are attempting to couch their pro-adoption stance as a noble plan to help the hundred of thousands of children in foster care. But, Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson, a major player in this new path of evangelism, expressed concern that foster parents typically are permitted to take children to church but cannot force religion on them. They must adhere to other state guidelines as well, some of which may contradict their faith such as parents “disciplining” their children physically with switches as taught by Dobson, a child psychologist.
While some of the flock may in fact adopt children from foster care —replacing abuse in the name of Satan from their original parents with abuse in the name of God—concern for orphaned and abandoned children is a smoke screen, or at best unclear. Their agenda is mired with using adoption as a tool against abortion, against single parenthood, and for evangelism.
At a recent three-day summit in Colorado Springs, members of Focus on the Family and Campus Crusade for Christ joined Evangelical leader Rick Warren and dozens of other pastors from across the nation to promote adoption via a media blitz. Many of those attempting to fulfill the edict of promoting adoption, resort back to the old ‘abortion not adoption’ arguments, which have nothing to do with children in foster care.
Ken Connor, the attorney who represented Governor Jeb Bush in the Terri Schiavo case and Vice Chairman of Americans United for Life, reporting on the pro-adoption summit (A Selfless Choice: In Celebration of Adoption, Townhall.com May 12, 2007) calls abortion big business and extols the “virtues” of adoption—a far bigger and corrupt—multi-billion dollar industry.
Connor goes on to tout infant adoption as a win-win for everyone including the mother who loses her parental rights, her child, and her relationship with him. That’s a lose-lose: a permanent, irrevocable lifetime loss that mothers and their families never fully forget or recover from. Some describe adoption as aborting the mother. It most assuredly aborts the relationship between the two.
Lost in the dogmatic rhetoric being spewed by both ideological extremes among pro-choice and pro-life proponents….the third choice, the most compassionate and moral choice gets lost, dismissed, and totally ignored by both sides in an attempt to prove their chosen “choice” is the better of the “two.” UNICEF’s position is that adoption should be a last resort. “Families needing support to care for their children should receive it, and that alternative means of caring for a child should only be considered when, despite this assistance, a child’s family is unavailable, unable or unwilling to care for her or him.” This is the moral and ethical “choice” to be promoting and none other! A decline in children being abandoned by mothers for adoption is something to celebrate, not bemoan…as does Connor and his followers. A decline in adoption is related more to single parents finding the support they need to parent, not an increase in abortions.
The only reason to encourage and promote more relinquishments and more adoptions is to fill a “demand” for healthy white infants, which, in fact, is counter to a goal of finding homes for older, non-white, or physically challenged children being supported by state funds. It is uncharitable and un-American. The same is true for supporting and encouraging international adoption.
The truth behind the curtain becomes clearer in the fact that working hand-in-hand with, and praising the efforts of, these pro-adoption zealots is Tom Atwood, president of the National Council for Adoption, which represents non- and for-profit adoption agencies. While the NCFA web page purports to be about finding homes for children in foster care as their goal, one click on their mission page shows in black and white their first and foremost agenda item: “Train pregnancy counselors and health care workers in infant adoption awareness, so women and teens with unplanned pregnancies can freely consider the loving option of adoption.”
Other items on their agenda list include the promotion of anti-family, anti-parenting programs such as so-called “safe havens” that allow for the legal abandonment of infants and putative father laws to speed relinquishments of newly born babies, causing one to ask if the real reason is to maintain the supply of “adoptable” [read acceptable] babies for their contributors, cronies, constituents or clients.
Also contrary to promoting the adoption of U.S. orphans, on the NCFA agenda is “Work[ing] with the U.S. and foreign governments to establish sound policies for inter-country adoption, so foreign orphans can be placed with loving, permanent families.” Seems foster care children are the foot in the door to get tax incentives and other benefits for their clients who seek to adopt primarily infants. All good social engineers know the advantages of starting with a “blank slate.”[1]
Additionally the NCFA is not just pro-adoption, they are the largest—and in many states the only—opposition to open record legislation returning to adoptees their right to their own true identity as protected by the UNICEF CRC and recommended by all experts on child and family issues.
Pro-life organizations can be known by whatever family-orientated, all-American sounding names and their adoption agencies can be called cutesie “baby saving” and “hope-filled” names…they may even invoke the name of, or believe that they are doing the work of, God…. but their tactics are all counter to true Family Preservation as spelled out in the constitution of the United States which protects parental rights; the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child; and message of Judeo-Christianity. Being pro-family means being supportive of all families…not judging who has the necessary finances or marital status. Nor should children be removed from abusive parents to go from the frying pan into the fires of hell, damnation and corporal punishment all in the name of God. Is this how Jesus meant for us to help widows and children by promoting the creation of more orphans and punishing children?
[1] For more on American adoption as social engineering see Barbara Melosh, Ellen Herman, and E. Wayne Carp.
Mirah Riben
author of “THE STORK MARKET: America’s Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry” (2007)
and “shedding light on The Dark Side of Adoption” (1988)
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