Thursday, April 11, 2013

God Made Me Do it!

In 2007, I wrote, "Adoption And The Role of the Religious Right" making the connection between the evangelical push from the pulpits to adopt, in part to recruit Christian soldiers, and the NCFA lobbyists for the mega-billion dollar adoption industry.

Now, award winning journalist Kathryn Joyce, author of Quiverfull gives us Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption. The book description follows:
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 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 expose 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, pulpt command.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think I'll be getting this book. Thanks for the heads up Mirah.

RussiaToday Apr 29, 2010 on Russian Adoption Freeze

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