Cultivating a Culture of Adoption

Jane

“Adoption is the natural result of our redemption.” I came across these words when I Googled “Culture of Adoption” looking for follow-up materials to my article “Does Adoption Run in Families?. The words came from an article by Carolyn Curtis, “Cultivating a Culture of Adoption”* in the Presbyterian Church in America’s web magazine.

I was stunned. The Presbyterian Church, the Church in which I was raised, unabashedly promoting adoption? Although I haven’t attended the Presbyterian Church or any other church in more than fifty years, I can still recite the biblical passages I memorized in Sunday School and hum the tunes to “A Might Fortress is Our God,” “Faith of Our Fathers,” the Doxology, and other hymns I heard each week. I’ve always thought of the Presbyterian Church as a good institution, progressive, a model of what a church should be, certainly not an institution promoting adoption as the inside track to heaven.

After more research I was relieved to find that there are several Presbyterian Churches. The offending church, the Presbyterian Church in America was organized in 1973. It’s not connected with my former church, FirstPresbyterian Church of Chicago, founded in 1833.

Even though it’s not my church, it’s still unsettling to read that “Christians should be motivated to adopt, to participate in the ‘big story’, the renewal of all things, the advancement of shalom.”

Curtis considers Jose and Nikolle Reyes a model for other Christians: “The more they prayed, the more aware of how adopting earthly children mimics our Father in heaven adopting us. So [the Reyes] bypassed options to have biological children and pursued adoption through a Christian agency …. About a year after they began the actual process of adoption, they stepped off a plane in Guatemala and welcomed Alex and Ella into their hearts and home.” Guatemala? The government in Guatemala shutdown adoptions because of rampant corruption.

The author exhorts Churches to create a culture of adoption following the lead of Pastor Adam Jones of the Seven Rivers Presbyterian Church in Lecanto, Florida. Pastor Jones gave “pulpit messages that emphasized the grace of our adoption into the family of God followed by church families who adopted, which in turn caused other families to consider the process” creating a “domino effect.”

If Curtis’ expansive view Christian grace was restricted to “hard to place” children, older children and those with disabilities, we might hold our tongues. But Curtis would cast a wide net, gathering all the world’s orphans and take the US  back to the Baby Scoop Era (1945 to 1973) where single moms routinely surrendered their children to adoption. In fact, Curtis includes a bold print warning that many children available for adoption are infants “conceived out of wedlock”. She reassures the reader, however, that “women who conceive children out of wedlock [are] just like us—sinners—although those who choose to give birth to the baby and allow a couple to adopt are perhaps more courageous.” We first mothers are sinners? Is she seriously suggesting that the one million plus babies born each year to single mothers be raised by biological strangers?

“Child savers” like Curtis and Reverend Jones increase the demand for foreign children, resulting in wide-scale corruption. These children are often not orphans and their parents did not consent to their adoption. There’s some irony here. In the 1880’s a Presbyterian minister, Martin Van Buren Van Arsdale, founded children’s homes throughout the country which took children off the street and placed them for adoption. However, Van Arsdale “made it a cardinal principle to investigate each case thoroughly in order to avoid 'severing the bonds of blood relationship’” and accept “children who had  parents or guardians only if written surrender or commitment was given by the courts” (E. Wayne Carp, Family Matters). 

Curtis concludes with a pitch for Bethany Christian Services quoting Bethany’s president Bill Blacquiere that Bethany is “’doing God’s work, participating with Him in caring for the world’s orphans.’” Bethany is a supporter of the National Council for Adoption, the foremost opponent of opening records to adult adoptees. Although I haven’t been to church in over 50 years, I’m sure that denying adult adoptees the right to know their original identities is not doing God’s work.

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*Cultivating a Culture of Adoption

  Lorraine here: Overheard at dinner Saturday night:  A group near me was talking about the woman who had a face transplant after being bitten by a chimp...and the just-graduated-from-Harvard young woman who was among them said: If somebody wanted to have a chimp for a pet, why didn't she just adopt a child? There are so many who need to be adopted...I wasn't really part of that conversation at that point...and, Dear Reader, I admit did not turn from the man sitting next to me (her grandfather, my friend) and jump in and say something contrary. There are times I just don't have the energy to take on every comment, but now, Monday morning remorse has set in, and I'm feeling very upset that I did not.

But as Jane write,this is the pervasive culture if ideas we live in. Most people believe there are starving children everywhere who need to be adopted.

Regarding the book International Adoption shown above (from Amazon): In the past two decades, transnational adoption has exploded in scope and significance, growing up along increasingly globalized economic relations and the development and improvement of reproductive technologies. A complex and understudied system, transnational adoption opens a window onto the relations between nations, the inequalities of the rich and the poor, and the history of race and racialization, Transnational adoption has been marked by the geographies of unequal power, as children move from poorer countries and families to wealthier ones, yet little work has been done to synthesize its complex and sometimes contradictory effects.