Two articles, same day, December 11, 2008. I couldn’t fit both articles into the headline.
From the Boston Globe: The problem with saving the world’s ‘orphans’
From the Baptist Standard: Adoption: A calling or command?
These two articles illustrate how far the adoption discussion has come in the last 10 years, and how divided it is getting. Ten years ago, you would not have seen either article in print. Back then the discussion was pitched around seriously dumb comments like why you can’t pop them out the normal way. Now the Baptist Standard quotes a director of adoptions at Bethany who says “there has been a ‘paradigm shift’ in the way Americans view adoption.”
That is true. Which may account for some of these statements:
According to the U.S. State Department, there are an estimated 120,000 children available for adoption in the United States. And there are an estimated 143 million orphans around the world.
With more than two billion Christians living today, the feat of eliminating the world’s orphan crisis seems realistic. The church is being challenged with questions of duty when it comes to orphan care and adoption. Do Christians have a responsibility to adopt?
. . .
Worship Pastor David Peyton, an adoptive parent in the process of bringing home two children from Haiti, said his own family’s experience inspired his vision “to get more orphan children into Christian homes.”
Swing over to the article from the Globe and you’ll be sobered up by the following:
By heading to a poor, underdeveloped, or war-torn country to adopt a baby, Westerners can inadvertently achieve the opposite of what they intend. Instead of saving a child, they may create an orphan. The large sums of money that adoption agencies offer for poor countries’ babies too often induce unscrupulous operators to buy, coerce, defraud, or kidnap children from families that would have loved, cared for, and raised those children to adulthood.
How does this misunderstanding happen? One problem is the word “orphan.” UNICEF reports 132 million orphans worldwide. UNICEF’s odd definition includes “single orphans” who have lost just one parent, and “double orphans” being cared for by extended families.
Cold water much? I don’t think I’ve seen such polarized views since the 1970s abortion debate. These people can’t even agree on what the statistics mean. I mean, even evangelical Richard Cizik slipped on NPR and said he supported gay civil unions. There’s no slippage on this one.
Ten years ago, anti-adoption sentiment was sporadic and neurotic. That voice is calmer now, and gaining respectability every day. Check out the author of the Globe article and the Brandeis University Institute for Investigative Journalism she is associated with. Also check out The Lie We Love by the same author.
It will be interesting to see how the push for Christian international adoption fares in this climate. This article is not a one-shot deal. In 2007, Focus on the Family made “orphan care” one of its new mandates. In 2007, the group hosted the Evangelical Orphan Care and Adoption Summit at Colorado Springs. I don’t really know yet if this is the twilight of international adoption but it strikes me that we’re seeing signs of it. Besides, if Focus has gotten on the train, this is a broad hint for me to get off.
Filed under: adoption, kids, life, solo life , Christian homes, Focus on the Family, international adoption, orphans, The Lie We Love
And in Arkansas they passed an initiative which bans non-married couples (read gay) from adopting. So they’re still much more concerned about their homophobia than they are about the children.
It’s so ironic that they’re plugging international adoption at this exact moment. But saving the world’s babies for Christian homes may prove difficult depending on how IA regulations shape up in the years to come.
I just discovered the anti adoption movement a few months ago. I can see a lot of valid points to it. At the same time, I’m not ready to say its 100% evil either. I think we need to focus on finding a middle ground, because truely orphaned children need homes, and women who do not want to parent need options.