The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce Read Free Book Online Page B

stayed at the embassy in a makeshift day care. “Very extraordinary measures were taken to save the lives of over 1,100 children,” Rhatigan said. “In light of the emergency situation, I think they did everything they possibly could have.”
    In the end some 2,100 children were adopted out of Haiti after the earthquake, including more than 1,150 children to the United States and about 900 more to Europe and Canada. It’s not a huge number, but it was double the country’s normal standard and a sizable percentage of international adoptions to the United States in 2010. About 350 of the children sent to the United States represented adoption cases that were nearly final, whereas the remainder—the vast majority of the humanitarian parole cases—were in the second, more ambiguous category. “This acute augmentation in figures shows that inter-country adoptions were disturbingly ‘over’ prioritized during the emergency,” a report from International Social Services concluded. The report also found that the expedited procedures “resulted in what one can only describe as chaos for all parties involved,” with no Haitian oversight body, no investigation ofchildren’s surviving family, and with Haitian government officials who were as disconnected from adoption policy as the minister of agriculture being called upon to approve children’s adoption paperwork.
    After the Haiti earthquake, several congressional bills were proposed, and Christian bloggers lobbied hard for them. There was the HOPE Act—an acronym for Haitian Orphan Placement Effort—that was sponsored by Republican Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan. This bill sought to expand humanitarian parole adoptions to children who hadn’t been in the process of being adopted. And there was the Help HAITI Act, introduced by Republican Representative Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska, an antiabortion stalwart whose bill aimed to “help Haiti” by expediting permanent resident status and, thus, eventually citizenship for Haitian adoptees rushed into the country under humanitarian parole. Controversy almost struck down the bill in late November 2010, when an unnamed Democratic aide told Congressional Quarterly that Democrats were considering tying the bill to President Obama’s DREAM Act, which would have created a path to legal residency for undocumented children whose parents had brought them into the country. Conservatives reacted with outrage, with Rightwing News sputtering, “Think of it . . . if Republicans vote against the DREAM Act . . . they would also be voting AGAINST the orphans.” Once again the lines between which sorts of poor people from developing countries deserved Americans’ help were clearly drawn.
    “This [bill] is about Haitian orphans and their adoptive American families,” said Fortenberry, seemingly unaware of how that definition conflicted with the bill title’s larger promise to “Help Haiti.” “To leverage that bill for a highly controversial immigration measure was just wrong.” The bill passed, without any association with the DREAM Act, on December 1. Fortenberry called it a “Christmas present” for adoptive families.
    GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS often bend to pressure from constituents when it comes to adoption, seizing the opportunity for an easy PR boost and not recognizing the rationale behind adoption restrictions. As Karen Moline, a board member of Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform (PEAR), an adoptive parents’ advocacy group, said, “Congress’s slant is that international adoption is good, let’s get those kids out. They don’t understand the business aspect of it, just the humanitarian side.”
    But at least for a short time the Silsby affair changed the script for how adoption ethics are discussed, bringing a critique of Western imperialism—a topic usually reserved for academia—into the public sphere. For Moline, “Laura Silsby did a good thing. She put a face to the worst part of what international