The shadow of Trump’s family separation policy is long. In its darkness: children who were ripped away from their parents, now being adopted out to American families. All with the help of those who claim to stand up for children because they are “pro-life”.
An Associated Press investigation earlier this month found that children across the country are being stripped from their parents and handed over to new families, who are able to petition for custody of them – and that state court judges can grant that custody without notifying the children’s parents. Thanks to a hastily implemented family separation policy, there are hundreds of migrant children in foster care or detention centers whose parents undoubtedly want them. But if their parents have been deported, reunification is more difficult – especially if more-powerful American foster parents decide they want to keep the child they are supposed to be temporarily caring for.
According to the AP, “more than 300 parents were deported to Central America without their children this summer.” Many of those parents likely had legitimate asylum claims but did not get fair hearings (or any hearings at all). Their children are at risk of being permanently and legally given over to wealthier American families who seem to think they deserve the children of the poor and the vulnerable.
For this, you can thank the pro-life movement.
The organization in charge of many of these family placements is Bethany Christian Services: an anti-abortion, Christian adoption agency that only started placing foster kids with same-sex couples this year, and only because they got sued. Many other children are being fostered via other conservative, anti-abortion Christian groups. These groups claim that they work to reunite families and that they do not put migrant children up for adoption; they also have a history of exploitative adoption practices, pushing vulnerable women to continue unplanned pregnancies, and then pushing them again to surrender their children for adoption, sometimes even conditioning support on consenting to adopt out.
The pro-life Christian movement has long pushed the idea that adoption is a gift and a win-win. As journalist Kathryn Joyce has extensively reported, evangelical churches lean on adoption as a way of creating rainbow churches and “saving” vulnerable children. They claim there are countless orphans just waiting to be scooped up by good (and relatively wealthy) Christian families.
It is, of course, not the case that there are countless children whose parents have died and who have no one else to care for them – how many children do you know who, if their parents passed away, would have no extended family, friends or community members who would step up? It’s actually not that easy to find adoptable children, especially if you are looking for, as most parents are, healthy infants. The vast majority of American women who become pregnant either give birth or terminate; it turns out that women who don’t want children at that particular moment also don’t want to be forced to continue a pregnancy.
Legal abortion has indeed depressed the domestic adoption market, which has pushed pro-life adoption groups to look overseas. And because the claim that there is a glut of adoptable children is in fact a fiction, many of these groups have resorted to fraud, exploitation and what amounts to baby-stealing. This is all justified by the arrogant assumption that American Christian families provide better homes for children than, say, a poor Ethiopian mother ever could.
It’s that same assumption that allows foster parents to feel justified in laying claim to wanted children whose parents have been profoundly victimized by US policy.
The pro-life focus on fetuses and babies to the total exclusion of the pregnant woman doesn’t help, either. There’s a profound disrespect for maternity in the anti-abortion cheer of “just give the baby up for adoption!” There is no just in being pregnant for nearly 10 months, nor in risking your health and life to carry a pregnancy, nor in giving birth, nor in surrendering a child. Adoption can be a great thing when all parties are fully consenting. It can also be a deeply difficult, heart-rending thing – and a traumatic one when it’s forced or coerced.
Today’s pro-life movement, though, has wholly disregarded the pregnant woman. They don’t trust her to make her own reproductive choices. They demonize her: by, for example, claiming that African American women are engaging in “black genocide” by ending pregnancies. They exhibit condescending faux concern for women with crisis pregnancies, only to oppose the exact policies that would help vulnerable women parent their own children. They push a system in which less powerful, poorer women reproduce in the service of more powerful, better-resourced Christian families.
That is the landscape upon which the current situation of family separation has been able to thrive. It is the landscape upon which Christian organizations, the Department of Homeland Security, and state court judges have apparently enabled the legal transfer of children away from loving but poor and undocumented parents to people who claim to value life and have the best interests of children at heart. It strips children from their families. And it strips mothers of their babies – something that has never been a high concern for pro-life groups, but should shock and disturb all of us.