#Baby Veronica #ICWA: Future Threats coming

Another book about this appalling history

The Adoption Crunch, the Christian Right, and the Challenge to Indian Sovereignty

By Kathryn Joyce

About Kathryn Joyce

Kathryn Joyce is the author of The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption and Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement (Beacon Press 2009). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, Slate, Mother Jones, the Atlantic, and many other publications.

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While the demand for adoptable babies is increasing in the United States—driven in large part by evangelical Christians—the number of babies available for adoption is declining. Adoption agencies are now targeting tribal nations as a potential new source of babies to adopt, and forming alliances that threaten to undermine the sovereignty of Native American nations.

**This article appears in the Winter 2014 issue of The Public Eye magazine.**

On September 23, 2013, a child-custody battle that was nearly five years in the making came to its conclusion in Oklahoma when an Army veteran from the Cherokee Nation, Dusten Brown, handed over his daughter, Veronica, to Matt and Melanie Capobianco, a White couple from South Carolina who had raised her for the first two years of her life.¹

Brown gained custody of four-year-old Veronica in December 2011, after a South Carolina court ruled that the adoption process had violated federal Indian law. Brown’s attorneys also argued that Christina Maldonado—Brown’s ex-fiancé and Veronica’s biological mother, who is Latina—had deliberately concealed plans to let the Capobiancos adopt her.²  As the custody decision was reversed following a 2013 Supreme Court ruling,³ and Veronica was tucked into the Capobiancos’ car to return to South Carolina, the scene was broadcast across national and social media to two polarized camps. Brown’s supporters condemned the Capobiancos as baby-snatchers stealing an Indian child from her loving father, as tens of thousands of Native children had been systematically removed from their families in decades past. The Capobiancos’ supporters condemned Brown as a deadbeat dad who had given up his rights long ago and was hiding behind an obsolete law.

...In the 1950s and 1960s, boarding schools gave way to the Indian Adoption Project, which removed children from Native homes and placed them in foster care or adoptive homes. By the 1970s, an astonishing one-quarter to one-third of all Indian children in the United States had been taken away from their families, and 85-90 percent of them were placed in non-Indian families.  The generation came to be known as the “Lost Birds.”⁵⁵


“There were literally American Indian communities where there were no children,” said Terry Cross. As the broader Native American community realized what was happening and began to collect testimony for Congress, other stories emerged: of Native American women pressured into relinquishing babies for adoption just after birth while still under the effects of anesthesia, and of women waking up to find that their babies were gone and, sometimes, that they had themselves been sterilized.⁵⁶

 Read more→  HERE

What if everything you thought about adoption was wrong?

 http://www.amazon.com/The-Child-Catchers-Trafficking-ebook/dp/B00BKRW582 The Evangelical Christian adoption movement: The orphan crisis that wasn't

Evangelical Christians are adopting children in large numbers - but are they doing more harm than good? "Joyce's book is a powerful call to action, even for those of us who thought we knew something about the ethical issues posed by the adoption industry. But she is pushing back against an evangelical mega-church culture where leaders have convinced their followers that there is no greater crisis today than the plight of orphans, and that it is a Christian duty to rescue these poor children. There are many ways to help children and family in need, and the fact that the Evangelical churches want to be involved in social justice causes is laudable. But to actually help, they need to listen to the voices of adopted children and the families who have placed them for adoption...."

Read this excellent review of the CHILD CATCHERS:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/2013516308692198.html?utm_campaign=Listly&utm_medium=list&utm_source=lastly

and check this out too: http://www.adoptionbirthmothers.com/the-child-catchers/

NPR interview with Kathryn Joyce:

The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce

Hardcover, 272 pages, Perseus Books Group, List Price: $26.99 |purchase

 

The author of Quiverfull reveals how adoption has become entangled in the conservative Christian agenda as a reflection of pro-life initiatives, explaining how child and family well-being has become a lesser priority in a market increasingly driven by profit and religious ideology.

Read an excerpt of this book

 

Interview: How Evangelical Christians Are Preaching The New Gospel Of Adoption

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Fresh Air from WHYY

34 min 35 sec

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http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=177350912&m=177469443

AMAZON Book Description

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 long been enmeshed in the politics of reproductive rights, pitched as a “win-win” compromise in the never-ending abortion debate. But as Kathryn Joyce makes clear in The Child Catchers, 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 exposé 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, pulpit command.
Anyone who seeks to adopt—of whatever faith or no faith, and however well-meaning—is affected by the evangelical adoption movement, whether they know it or not. The movement has shaped the way we think about adoption, the language we use to discuss it, the places we seek to adopt from, and the policies and laws that govern the process. In The Child Catchers, Kathryn Joyce reveals with great sensitivity and empathy why, if we truly care for children, we need to see more clearly.

Related articles

• Where is the Line Between Adoption and Child Buying? | Dissident Voice (towardchange.wordpress.com)