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A review by hekate24
The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce
5.0
Popsugar 2022 challenge: A book with a misleading title
In the introduction, the author says she’s deliberately chose a title that could be interpreted a bunch of different ways based on your perspective. For me the title conjures up an image of people “catching” adoptive children as though they grew on trees and have no prior history of their own… Which is inherently misleading. And based on the policies pushed by evangelicals in this book, I think that’s how some people do think of adoptees as a tabula rasa.
I feel like every year for a while now I’ve been reading a book about how evangelicals get caught up in politics and culture wars, if only to better understand How We Got Here. This is somehow even more infuriating than the excellent [b:Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation|53121662|Jesus and John Wayne How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation|Kristin Kobes Du Mez|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1611376522l/53121662._SY75_.jpg|73351359]. I think it’s important to understand that - contrary to bad reviews I’ve seen of this book - this author is not against adoption at all. Yes, she talks about a lot of worst case scenarios. This is because this book’s thesis is about how American evangelicals have really inflated perceptions of how many adoptable babies there are out there and have proceeded to manipulate and extort birth parents in America and abroad to meet that demand. Furthermore, there’s an evangelical emphasis on how adoption supposedly mirrors being saved by God. This ends up instilling a pretty much literal god complex in adoptive parents who go into the adoption with that ideology front of mind. When you throw all these factors together it often makes for damaging and heartbreaking situations. This book is highlighting this particular aspect.
It also explores cultural factors that lead to birth parents reluctantly giving up their children in some cases and how those factors can be changed. There are several case examples of birth parents in America and South Korea giving up their children because the social stigma against them and the child would have been too much to bear. These women were often groomed and treated as heroes by the adoption agencies but would be scolded for having spread their legs if they ever made noise about wanting to keep and parent their child. Therefore, oftentimes the same entities pushing adoption as an act of salvation are responsible for the same social pressures that have made mothers decide to give up their children in the first place. Which means for all the noise made about adopting every orphan out there, there would be fewer abandoned children if society simply made it easier for all families to parent in peace … even if those families are (gasp) not a heterosexual nuclear family (or, hell, even if there was more of a safety net for hetero nuclear families in times of struggle.
I definitely found this book very compelling and interesting. It introduced me to a lot of complexities that I’d never even considered before. Again, I don’t think this book hates adoption. I think it simply encourages the reader to respect the agency of people like adopters and birth parents and to reconsider the hold that white savior narratives tend to have on the American psyche. I think that’s a good thing, especially when it’s backed up with a lot of data and context like this book is.
In the introduction, the author says she’s deliberately chose a title that could be interpreted a bunch of different ways based on your perspective. For me the title conjures up an image of people “catching” adoptive children as though they grew on trees and have no prior history of their own… Which is inherently misleading. And based on the policies pushed by evangelicals in this book, I think that’s how some people do think of adoptees as a tabula rasa.
I feel like every year for a while now I’ve been reading a book about how evangelicals get caught up in politics and culture wars, if only to better understand How We Got Here. This is somehow even more infuriating than the excellent [b:Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation|53121662|Jesus and John Wayne How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation|Kristin Kobes Du Mez|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1611376522l/53121662._SY75_.jpg|73351359]. I think it’s important to understand that - contrary to bad reviews I’ve seen of this book - this author is not against adoption at all. Yes, she talks about a lot of worst case scenarios. This is because this book’s thesis is about how American evangelicals have really inflated perceptions of how many adoptable babies there are out there and have proceeded to manipulate and extort birth parents in America and abroad to meet that demand. Furthermore, there’s an evangelical emphasis on how adoption supposedly mirrors being saved by God. This ends up instilling a pretty much literal god complex in adoptive parents who go into the adoption with that ideology front of mind. When you throw all these factors together it often makes for damaging and heartbreaking situations. This book is highlighting this particular aspect.
It also explores cultural factors that lead to birth parents reluctantly giving up their children in some cases and how those factors can be changed. There are several case examples of birth parents in America and South Korea giving up their children because the social stigma against them and the child would have been too much to bear. These women were often groomed and treated as heroes by the adoption agencies but would be scolded for having spread their legs if they ever made noise about wanting to keep and parent their child. Therefore, oftentimes the same entities pushing adoption as an act of salvation are responsible for the same social pressures that have made mothers decide to give up their children in the first place. Which means for all the noise made about adopting every orphan out there, there would be fewer abandoned children if society simply made it easier for all families to parent in peace … even if those families are (gasp) not a heterosexual nuclear family (or, hell, even if there was more of a safety net for hetero nuclear families in times of struggle.
I definitely found this book very compelling and interesting. It introduced me to a lot of complexities that I’d never even considered before. Again, I don’t think this book hates adoption. I think it simply encourages the reader to respect the agency of people like adopters and birth parents and to reconsider the hold that white savior narratives tend to have on the American psyche. I think that’s a good thing, especially when it’s backed up with a lot of data and context like this book is.