[“Some parents seemed almost to fetishize the disparity between themselves and the children they sought to adopt. As one blogger wrote, “No one can get any poorer than our Bethie is. . . . We, by contrast, have all the power in the world.” That focus seemed to slide from acknowledging poor children’s struggles to denigrating kids the adoption movement kept referring to as “the least of these,” as when another adoptive mother to six described herself as “a dumpster diving orphan lunatic” who was still “afflicted with my Orphan Obsession” after adopting four kids and birthing two. “I am already part of a tribe of women that by much of the world’s standards have a disorder,” she wrote. “We wake up at night with visions of orphans going through our heads” and are fixated, she continued, on “match-making” their friends with orphans they had seen pictures of online. “Like the woman diving headfirst for the day old bread and barely ripe red bell peppers we dream and obsess over capturing and saving human treasures from being thrust into a decaying dump where they will be lost forever.”
(…) Some simply proclaim adoption as a great way to make converts. Adoption is better than simply sending money, followers have suggested, because adopting gives an opportunity to save a soul that aid alone will not. As one Christian blogger wrote when arguing against simply sponsoring children in their home countries, “You cannot make a disciple out of a child you barely see.” Cheryl Ellicott, an evangelical foster care proponent, goes further yet in her book, This Means War. A foster mother to more than fifty, Ellicott wrote, “Your main goal is not to raise well-adjusted children, but rather to bring the life-changing message of the Gospel to lost souls. If you work with a troubled, damaged child and he never becomes a successful or productive citizen, but he believes the Gospel and has a saving faith in Jesus Christ, you have succeeded. Adoption is a ministry to unsaved souls.”]
kathryn joyce, the child catchers: rescue, trafficking, and the new gospel of adoption