Update (June 10): The Tennessean explores viable solutions to critiques laid out in Kathryn Joyce’s The Child Catchers. In addition to featuring adoptive families “with heart for missions,” the series of three articles suggest that child sponsorship, foster care, and support of adoptive families can help address differences in communication across cultures, raising orphans’ quality of life and leaving adoption as a last–though potentially successful–option.
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Update (June 3): In a front-page story, The New York Times examined the evangelical adoption movement. It notes:
David M. Smolin, director of Samford University’s Center for Children, Law, and Ethics in Alabama and an evangelical, said the new movement has often fallen into the same traps that led a succession of countries, including Guatemala, Cambodia, Vietnam and Nepal, to close down all foreign adoptions after baby-selling scandals.
“Now people are repeating the same mistakes in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” he said.
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Update (May 10): CT editor Timothy C. Morgan reviewed Kathryn Joyce’s Child Catchers, saying that Joyce “demonizes overseas adoption through agenda-driven journalism.” Similarly, Her.meneutics author Megan Hill says Joyce’s book focuses on a few cases of adoption with negative consequences, missing out on how adoption benefits women.
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Last week, author Kathryn Joyce slammed the “evangelical movement’s adoption obsession,” critiquing what she calls an “epic mismatch of children’s needs and parents’ propensities.”
But defenders of the evangelical adoption movement are speaking out against Joyce’s claims, just in time for the release this week of her new book, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption.
Religion News Service columnist Jonathan Merritt says Joyce paints a “partial and distorted picture,” making her argument by leaning on “a slew of fringe ministries, publications, and personalities.”
Merritt writes:
Joyce curses the darkness without lighting a candle. She attempts to pour cold water on the Christian adoption movement, but her ideas for actually solving the orphan crisis that now affects more than 100 million children are more than lacking; they’re non-existent. We should expect more from even an unashamedly partisan publication like Mother Jones. Not to mention a writer who recently published a 352-page book on the subject.
Similarly, LifeWay Research president Ed Stetzer says the book is “more of a hit-and-run journalistic hatchet job on evangelical adoption than a substantive investigation of any kind.” On his blog, Stetzer offers his own Q&A roundup with evangelical adoption experts, including Bethany Christian Services’s Johnny Carr, Jedd Medefind of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, Rebecca Caswell of Lemonade International, and Orphanology coauthors Tony Merida and Rick Morton.
CT regularly reports on the issue of adoption. Recently, CT highlighted the rise of open adoptions, and looked at how adoption became new ERLC president-elect Russell Moore’s personal cause.
