I had a fascinating conversation with Jill Filipovic on The Child Catchers and the orphan crisis, up now at Buzzfeed.
A big reason Christians are adopting is because in a lot of Evangelical churches the idea of the “orphan crisis” is compelling a huge amount of advocacy. That’s the idea, commonly held in these churches, that there is a global crisis composed of hundreds of millions of orphans. There are a lot of reasons why that number is really misleading and has confused people about the actual status of orphans around the world — to start, many of those children are not orphans as we think of the term, but live with a parent or extended family. But in a lot of these churches that idea, of many millions of orphans in need, has led to the assumption that it’s the Christian mission to take these children in, that this best reflects the Gospel. Families hearing this message start to have the idea that children are in incredibly desperate circumstances and adoption into any family in America — but especially to a Christian family — is going to be a vast improvement over their current situation. So families with the best of intentions start having this approach to adoption that amounts to, “We have room for one more.” And they have room for one more whether they have three biological children or whether they have ten biological children.
