In her shocking new book, Kathryn Joyce uncovers how conservative
Christians have come to dominate the international adoption circuit—and
its dark underbelly.
In 2009, a van from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, carrying seven young
children and babies, was stopped as it drove outside the rural, central
Ethiopian town of Shashemene. The children in the van were wards of
Better Future Adoption Services (BFAS), a U.S. adoption agency, and had
been declared abandoned—their families unknown—in the capital city of
Addis Ababa. Police outside Shashemene arrested seven adults riding in
the van, including five BFAS employees. The staff, it appeared to some,
had sought to process children who had living family as though they had
been abandoned in anot
her region of the country, so that their adoptions
to the U.S. could proceed more quickly.
At the time, Ethiopia
was in the midst of a dramatic international adoption boom, with the
number of adoptions to U.S. parents rising from a few hundred per year
in 2004 to more than 2,000 five years later, and around 4,000
worldwide.The boom had brought substantial revenue into the country, as
agencies and adoptive parents supported newly-established orphanages
that became an attractive child care option for poor families; some
agencies paid fees to “child finders” locating adoptable children; and
the influx of Western adoption tourism brought money that trickled down
to hotels, restaurants, taxi-drivers and other service industries.
Also with the boom came early warning signs of adoption fraud and
corruption. Before the van was stopped near Shashemene, there had been a
glut of abandonment adoptions being processed in Addis Ababa. The
number of adoption cases where the parents were said to be unknown had
caught the attention of Ethiopia’s First Instance Court, the body
responsible for approving international adoptions. The court announced a
temporary suspension on processing abandonment cases that originated in
the capital until it could investigate further. For some agencies, the
news was likely a blow, forecasting long wait times to process adoptions
and frustrated clients in the U.S. But there was a way around: the
court would continue to hear cases for children abandoned in other parts
of Ethiopia.
Listen to the Story
One of the children transported in the van would later be adopted by a
Christian couple just outside Nashville: 31-year-old Jessie Hawkins, a
health and wellness author, and her 38-year-old husband, Matthew, a
marketing executive. The Hawkinses had chosen BFAS as a protection
against corrupt adoptions, assuming that because an Ethiopian woman
living in the United States, Agitu Wodajo, ran it, the agency would
operate more ethically than those lacking a local connection. Wodajo’s
public professions of Christian faith reassured them as well.