When Adoption is a War Crime
Although most people in the United States continue to think of adoption as an unqualified social good, it can also be thought of as a war crime and a violation of human rights.
The most evident example of this today is the illegal and immoral removal of Ukrainian children from their families and their adoption by Russian nationals, presumably to culturally eradicate Ukrainian culture and nationhood. According to this article in The Guardian from Feburary 2023, over 14,000 Ukrainian children have been forcibly adopted. (I’m guessing the actual number is much higher.) As the BBC reports (March 16, 2023), the U.N. has declared the illegal and forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia as a war crime.
Human trafficking and forced adoption is, of course, a grave human rights violation, but using forced adoption as a war tactic has a long history, as children represent new futures. Transforming victims of war into new national citizens makes children obvious targets for policies of state violence and genocide, carried out through separation from their families and forced assimilationist policies imposed by grafting them on to new families and reeducating them. Removing children from their parents and recycling them into new kinds of citizens with new national histories and futures has been practiced in a wide array of both international and national conflicts. There’s a lot of precedent for this practice and almost always some kind of U.S. involvement.
The Korean War of the 1950s generated a huge number of orphaned children, many of whom were sent to the United States for adoption after a special act from Congress allowed the Holt family to adopt eight Korean children in 1955. The Holts would become major players in the new trend of international adoption of children, particularly from South Korea. The early years of their agency promised quick and easy adoption practices, which many adoption professionals considered dangerous, were nonetheless often seen by the public as a model of evangelical charity and goodwill. Holt International continues to operate today out of Eugene, Oregon. South Korea continues to export large numbers of children to the United States, decades after the official end of the war.
In 1975, the United States withdrew from its war in Vietnam in 1975. The end of wartime operations, however, doesn’t end with military withdrawal, as the messy human costs of war continue. As war always does, this one generated not only war orphans because of high numbers of Vietnamese casualties, but also left a huge number of Vietnamese women with children fathered by American GIs. In response, the U.S. government launched Operation Babylift, a mass evacuation program designed to transport Vietnamese orphans to the United States, Canada, and Australian for adoption. Although presumably a humanitarian effort, Operation Babylift generated controversy of the morality of exporting large numbers of orphaned children to the United States for adoption. Reviewing news stories in the New York Times about Vietnamese orphans in 1975 and 1976 suggests concern on the part of immigration officials about whether the children were actually orphans of if they had parents and had been trafficked to the United States against their will.1 The 1970s surge of Vietnamese orphans (and potentially non orphans) brought to the United States established adoption as an important part of post-war resolution.
In Guatemala, the destructive state-sponsored armed conflict of 1960-1996 not only caused huge numbers of civilian causalities, but also resulted in a surge of stolen children in the aftermath of army massacres. Many were adopted by the very army officers that had murdered their parents. Others became part of the generation of children adopted by U.S. families. As This American Life (May 25, 2012) documented in its episode that explored the adoption of a survivor of the 1982 massacre of the village of Dos Erres, many victims of these forced adoptions did not know about the history or circumstances that led to their adoption. Many of these forced adoptions became part of the skyrocketing post-conflict wave of adoptions to U.S. families in the 2000s. The stolen children of the civil conflict gave way to a new generation of Guatemalan children (many of them indigenous Maya) stolen by Guatemalan and foreign traffickers, corrupt judiciaries, American adoption brokers, and ultimately adopted U.S. adoptive families. The Guatemalan adoption program, responsible for exporting 30,000 children, ultimately became a trafficking racket so obvious that it was shut down in 2007.
Authoritarian states often practice the forced adoption of political subversives and critics to maintain social order through the politics of state terror. The New York Times reported in 2021 that hundreds—possibly thousands—of Chilean children has been stolen from their parents during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). Although the Pinochet government engaged in widespread human right abuses, the legacy of the forced and coerced adoptions has been harder to trace, as anywhere from 8000-20,000 children were adopted by foreigners. We don’t know how many of those children know about their Chilean pasts, but many are now searching. The Guardian reported on the dictatorship’s policy of coercing poor and largely indigenous Mapuche women to relinquish their children for international adoption, a practice that supported not only the new economic shift to Chile’s famous neoliberal economy, but also a vision of the future Chilean state and the kind of people it both wanted and didn’t want.
Argentina’s so-called dirty war of 1974 to 1983 unleashed nearly a decade of state terror against supposed political subversives. Secret police captured, killed, and disappeared nearly 30,000 people, many of whom were murdered on the “death flights” (The Guardian, March 24, 2023) and thrown to their deaths into the Atlantic ocean. The babies of political enemies were taken from their parents and adopted by the families of the Argentine military officers who had killed their parents (The Guardian, January 16, 2023). They were given new names and identities in an effort to conceal their origins. Wide-scale efforts are now underway using DNA technology to locate the stolen children and reunite them with their families of origin. Since 1977, the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo has also made efforts to identify disappeared children and grandchildren.
And then there’s the legacy of forced adoption in the United States. No one wants to think about these adoptions as war crimes, as they happened in a nation ostensibly not at war or under dictatorship. (On the other hand, I’d argue the U.S. war on women has been going on forever.) But the politics are much the same, despite the presumable peacetime context. Although not under dictatorship, but still under a different type of pressure, huge numbers of poor mothers in the United States (and Canada, the UK, Ireland, and Australia) relinquished their children under conditions of force or coercion for adoption by families considered more socially desirable. Many are still searching for their stolen children too. These adoptions aren’t so far in the past, either. As NBC reported in 2021, the Baptist-affiliated Bethesda Home for Girls forced pregnant women in the 1980s and 1990s to relinquish their newborn babies for adoption to Christian families, an operation characterized as as “a baby selling factory.”
Returning to the present moment, Let’s also not forget that the United States also has a long and complicated history with adoptions of Ukrainian children, even in presumable peacetime. Many U.S. adoptive parents sought to adopt from Ukraine prior to the Russian war, a trend that continues today. Despite Russia’s devastating war on Ukraine, potential adoptive parents are still waiting to finalize the international adoptions of Ukrainian children they now claim as their own. Until the war started, Ukraine has served as one of the leading sending countries of adopted children, surpassing China in 2021 (U.S. Department of State, 2021). The United States serves as the receiving nation of these adoptions. U.S. nonprofits have leapt into the The Russian war has (at least temporarily) halted adoptions of Ukrainian children.
Although we might think that these adoptees were saved by the goodness of foreigners or given a better life, make no mistake: these are war crimes. The appropriation of children is a war tactic, aimed at humiliating and demoralizing the enemy. Wars create orphans overseas, but those orphans also satisfy foreign demands for children at home. Adoption, as I have long argued, serves to demarcate body politics in both real and symbolic ways and to unmake and remake certain types of nations and citizens. As long as there’s war, the twin military and adoption-industrial complexes will roll on.
Bibliography
"U.S. TOLD TO CHECK VIETNAM CHILDREN: A JUDGE ORDERS IMMIGRATION SERVICE TO BE CERTAIN PARENTS ARE NOT LIVING." New York Times (1923-), May 23, 1975. https://denverlibrary.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/u-s-told-check-vietnam-children/docview/120398506/se-2.