How American Christians Traffick Babies Through Overseas Adoption – “The United States has Taken More Adopted Children than Every Other Country Put Together”

Most Americans don't know that the current foreign Adoption Industry in the U.S. started in the 1950s, when Evangelical Christians petitioned Congress to allow them to adopt more children from Korea during the Korean War. Harry and Bertha Holt, based out of Oregon and with six children of their own, wanted to adopt more children from Korean orphanages in South Korea. U.S. law at the time only allowed a couple to adopt 2 children from outside of the U.S., so the Holts worked with the U.S. Congress to pass a new law allowing them to adopt 8 children from South Korea. The Holts gained widespread media coverage, and they soon developed their own adoption agency to help Americans adopt Korean babies. Being Evangelical Christians with support from many evangelical leaders, such as Billy Graham, the Holts tried to place the Korean children with Christian families. Today, Holt International is a $28 million a year operation working in many countries besides Korea, and one of the largest adoption agencies in the world. But from its inception in Korea in 1955, the majority of children adopted out to the U.S. are not orphans. The children adopted out of Korea after the Korean war were mostly children from unwed mothers, many of them babies conceived by U.S. military personnel who were there during the war. Unfortunately, 90% of these Korean mothers did not want to give up their babies, but were pressured to do so. Camille Bromley, writing for The Verge, has just published an extraordinary investigative report about how the same thing happened with "Operation Baby Lift" after the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war. Everyone in America living in the U.S. in the 1970s, especially Evangelical Christians, saw "Operation Baby Lift" as a wonderful thing. But now many of those adopted children are adults, and they paint a very different picture from the one that was portrayed in the media at that time. Bromley must have spent months, if not more than a year, researching for this article and interviewing people, and I encourage everyone to read it, as it is part of our national history, and further documentation that many American Christians are child traffickers all in the name of "saving the orphans" whether the child is an orphan or not.