What I'm Reading
Links, links, links!
Since the start of the year, I’ve been collecting family policing/adoption/reproductive justice–related stories that I’ve read, admired, and want to recommend. Here we go:
Ava Kofman’s “The Babies Kept in a Mysterious Los Angeles Mansion” for The New Yorker, a sensitively reported feature on a Chinese couple who exploited the unregulated nature of the $42 billion surrogacy industry to have more than twenty children by dozens of gestational carriers across the United States. The children, ranging in age from newborns to toddlers, were kept in a mansion in Arcadia that was outfitted like an institution, where they were subjected to corporal punishment by nannies. Gallingly, when police and child protective services social workers entered the home to investigate alleged physical abuse, they allowed the fact that it was “nice” and “well-kept” to sway them into overlooking signs of the children’s maltreatment.
Key takeaway: “Although it was convenient to pretend that what had happened in the Arcadia home was a private matter, impossible to foresee, each step of the couple’s reproductive spree was made possible by fertility-clinic doctors, multiple attorneys, agency coördinators, and judges, all of whom are supposed to serve as guardrails.” I’d add family policing here, which fails even when an actual situation of grievous maltreatment is right under its nose.
Jessica Schreifels and Paighten Harkens’s pair of stories on Utah’s “adoption tourism” industry for The Salt Lake Tribune, which illustrate how adoption agencies prey on pregnant women to travel to Utah to relinquish their babies, and how those agencies leave women feeling trapped and unable to change their minds. These were among the investigative stories that helped spur the passage of HB 51, a groundbreaking new piece of state legislation that reins in the industry and protects birth parents. (I’ve plugged one of those stories, by Julia Lurie at Mother Jones, in this newsletter before!)
I also have to laud the intensive advocacy work of Utah Adoption Rights, led by birth mothers Ashley Mitchell and Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, here—they worked so hard to support the passage of HB 51, and Ashley was present when Governor Spencer Cox signed the bill into law last week! HB 51 is not perfect, but it extends the revocation period (when birth mothers can choose to change their minds about adoption) from 24 to 72 hours after birth, requires all child-placing agencies in the state to be registered as nonprofits, bans financially-incentivized advertisements, and more. All of these steps will make adoption in Utah much less dangerous for birth mothers.
Meanwhile, for the right people, Virginia will apparently bend its own laws when it comes to international adoption. That’s what Claire Galofaro and Juliet Linderman reveal in “The US said a Marine could not adopt an Afghan girl. Records show officials helped him get her” for AP News. I’ve been following this story—which concerns a girl whose parents were killed by Army Rangers, who was adopted under false pretenses by a Marine and his wife in Virginia—since 2022, when the AP and the New York Times Magazine reported on it (I linked the NYT Mag story in this newsletter back then). Garofalo and Linderman’s new story is based on thousands of pages of newly released court documents that the AP fought for years to access. It unravels how the federal government worked against itself to enable the adoption by the couple (who are unsurprisingly evangelicals) in Virginia, even though the girl was being raised by family in Afghanistan.
Finally, one more story by Claire Galofaro at AP News—“She was an orphan adopted from Iran by a US veteran. The Trump administration wants to deport her.” Garofolo explains how a woman who was adopted from an Iranian orphanage at age 2 and brought to the U.S. in 1973 by an American Air Force officer was never granted citizenship due to “a fracture at the intersection of adoption and immigration law.” The woman, who is not named in reporting because of her legal situation, received a letter from DHS in February ordering her to appear for removal proceedings for overstaying her visa as a child. She has no criminal record. “It just baffles me that it’s OK to send me to a foreign country that I could potentially die or I could get imprisoned because of a clerical error,” she told AP. That was before the U.S. started a war against Iran.
This Iranian woman is one of hundreds of thousands of international adoptees in limbo, as the New York Times recently explored in a piece about adoptees who lack either citizenship because their adoptive parents failed to naturalize them, or lack proof of citizenship.
That’s all for now, though I have some big reviews in the pipeline that I hope to share soon!