Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

We Need to Tear Down the Adoption Industry

Adoption as practiced in the US is rooted in racism, imperialism, colonialism, and outright abduction. It’s time to do something different.

Joshua Mast speaking to CBS News in 2023.

On the eve of September 5, 2019, death stalked a quiet agrarian community in rural Afghanistan. First, the blades of helicopters cut through the autumn air, a hum thickening into a roar. Then bullets and explosives cut through mud walls and flesh. As American and Afghan troops descended upon her home, a young girl felt her infant sister slip out of her arms and vanish into a cloud of dust and “red fire,” as did the family and home she once knew. The infant was only 40 days old. 

The girl recalled this moment to The Associated Press as if nature itself had betrayed her: “The wind blew her out of my hands.” For her, what the West wrought that evening was an inescapable inferno. “I see this attack every night… it comes to me in my dreams.” As is often the case in episodes of US military aggression, the attack was shrouded in conflicting accounts of who was targeted, who was killed, and who managed to survive beneath the rubble.

The US claimed it was targeting an al-Qaeda compound, along with foreign fighters from Turkmenistan. Family and community members said that the Americans had attacked an Afghan farmer, his wife, and their ten children, who all lived next door to foreigners who often carried guns. The farmer’s brother and neighbors told AP that four of the children survived—he and neighbors dug through the rubble to rescue them, as well as the bodies of their parents, who they buried along with their 5 dead children. But one child—the infant who had seemingly been lost to the wind—was still missing. 

It turned out that the baby was not lost at all. She was on a military helicopter with her family’s attackers. (The raid team would soon tell an orphan rescue story for the ages, in which US troops saved the girl’s life from Afghan partner forces trying to throw her into a river— a claim supported, according to CBS, only by fellow Army Rangers on the ground that night.) Instead, she was taken to a hospital at Bagram Air Base, where Marine lawyer Joshua Mast first encountered yet another possible child-made-orphan by the United States. 

The baby, whom the US troops named “Sparrow” and who officially became known as “Baby Doe,” swiftly became subject to a multitude of competing interests. Baby Doe’s uncle—who suffered the tremendous loss of his kin, burying the dead and painstakingly accounting for the living—finally found his missing family member. For weeks, the Red Cross and Afghan officials searched for surviving relatives, eventually locating him and informing him that Doe had survived the raid. Meanwhile, Mast, along with several others, was already making plans to adopt her. The Afghan state confirmed her uncle’s familial status, the military signed off on it, and Baby Doe was reunited with her family: now to be raised by her uncle’s son and his wife, young professionals living in the city. 

What Baby Doe’s uncle and surviving family considered a miracle following a period of immense heartbreak, Joshua Mast sought to undo. Within weeks of the raid, Mast and his legal team convinced a Virginia juvenile court to grant custody of Doe to him, and days later a circuit judge, acting on an emergency request, granted a temporary adoption after being told the baby was a “stateless” orphan in desperate need of medical care. Federal officials would later say she was neither stateless nor in a health crisis, yet the adoption was finalized in December 2020. The following September, Mast—with the help of an Afghan translator—convinced Doe’s family that if they came to the US, he would help them acquire medical care for Doe and safety for all three of them amidst the fall of Kabul, knowing full well that if they stepped foot on US soil he would have legal rights to the child. In the chaos of America’s retreat, the couple made the fearful decision to board an evacuation flight. But when they arrived at Fort Pickett, Doe was taken from them and handed over to the Masts, now to be renamed “Baby L.” 

The AP captures the handoff in harrowing detail: Doe squirmed and cried as the Afghan woman reached out for her, only to have her hands pushed away by a State Department official. “It’s like you are kidnapping her,” the Afghan man said, before his wife collapsed to the floor in tears. The couple had been betrayed by the Masts, thus continuing this family’s long American-induced inferno. The Afghan woman later told the outlet, “Our hearts are broken. We have no plans for a future without her. Food has no taste and sleep gives us no rest.” This handoff would go on to spark an international incident between two sides—with Mast, an evangelical Marine Corps lawyer and his wife who adopted the infant on one side, and Baby Doe’s Afghan family, as well as the US State Department, the Justice Department, and the Taliban on the other—strange bedfellows, indeed.

In February, the Virginia Supreme Court decided to uphold the adoption, once again thrusting the controversy back to the fore, just days after the AP’s release of thousands of court documents related to the case, which revealed the extent of the Masts’ fraud and a government that went along with it until they couldn’t. These revelations are damning and wholly deserving of fervent public outrage. However, the case of “Baby Doe” isn’t exceptional—it’s illustrative of adoption as it is ordinarily practiced in the West. Child-taking, and even outright abduction at its most explicit, are the historic foundations of acceptable adoption practice today. Adoption can’t outrun this legacy; it remains constitutive of US imperialism. The power of adoption scandals like this one lies in their ability to reveal to the general public, albeit for a brief window, the contradictions of Western adoption norms, and if taken seriously, an opportunity to rethink them. 

Adoption in the West, also known as plenary adoption, functions as a legal process for the full termination of parental rights, or rather property rights, to another party. Adoption is intended to serve the interests of adopters first, relinquishing parents second, and adoptees last—providing legal protections to ensure the security of the adopter’s right to the child above all else, while masquerading as a privacy shield for the relinquishing parents. To do this, an adoptee’s birth certificate is overwritten, reflecting a new name, and in a majority of states, allowing little to no access to their original birth records or medical history. The “better life” that is promised for so many adoptees fails to consider the trauma of severance and alienation inherent to adoption. Research shows that adoptees are overrepresented in mental health settings and are four times more likely to attempt........

© The Nation