Transnational Adoption: A Noble Cause? Female Missionaries as Pioneers of Transnational Adoption, 1945-1965

by Soojin Chung

All theology is based on autobiography. All theology has its unique color and context, and so does my missiology. My missional focus for this article is transnational adoption in the larger context of the ministry of compassion.

All theology is based on autobiography. All theology has its unique color and context, and so does my missiology. My missional focus for this article is transnational adoption in the larger context of the ministry of compassion.

My interest in adoption started when I encountered my friend, a Korean adoptee who grew up with two loving American parents. Through her, my faith in Jesus was renewed and I accepted Christ into my heart. Although she died of leukemia at the age of 24, she touched countless lives and showed what it meant to live as a disciple of Christ.

In the following years, I also coincidentally met a number of adoptive parents in Boston and was able to hear their stories. I was naturally led to read literature on international adoption, and realized that there are two sides to the story.

In recent years, the “evangelical orphan crisis” has come to the fore. Conservative Christians have urged action, citing 163 million orphans around the world who are in need of permanent homes. The resulting adoption boom has been contested and criticized from many perspectives, including the view that characterizes such adoptions as child trafficking and child abuse.

The complex issues of race, religion, Western imperialism, and identity formation also play important roles in the experiences of both parents and children. Horror stories of failed adoptions that have reached the international media have further complicated the issue.

Some of the criticisms of international adoption are indeed valid, and it is undoubtedly true that the ministry of compassion must stem from a deep commitment rather than out of selfish desires. Transnational adoption in fact originally grew from true compassion and genuine humanitarianism, and the purpose of this article is to unearth these historical roots.

The organization of the article is as follows: The first part provides biblical and theological grounds for international adoption, along with some criticisms regarding the issue. The second part is a case study of two prominent female missionaries who spearheaded the transnational adoption movement in Korea. In examining these two figures, I argue that the historical context in which adoption was born was vastly different from the contemporary evangelical adoption boom, which is parent-focused rather than child-centered.

The final section provides some practical suggestions for action. The motivation behind this article is twofold: my personal interest in and commitment to adoption and my desire to inform Christians about both the perils and benefits of international adoption. Is adoption a noble cause that Christians should embrace, or is it child trafficking? How did this movement begin? Who started it? These are some of the questions I hope to answer.

Why Christian Adoption?

The biblical basis for adoption has been one of the most controversial topics in regards to Christian responsibility towards orphans. Many people who criticize Christians for the theology behind adoption argue that passages like “A father to the fatherless” (Ps. 68:5) cannot be applied literally to promote the adoption movement. Moreover, the metaphorical “theology of adoption” that Paul employs in the Book of Romans should not be exegeted in a way that advocates the literal legal adoption of children.

When Paul said Christians have received the “adoption of sonship,” his intention was not to advocate legal adoption or foster a new movement. He was merely using a spiritual metaphor to show that by God’s grace, Christians have received a new identity as sons and daughters of Christ.

Then where can we find the biblical grounds for welcoming the orphans into our homes and adopting them as our own? The answer is simple: it goes back to our greatest commandment, in which we are called to love the Lord and our neighbors. Skepticism about applying particular biblical passages aside, Christians are simply called to tend to the needs of the most needy, the children, and the poor.

Thus, the question we should ask ourselves is not “Is adoption right/biblical?” but rather “How can we care for abandoned and displaced children in a way that meets the needs of the children most effectively?”

Mission history is replete with cases of women missionaries who were involved with orphans, child widows, and displaced and abandoned children.  

I believe the key can be found in mission history, which shows us missionaries who took on the identity of mothers in ministering to the needs of abandoned children. The most notable one is Minnie Florence Abrams, who based her missiology on her holiness spirituality and years of missionary experience.

In viewing the highest form of power as love, her missiology was heavily focused on Christian presence and service based on divine agape. She later collaborated with Pandita Ramabai, a convert from Hinduism who founded an orphanage for girls and an educational center for abandoned Hindu child widows (Robert 1997, 252).

Mission history is replete with cases of women missionaries who were involved with orphans, child widows, and displaced and abandoned children. They identified themselves as mothers—spiritually and emotionally—to these children.

The most radical and literal translation of motherhood in the form of the ministry of compassion is the act of adoption. While taking care of orphans can be seen as welcoming children as spiritual offspring, adopting a child entails the primordial boundary-crossing of bestowing an exclusive sonship or daughter-ship on an otherwise stranger.

Family—the most sacred, primary, and fundamental human institution—is redefined and restructured when adoptive parents choose to make an outsider their own. The majority of adoption literature, dominated by psychological or social scientific approaches, was heavily focused on psychological damage to the adoptees and the political agenda of post-war America when contemporary transnational adoption took shape. While acknowledging the socio-political complexity of this time, I argue that the women missionaries’ primary motivation was nonetheless genuinely humanitarian and grounded in personal belief, as evidenced in their own writings.

Case Study: South Korea

Pearl Buck, The Public Voice of a Ministry of Compassion

Pearl Buck was a second-generation Presbyterian missionary in China. She was a prolific writer who received the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize in Literature for her acclaimed book The Good Earth, a reflection of a lifetime spent among the Chinese.

As the book suggests, she had an extremely positive view of the Chinese. She believed in living with them, learning their culture, and listening to their stories. Even after suffering from the terror of the Nanking Massacre and the Communist Revolution, she recollected that the people of her memory were too kind and the land too beautiful (Buck 1962, 1). Her personal commitment to “sharing life with people” was what compelled her to live among the people and abandon imperialistic attitudes.

Pearl Buck was an adoptive mother of seven mixed-race children and believed that all children deserved a home. She founded the Welcome House in 1949, the first interracial, international adoption agency in the country. Welcome House specialized in placing mixed-race Amerasian children (a term that she coined). South Korean Amerasian babies during the Korean War consisted the majority of the adopted children.

The birth story of the Welcome House shows Buck’s personal connection to the adoption movement. In December 1948, she received a Christmas card from an adoption agency about David, a mixed-race 15-month-old baby who needed a home. The agency had been trying to find him a home, but at that time mixed-race babies were simply unadoptable.

Pearl Buck’s lifetime opposition to discrimination and her personal philosophy of human solidarity were what motivated her to act. 

Deeply moved by compassion and indignant at such social injustice, Buck and her husband, Richard Walsh, took David in themselves. She soon adopted another mixed-race child who was unwanted by others. Since 1949, the Welcome House has placed five thousand children in adoptive homes.

Pearl Buck’s lifetime opposition to discrimination and her personal philosophy of human solidarity were what motivated her to act. Using her public voice as a writer, she wrote prolifically on the issues of adoption, children with disabilities, and the poor social conditions that failed to support single mothers. Her goal was to educate and eliminate the stigma of interracial adoption.

Criticizing American society’s indifference to global welfare, Buck strived to eradicate racism, which she believed was the root of the phobia surrounding transnational adoption. She wrote, “There is no escape for the colored child…I should like to see you take an active part in all groups of people who are working for the removal of race discrimination, because children cannot be saved from the evil effects of race discrimination” (Buck 1943, 198).

She also spoke strongly against immigration laws concerning Asian countries, especially China.

Buck considered that all children without a country and home were the responsibility of Americans not because of cultural imperialism, but because of a moral duty—many war orphans were left fatherless as a result of fleeting love affairs between American soldiers and local women (Buck 1942, 451).

Moreover, she believed that Amerasian children could be a positive bridge between East and West, alleviating the racial tension and ignorance so prevalent in America in her time. Ultimately, she yearned for a universal color-blindness that would set children free to be just children, the color of their skins irrelevant.

Most importantly, Pearl Buck viewed herself as a mother. In her poem “To an Amerasian Child,” she expressed the overwhelming burden of wanting to be “left alone,” asking the child to make his own fate. She closed the poem by confessing that it was too late to turn away since she had seen the face and eyes of the child.

In this short poem, Pearl Buck expressed her staggering sense of motherly love and compassion toward the child. The “face” likely was that of her first adopted baby David. Her ministry of compassion was not only driven by her call for social justice, but also by the deeply personal experience of encountering Amerasian children.

Bertha Holt, a Mother of Korean Adoption

Bertha Holt, referred to as “Grandma Holt,” was the first missionary to adopt mixed-race children from Korea. She and her husband, Harry, founded their own international adoption agency and placed half of all Korean children adopted since 1956 (Dubinsky, 94).

Harry and Bertha Holt were not ministers or denominationally-affiliated missionaries. They were seemingly ordinary farmers and followers of Christ who lived in the quiet rural area of Creswell, Oregon. Their extraordinary journey started when they watched several films sponsored by World Vision.

They were broken by the sight of a martyred Korean pastor, war widows and orphans, amputees and lepers, and the tragedies that surrounded the Korean War. But what shattered their hearts the most was the account of the mixed-race babies, or the “GI babies.”

At that time, GI babies experienced a triple stigma: they were mixed-race, they were fatherless, and their mothers were treated as prostitutes who had borne racially “impure” babies (Oh 2015, 51). The Holts experienced a “sharp cutting like a knife into their hearts,” and decided to go to Korea to adopt GI children themselves (Holt 1956, 25).

In 1955, they adopted eight mixed-race babies and brought back four other children for other families. The publicity around this incident was groundbreaking. Bertha felt the need to raise more money for the project, and wrote multiple books detailing the history behind the Korean adoption project.

In 1956, they founded the Holt Adoption Program (HAP), which today has become Holt International Children’s Services.

It is interesting to note the relationship between Pearl Buck and the Holt family. In her book Children for Adoption, Pearl Buck wrote a detailed account of how she perceived the Holts’ adoption method as inadequate.

She was critical of the methodology of handing out questionnaires to prospective parents because few questions were related to the material capacity of the adoptive family. The majority of the questions pertained to religion, and the agency was notorious for giving children to couples who believed in Christian dogma. Buck was unsettled by this “distinctly fundamentalist” questionnaire and decided to meet Harry Holt in person (Buck 1965, 153).

She was immediately charmed by Harry’s warm personality and apparent passion for adoption, and later wrote that while she still disagreed with the approach Holt’s agency used, she understood that given the urgent circumstances of the mixed-race children, affording them a chance to live was the top priority. She specifically praised the agency’s successful adoption testimonies and stated that the Holts were “accomplishing much more than all the other agencies put together” (Buck 1965, 152).

After the death of Harry Holt in 1964, Bertha labored ceaselessly for the advancement of the agency and founded additional adoption centers in other countries. In 1972, she established a counseling and support center for single mothers in Il-San, South Korea, as well as a school for disabled children, which later became Holt School.

Until her death on July 24, 2000, Bertha advocated for homeless children and helped them find permanent families. She closed her book The Seed from the East with a prayer: “Father, please open the hearts and home and pocketbooks of the American people to help the mixed-race children in Korea. Father, we especially plead for the negro-Korean children” (Holt 1956, 243).

This was an apt closing considering her lifetime dedication to displaced GI babies, which stemmed from her deep personal conviction as a mother and a missionary.

Compassion and Action

As we have seen in the South Korean case study, the two female missionaries played a pivotal role in the inception of transnational adoption. Pearl Buck and Bertha Holt were different in their theology, missiology, and worldviews. However, both worked together to elevate the social condition of abandoned children by taking an active role as adoptive parents for a common goal: Christian service and acts of compassion.

While social and geopolitical factors may have contributed to the boom in international adoption in the 1960s and onward, Pearl Buck and Bertha Holt paved the road, despite numerous obstacles, because of their personal conviction and faith.

Through adoption, a nobody becomes somebody in the household—through this unnatural and conceivably uncomfortable process, a child or infant is given a permanent space, title, and identity. Hence, adoption involves true compassion—not in a sense of passing emotion or sorrow, but a deep-seated, heart-wrenching, gut-moving commitment. This is why the Hebrew word for compassion, rachamim, refers to the womb of Yahweh.

Compassion is so deep that it is linguistically related to a woman’s life-creating womb where life is generated through suffering and pain. The imagery of the womb as the birthplace of compassion and life is befitting by virtue of women’s pioneering role in the inception of the transnational adoption. Just like mothers giving birth through pain and suffering, women missionaries bore new life through the process of making strangers their own.

It is important to note that the historical context of the missionaries was vastly different from ours today. The demand for children was much lower during their time, and they had to actively pave the way in order to promote transnational adoption. Their priority was the well-being of the mixed-race children, and the parents’ needs were secondary, as we can see from Holts’ policy of accepting only Christian couples.

In contrast, the demand for children on the part of infertile parents is significantly higher today. Moreover, due to rapid globalization, the willingness to adopt foreign children has increased during the past decade. Unfortunately, in this climate of increased demand and decreased supply of healthy babies, the international adoption movement has become a billion-dollar industry with all kinds of malpractice.

What, then, are some practical actions we can take as a church? What can we do to prevent and actively fight against horrible injustice? The following suggestions are moderate, but I believe they represent an important step forward.

Pray. Pray that God would give us a heart for the orphans, the needy, the poor, and the weak. Pray that we would not be content in our own little Christian bubble, but that we would actively live out our faith.

Discern and Be Educated. Read books on adoption/orphan care. Go to different websites. Be discerning about the flood of information and try to see both the positive and negative aspects of the issue. Some helpful resources will be included in the “Resource” section at the end of this article. Volunteer at an orphanage long term, or work with a reputable organization that partners with local Christians. Talk to someone who has already adopted a child.

Examine Your Motivation. Many couples who are not able to have biological children think of adoption as an alternative. As we have seen, however, the inception of transnational adoption arose from the needs of the children, not the parents. Adoption must always be centered around the needs of the children, not those of the relatively privileged parents who can choose to adopt on their own terms. Most Korean orphans in the 1950s and 1960s had nowhere to go, and missionaries merely stepped in to fill the gap.

Listen to Their Stories. Going back to the theme of ‘theology as autobiography,’ we must first listen. Listen to the stories of the children. Listen to their side of the story. Listen to their ‘whys’ and hows’. When we finally sit together to listen, then will we start to see the answers.

Resources

Books on Transnational Adoption
Askeland, Lori, ed., 2006. Children and Youth in Adoption, Orphanages, and Foster Care: A Historical Handbook and Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

Bennett, Amanda, and Sara Brinton. 2015. In Defense of the Fatherless: Redeeming International Adoption & Orphan Care. Christian.

Berebitsky, Julie. 2000. Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851-1950. Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas.

Kim, Eleana J. 2010. Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press Books.

Lee, Ellen, Marilyn Lammert, and Mary Anne Hess. 2008. Once They Hear My Name: Korean Adoptees and Their Journeys Toward Identity. Tamarisk Books.

Tuan, Mia, and Jiannbin Lee Shiao. 2011. Choosing Ethnicity, Negotiating Race: Korean Adoptees in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Websites

Holt International: www.holtinternational.org/

Pearl Buck Foundation: www.psbi.org/

Adoption History: pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/index.html

U.S. Department of State: travel.state.gov/content/adoptionsabroad/en.html

USCIS: www.uscis.gov/adoption/immigration-through-adoption/hague-process

All God’s Children (Christian Adoption Agency): www.allgodschildren.org International

Adoption Net.: www.internationaladoptionnet.org/

Article References

Buck, Pearl S. 1965. Children for Adoption. New York: Random House.

______. 1962. A Bridge for Passing. John Day Co.

______. 1943. “Save the Children for What?” The Journal of Educational Sociology, 17(4).

______. 1942. “Breaking the Barriers of Race Prejudice.” The Journal of Negro Education, 11(4).

Dubinsky, Karen. 2010. Babies without Borders: Adoption and Migration across the Americas. New York: New York University Press.

Holt, Bertha. 1956. The Seed from the East. Los Angeles: Oxford Press.

Oh, Arissa. 2015. To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption. Stanford University Press.

Robert, Dana L. 1997. American Women in Mission: The Modern Mission Era 1792-1992. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press.

. . . .

Soojin Chung is in the PhD program at Boston University, studying mission history and world Christianity. She holds a BA in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia and an MDiv from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Prior to her theological training, she worked for Youth With A Mission (YWAM) in India, Thailand, and Fiji. 

EMQ, Vol. 52, No. 4. Copyright  © 2016 Billy Graham Center for Evangelism.  All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from EMQ editors.

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