The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce Page B

by my name: for I have created him for my glory, I have formed him; yea, I have made him.” Just two years after the armistice ending Korea’s civil war, which had lasted from 1950 to 1953, the reference to north and south seemed to resonate. In light of his larger undertaking Holt reflected on how the mandate to gather the “seed from the east” might mean more than just his eight children-to-be.
    The verse would become perhaps the most important passage of Scripture to Holt and his wife for the rest of their lives; Bertha even went on to write three books that referenced it: The Seed from the East, Created for God’s Glory, Bring My Sons from Afar. It would also forever change not only the lives of the approximately two hundred thousand Korean children adopted overseas and the families they joined in the United States and in Europe but also international adoption itself.
    In rescuing these children, the Holts became America’s first celebrity adoptive parents. Media gave their story heavy play not just for the spectacle of the grandfatherly Harry returning to the United States with eight babies and toddlers in tow but also for the legal mountains he and Bertha had moved to make it possible: lobbying for a special act of Congresspermitting them to adopt four times as many children at once than was legally allowed. Their story was retold in television specials, a photo spread in Life magazine, and myriad newspaper articles. A senator’s wife nominated Bertha Holt as Oregon’s “mother of the year” (though she was disqualified because her biological children were too old, in 1966 Bertha did receive the national “American Mother of the Year” award from the American Mother’s Committee). Journalists in Korea trailed Harry, a darkhaired man who often wore overalls or suspenders, and photographed him lying on the floor with a bevy of sweet-faced children crawling around him or as he led the toddlers in a line up a picturesque Korean hill. The couple was sure that the message Holt had received through Isaiah 43 wasn’t limited to their eight adoptees but that “God was telling Harry” to do something more, “to assume the responsibility of getting the rest of those children into these homes that so obviously are open to adopting them.”
    The Holts appealed to Americans to save Korean orphans from the “cold and misery and darkness of Korea into the warmth and love of your homes.” They also noted that they hoped “that every adopted child would become a born-again Christian.” Interest continued to grow. By 1956 World Vision, which briefly partnered with Holt, published an ad in the Los Angeles Times offering “A Korean Orphan for You” to families who couldn’t personally adopt but could join in the movement through sponsorship, becoming symbolic “Mother or Daddy to your own child in a Christian orphanage in Korea.”
    The Holts received requests for adoption by the hundreds and then the thousands. They began to organize regular chartered flights, with airplanes bearing as many as one hundred or more children at a time tucked into cardboard bassinets and occupying most seats in the cabin. The children became known as “mail-order babies,” and some of the Holts’ flights seemed designed to appeal to the public imagination, such as a widely covered “Thanksgiving Baby Lift.” Many of the children underwent expedited procedures and benefited from the intensive involvement of supportive US politicians, who, then as now, were eager to be associated with missionaries bringing back planeloads of babies to the United States from a poorly understood Korean warfront. What would today be considered unusual practices reigned, such as quick proxy adoptions, where Holt adopted children on behalf of foreign parents, then transported the babies back to the United States to meet their families; “order-taking” that matched children to parents’ desired age, race, and physical traits; and “prioritizing