President Obama has already dispatched an additional 21,000 American troops to Afghanistan and soon will decide whether to send thousands more. That would be a fateful decision for his presidency, and a group of former intelligence officials and other experts is now reluctantly going public to warn that more troops would be a historic mistake.
The group’s concern — dead right, in my view — is that sending more American troops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban in repelling the infidels.
“Our policy makers do not understand that the very presence of our forces in the Pashtun areas is the problem,” the group said in a statement to me. “The more troops we put in, the greater the opposition. We do not mitigate the opposition by increasing troop levels, but rather we increase the opposition and prove to the Pashtuns that the Taliban are correct.
“The basic ignorance by our leadership is going to cause the deaths of many fine American troops with no positive outcome,” the statement said.
The group includes Howard Hart, a former Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Pakistan; David Miller, a former ambassador and National Security Council official; William J. Olson, a counterinsurgency scholar at the National Defense University; and another C.I.A. veteran who does not want his name published but who spent 12 years in the region, was station chief in Kabul at the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and later headed the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center.
“We share a concern that the country is driving over a cliff,” Mr. Miller said.
Mr. Hart, who helped organize the anti-Soviet insurgency in the 1980s, cautions that Americans just don’t understand the toughness, determination and fighting skills of the Pashtun tribes. He adds that if the U.S. escalates the war, the result will be radicalization of Pashtuns in Pakistan and further instability there — possibly even the collapse of Pakistan.
These experts are not people who crave publicity; I had to persuade them to go public with their concerns. And their views are widely shared among others who also know Afghanistan well.
“We’ve bitten off more than we can chew; we’re setting ourselves up for failure,” said Rory Stewart, a former British diplomat who teaches at Harvard when he is not running a large aid program in Afghanistan. Mr. Stewart describes the American military strategy in Afghanistan as “nonsense.”
I’m writing about these concerns because I share them. I’m also troubled because officials in Washington seem to make decisions based on a simplistic caricature of the Taliban that doesn’t match what I’ve found in my reporting trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Among the Pashtuns, the population is not neatly divisible into “Taliban” or “non-Taliban.” Rather, the Pashtuns are torn by complex aspirations and fears.
Many Pashtuns I’ve interviewed are appalled by the Taliban’s periodic brutality and think they are too extreme; they think they’re a little nuts. But these Pashtuns also admire the Taliban’s personal honesty and religious piety, a contrast to the corruption of so many officials around President Hamid Karzai.
Some Taliban are hard-core ideologues, but many join the fight because friends or elders suggest it, because they are avenging the deaths of relatives in previous fighting, because it’s a way to earn money, or because they want to expel the infidels from their land — particularly because the foreigners haven’t brought the roads, bridges and irrigation projects that had been anticipated.
Frankly, if a bunch of foreign Muslim troops in turbans showed up in my hometown in rural Oregon, searching our homes without bringing any obvious benefit, then we might all take to the hills with our deer rifles as well.
In fairness, the American military has hugely improved its sensitivity, and some commanders in the field have been superb in building trust with Afghans. That works. But all commanders can’t be superb, and over all, our increased presence makes Pashtuns more likely to see us as alien occupiers.
That may be why the troop increase this year hasn’t calmed things. Instead, 2009 is already the bloodiest year for American troops in Afghanistan — with four months left to go.
The solution is neither to pull out of Afghanistan nor to double down. Rather, we need to continue our presence with a lighter military footprint, limited to training the Afghan forces and helping them hold major cities, and ensuring that Al Qaeda does not regroup. We must also invest more in education and agriculture development, for that is a way over time to peel Pashtuns away from the Taliban.
This would be a muddled, imperfect strategy with frustratingly modest goals, but it would be sustainable politically and militarily. And it does not require heavy investments of American and Afghan blood.
NEARLY 14 years after peace for Bosnia was hammered out in Ohio, the hills rising up around Sarajevo can still lead a visitor to uncomfortable thoughts about sightlines for snipers.
As I stood there in person on a visit back in May with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the violence of the ’90s didn’t feel so far away. Mr. Biden barnstormed through the Balkans on Air Force 2, also stopping in Serbia and Kosovo, with the goal of trying to draw flagging attention back to the region, delivering his sternest lecture to the Bosnian Parliament, warning against falling back onto “old patterns and ancient animosities.”
Mr. Biden is not alone in his warnings. In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, under the headline “The Death of Dayton,” Patrice C. McMahon and Jon Western write that because of ethnic divisions that refuse to heal, widespread corruption and political deadlock, “the country now stands on the brink of collapse” and “unless checked, the current trends toward fragmentation will almost certainly lead to a resumption of violence.”
Whether or not that happens, the peacekeeping force meant to crack down on any outbreaks now has fewer than 2,000 troops. And the American contingent, a promise and a deterrent to those who justifiably doubt the European Union’s resolve if force is needed, has left entirely.
These circumstances might be cause for widespread alarm, if anyone had noticed them in the first place. It didn’t used to be that way. It used to be that you didn’t have to shout to get heard on the subject of Bosnia. The name alone was enough to evoke the rape, torture, burned-out homes and mass graves that marked a three-and-a-half-year war in which roughly 100,000 people were killed, a majority of them Muslims.
But that was a long time ago. For much of the Western world Bosnia is an all-but-forgotten problem, far down the list of priorities after countries like Iraq, Iran and North Korea. As if to drive the point home, the chief architect of the Dayton peace accords in the Clinton administration, Richard C. Holbrooke, now a special envoy in the Obama administration, has his hands full with the war in Afghanistan and the even more complex situation in neighboring, nuclear-armed Pakistan. Mr. Holbrooke has complained in recent years of a “distracted international community.”
If the drift of public attention away from Bosnia is a result of more pressing issues in an age of terrorism and rogue nuclear states, it is also a function of the simple fact that this ethnically divided country finds itself in the middle of a far more united, stable and at times downright boring Europe than in the days of the civil war.
Bosnia could well return to violence, but it has lost a large measure of what might be called its Franz Ferdinand threat. For all of the moral and humanitarian arguments for getting involved in the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia, there was also the severe lesson from Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914, which provided the spark for World War I. That lesson was simple: conflicts start in the Balkans, but they do not necessarily stay there.
The end of the cold war brought elation but also trepidation. In hindsight, the march of countries like Poland, Hungary and Romania from the Warsaw Pact into NATO and the European Union may appear steady and all but predestined, but the paths of those newly freed countries were anything but certain at the time. Bosnia was a starkly destabilizing factor in a far more unstable continent. The fighting that began in the spring of 1992 was not quite three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and less than a year after the attempted coup of August 1991 in Russia, and came hard on the heels of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Today, the picture has changed again. Now that Europe is no longer the fault line of a divided world, it looks ever more like a retirement community with good food and an excellent cultural calendar. Spies cut from the George Smiley cloth could really come in from the cold, retiring with legions of their countrymen to the Spanish coast, with no more to worry about than the decline of the pound against the euro and the sinking value of their condos.
The European Union has its share of problems, including a rapidly graying population projected to shrink by 50 million people by 2050 and deep troubles in integrating the immigrants — particularly from Muslim countries — it so drastically needs to reverse the demographic slide. And the union’s energy security depends on its often capricious and at times menacing neighbor to the east, Russia.
Russia’s invasion of Georgia last summer served as a stern reminder that things can still get rough outside of the gated community, and certainly made newer members like Poland and Estonia nervous about the sturdiness of the fence.
Renewed fighting in Bosnia may not launch World War III, but it could well spread to other parts of the former Yugoslavia, including Kosovo. Kosovo declared independence last year, and the United States Embassy in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, burned at the hands of angry rioters. I walked the streets in the aftermath, interviewing Serbs, and found rage, sadness and desperation even among the most pro-Western elements of society.
It was something of a pleasant surprise, then, to return with Mr. Biden this year and find average Serbs on the same streets sounding deeply pragmatic about the visit by an American politician who not only represented the superpower that had bombed them but was personally an early and staunch supporter of Muslims in both Bosnia and Kosovo. While there were holdouts, most said that jobs and freedom to travel trumped old enmities.
With any luck the sentiment will find more traction in neighboring Bosnia too, drowning out the extreme voices and their loose talk of war. Given how far the world’s attention has wandered, supporters of peace in the Balkans will have to hope they find their own path to moderation. Otherwise the crack of snipers’ bullets and the whistle of mortar shells could herald the terrible spectacle of a preventable return to bloodshed.
JUBA, Sudan (Reuters) — Tribesmen killed 20 people, including a chief and his family, in an attack on a south Sudan village in the latest violence in the oil-producing territory, the southern Sudanese military said Saturday.
A southern army spokesman accused Sudan’s former foreign minister, Lam Akol, now the leader of a breakaway political party, of arming the attackers from his Shilluk tribe. Mr. Akol dismissed the accusation.
The Shilluk tribesmen attacked the village of Bony-Thiang in Upper Nile State on Friday morning, killing civilians of the Dinka tribe, the army said.
Dinka fighters mounted a retaliatory attack on the nearby Shilluk village of Buol on Saturday morning, killing at least five people, said the army spokesman, Kuol Diem Kuol.
Rival tribes from Sudan’s underdeveloped south have clashed for years in disputes often caused by cattle rustling and long-running feuds, but violence has soared this year.
The United Nations said the attacks could mar preparations for Sudan’s first multiparty elections in 20 years, scheduled for April 2010. They could also affect the security of oil installations.
Southern politicians accuse north Sudan’s dominant party, the National Congress Party, of trying to destabilize the south by provoking and arming rival tribes.
Sudan’s mostly Christian south fought the Muslim north in a two-decade civil war that ended in a 2005 peace accord. The deal created a semiautonomous southern government, allowed the south to keep an army and promised elections, followed by a referendum on southern independence in 2011.
Kuol Diem Kuol, the southern army spokesman, accused the north of conspiring with Lam Akol to arm the Shilluk attackers and encourage them to take revenge for past Dinka raids.
The attackers killed the Dinka chief Thon Wai, his two wives and three children, and burned down Bony-Thiang, he said.
Mr. Akol dismissed the accusations of his involvement as “absolute nonsense” and an attempt to smear his new political party.
MOGADISHU, Somalia — Fierce fighting exploded in this capital city on Friday night and Saturday morning, and witnesses said at least 10 people had been killed in the past two days, possibly including a Somali-American who had joined the insurgents.
One battle began on Friday after soldiers from Somalia’s transitional government attacked an insurgent base with mortars and machine guns.
“Soon after breaking fast,” said Fatima Elmi, a Mogadishu resident, referring to the evening Ramadan holiday ritual, “we heard strange noises of weapons and we ran into a concrete building nearby.”
The government forces pushed back the insurgents, who belonged to an extremist Islamist group called the Shabab. But by Saturday morning, witnesses said, the Shabab had recaptured the territory and once again remained in firm control of most of Mogadishu.
Among the dead was a Somali-American identified as Mohamed Hassan, 21, from Minnesota, according to Shabab fighters.
“We lost a martyr who was from Minnesota in the overnight raid,” said a Shabab foot soldier. He did not provide any more information about when Mr. Hassan might have arrived in Somalia or what exactly he was doing.
According to the F.B.I., dozens of Somali-Americans may have joined the Shabab jihadist movement, which American officials have accused of having links to Al Qaeda. At least one Somali-American killed himself in a suicide bombing last fall.
In earlier fighting, witnesses said that eight people were killed Thursday when insurgents attacked an African Union base at a former military academy. The deputy mayor of the city, Abdifatah Ibrahim Shaaweeye, told reporters in a news conference on Friday that as soon as the holy month of Ramadan ended, the government would drive the insurgents out of the capital.
“We will capture neighborhoods that are not government controlled,” he said.
GAZA — An acute struggle is emerging within the Hamas movement, which rules this coastal Palestinianstrip, over the extent and nature of its Islamist identity. Guardians of religious morality, some self-appointed, others from within the government, have sought to impose their views in recent months.
So far, top government officials have pushed them back, but it remains unclear for how long.
Examples of the battle abound. The most threatening occurred in mid-August when an extreme group called the Warriors of God commandeered a mosque in the southern city of Rafah and, calling Hamas impure and collaborationist, declared strict religious law to be in force. Hamas forces surrounded the mosque and, after an all-night gun battle, killed about two dozen people, including the group’s leader, and arrested 155 others, Hamas officials said. The Interior Ministry is now monitoring mosques and sponsoring public lectures against Muslim extremism.
Other cases involved no violence but plenty of coercion. The chief justice decreed this summer that female lawyers must wear the hijab head covering in court. A committee set up by the religious affairs ministry sent men along the beaches instructing bathers not to touch each other in public and to cover up. And a number of teachers and headmistresses in girls’ high schools told their students to dress in long coats and hijab rather than the jean skirts of past years.
All of those rules have already been reversed. Prime Minister Ismail Haniya told the chief justice, Abed al-Raouf Halabi, to rescind his order to female lawyers, and he did so.
The education minister, Mohammed Asqoul, called any new uniform requirement “an individual act.”
“The government and Hamas have nothing to do with it,” he said. “I’m against such orders since there is no need to impose the hijab in a conservative society.”
Khalil al-Hayya, a senior political leader in Hamas, said: “Neither the government nor Hamas has come out with any decision regarding such orders. We are an Islamic resistance movement that will never oblige anyone against his or her will. Advice is the best tactic.”
Iyad el-Serraj, a psychiatrist and close observer here, said there was little doubt that Gaza, long a religiously and socially conservative place, was increasingly so. Without instruction from above, the vast majority of women wear religiously modest dress and more and more men are bearded. No alcohol is sold.
Dr. Serraj attributes the shift to several developments beyond the fact that such an outward expression of identity is increasingly common across the Muslim Middle East. Hamas, he noted, has been in power for more than two years and those in midlevel positions of power, as well as those aspiring for such jobs, want to be noticed and promoted.
Second, he said, with the economy completely stalled because of the blockade of Gaza led by Israel, there is little to do and little horizon for advancement or development. In such circumstances, he suggested, fundamentalism finds fertile ground.
But Hamas, despite favoring Islamic law and behavior, has many reasons for pushing back. Its rival, the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, uses any hint of the imposition of religious law as evidence that Hamas is not capable of running a responsible, modern government. Hamas is labeled a terrorist organization by the United States, European Union and Israel, and is seeking international legitimacy to be the leader of the Palestinian movement.
It rejects Israel’s right to exist and remains doctrinally committed to its destruction. However, its leaders have said several times that if Israel were to leave all land taken in the 1967 war, Hamas could accept a Palestinian state limited to the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, depending on the terms of a truce.
A hard-line leader in Gaza said Hamas was deluding itself if it thought moderation would lead to international acceptance. “The world will never recognize us and will never end the siege,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. He added that perhaps imposing religious law “will scare them and force them to end the siege.”
For the small number of relatively secular Palestinians in Gaza, the growing push toward a more Islamic life is deeply worrying.
Ahmed Shawa, 18, said that when he asked friends for a back massage on the beach recently, a man wearing civilian clothing intervened. He said there should be no touching and instructed Mr. Shawa to put on a shirt. When he and his friends asked for an explanation, the man said: “The way you sit is satanic. You invite the devil to play in your heads.”
Mr. Shawa, who plays basketball, also said he was walking home from the stadium recently and was stopped by a man wearing Pakistani-style clothing who told him not to wear shorts or a sleeveless shirt. When Mr. Shawa argued, the man threatened him, saying, “Next time, I’ll use the other way.”
The morals committee that sends such men around the streets is against mixing of the sexes, against men’s wearing “feminine” clothing and against the sale of posters, books, magazines and DVDs that violate strict morals. The men have visited cafes, asking owners not to serve women the traditional shisha water pipes smoked throughout the region.
“It’s the first time in my life to cover my hair and to wear a jilbab, and I feel suffocated,” said Domoua al-Ali, 16, on a recent day. The moment she stepped out of the school, Ms. Domoua and her friend Dinah Nasrallah, 17, opened the buttons of the jilbab and proudly showed their tight jeans, then turned the hijab into a scarf around their neck. They mocked their religion teacher who explained the order this way: “It’s God who called for the hijab, not the headmistress. How can we forbid what he called for?”
Outside Ahmed Shawqi School, another circle of girls was led by Aziza Doghmosh, 16. She, too, removed the hijab the moment she stepped out of school and complained about her teacher. “My teacher said when you wear a tight skirt and shirt, the devil plays in the head of men,” she said to the laughter of her friends.
While only 20 girls among more than 800 did not abide by the new dress code during the first week of school, the number rose by the second week. But in the more conservative and less well-off eastern part of Gaza City, all complied, even after the rule was officially lifted.
Taghreed El-Khodary reported from Gaza, and Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem.
BEIJING — News Web sites in China, complying with secret government orders, are requiring that new users log on under their true identities to post comments, a shift in policy that the country’s Internet users and media have fiercely opposed in the past.
Until recently, users could weigh in on news items on many of the affected sites more anonymously, often without registering at all, though the sites were obligated to screen all posts, and the posts could still be traced via Internet protocol addresses.
But in early August, without notification of a change, news portals like Sina, Netease, Sohu and scores of other sites began asking unregistered users to sign in under their real names and identification numbers, said top editors at two of the major portals affected. A Sina staff member also confirmed the change.
The editors said the sites were putting into effect a confidential directive issued in late July by the State Council Information Office, one of the main government bodies responsible for supervising the Internet in China.
The new step is not foolproof, the editors acknowledged. It was possible for a reporter to register successfully on several major sites under falsified names and ID and cellphone numbers.
But the requirement adds a critical new layer of surveillance to mainstream sites in China, which were already heavily policed. Further regulations of the same nature also appeared to be in the pipeline.
And while the authorities called the measure part of a drive to forge greater “social responsibility” and “civility” among users, they moved forward surreptitiously and suppressed reports about it, said the editors and others in the media industry familiar with the measure, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid putting their jobs at risk.
Asked why the policy was pushed through unannounced, the chief editor of one site said, “The influence of public opinion on the Net is still too big.”
Government Internet regulators have been trying to usher in real-name registration controls since 2003, when they ordered Internet cafes around China to demand that customers show identification, nominally to keep out minors. Last year, lawmakers and regulators began discussing legislation on a more extensive “real name system,” as it is known.
But such proposals have aroused heated debate over the purview of the state to restrict China’s online community, which is the largest in the world at about 340 million people and growing.
Proponents, led by officials and state-connected academics in the information security field, argue that mandatory controls are necessary to help subdue inflammatory attacks, misinformation and other illegal activity deemed to endanger social order. They often note registration requirements on large sites in South Korea to support their point.
Critics counter that government regulation represents an incursion on free speech, individual privacy and the watchdog role of the Web in China.
The critics say sites and users should retain the right to discipline themselves. Given the country’s huge population of Internet users and its failure to guarantee freedom of expression, they argue, the case of China is hardly analogous to that of South Korea.
In 2006, Internet users and the news media rebuffed one official proposal to require real-name registration on blog hosting sites. Star bloggers denounced the notion, while ordinary users overwhelmingly rejected it in surveys conducted on sites like Sina.
In another key test of the policy earlier this year, the legislature in Hangzhou, near Shanghai, passed a regulation that would have placed the requirement on users who comment, blog or play games on sites based there. Amid a popular outcry, however, the city shied away from enforcing the regulation.
Government censors have closed thousands of sites in a continuing war on “vulgarity,” closed liberal forums and blogs for spreading “harmful information,” blocked access to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and cut off Internet service where serious unrest has erupted, notably in the Xinjiang region of the west after deadly clashes between ethnic Uighurs and Han in July. Increasingly, officials have defended the Web shutdowns on the grounds of national security.
The government recently set off an international furor when it ordered that all computers sold in China come prepackaged with pornography filtering software that authorities could remotely control. Officials were forced to retreat from the order after international companies and trade bodies protested and Chinese hackers showed that the software was designed to block politically offensive content as well.
The authorities had aimed to avoid a similar showdown over the new real-name requirement. “We had no recourse to challenge it,” said the news editor of another portal.
Ta Kung Pao, a Hong Kong-based newspaper loyal to Beijing, first leaked news of the State Council edict in late July. But the report was scrubbed from the paper’s Web site within a few days.
Another state newspaper tried to follow up on the Ta Kung Pao report soon thereafter, the paper’s editors said, but they were forced to abort their article because they were warned that the order was a state secret.
The State Council Information Office had yet to respond to a list of submitted questions about the move.
The new mandate did not appear to affect formerly registered users of the portals. Nor did it affect blog hosts, forums or government news sites like People’s Daily or Xinhua.
Whether because it had an impact mainly on rookie users or because of the void of news about it, bloggers in China were unusually slow to recognize the measure. But those who did were critical.
One commentator on the popular forum Tianya wrote, “Not daring to write one’s real name, in truth, is a form of self-protection for the weak.”
There were signals in the state media in recent weeks that more name registration measures would follow.
An influential advocate of the policy, Fang Bingxing, the president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, told a forum in August that the “time was ripe” to roll it out widely to bolster information security, newspapers reported.
A trail of comments on Sina thrashed the report.
Late last month, the Communist Party-run Guangming Daily ran a positive story about a city government portal in western China that imposed the requirement on new bloggers, calling it a “forerunner.”
Hu Yong, a new media specialist at Peking University, said government-enforced registration requirements carried long-term side effects.
“Netizens will have less trust in the government, and to a certain extent, the development of the industry will be impeded,” he said.
From a comparison of the most commented-on articles in July and August on a number of portals it was hard to determine whether the volume of posts had been affected so far.
But both editors at two of the major portals affected said their sites had shown marked drop-offs.
WASIT PROVINCE, Iraq — When China’s biggest oil company signed the first post-invasion oil field development contract in Iraq last year, the deal was seen as a test of Iraq’s willingness to open an industry that had previously prohibited foreign investment.
One year later, the China National Petroleum Corporation has struck oil at the Ahdab field in Wasit Province, southeast of Baghdad. And while the relationship between the company and the Iraqi government has gone smoothly, the presence of a foreign company with vast resources drilling for oil in this poor, rural corner of Iraq has awakened a wave of discontent here.
“We get nothing directly from the Chinese company, and we are suffering,” said Mahmoud Abdul Ridha, head of the Wasit provincial council, whose budget has been cut in half by Baghdad in the past year because of lower international oil prices. “There is an unemployment crisis. We need roads, schools, water treatment plants. We need everything.”
The result has been a local-rights movement — extraordinary in a country where political dissent has historically carried the risk of death — that in the past few months has begun demanding that at least $1 of each barrel of oil produced at the Ahdab field be used to improve access to clean water, health services, schools, paved roads and other needs in the province, which is among Iraq’s poorest.
The ripples are traveling far beyond this province, too. Frustrations have spilled over into sabotage and intimidation of Chinese oil workers, turning the Ahdab field into a cautionary tale for international oil companies seeking to join the rush to profit from Iraq’s vast untapped oil reserves.
Because Iraq is so heavily dependent on oil revenue, any international hesitation by oil companies to invest could mean years of continued economic and political instability in the country. All oil revenues go directly to the government in Baghdad and are the foundation of the national budget.
The Iraqi government has so far rejected the locals’ demands, but people here are clearly beginning to feel that something new is possible.
“No one would have dared to ask for such a thing during Saddam’s regime; if he did, he would definitely be executed,” said Ghassan Ali, a 43-year-old farmer who lives near the oil field. “But now we are a democratic country, so we have the right to ask for our rights like any other province in Iraq.”
The basis of the complaints here is that, aside from the hiring of a few hundred residents as laborers and security guards at salaries of less than $600 a month, the Ahdab field — a roughly $3 billion development project — has provided no local benefit.
Some local farmers began reacting by destroying the company’s generators and severing electrical hoses, angry because they believed that their fields were being unfairly handed over to the company. Other residents began expressing outrage that very few jobs were being opened to them.
China National Petroleum says it needs relatively few workers because it is still in the exploration phase of its 23-year project at the Ahdab field. Oil production is not scheduled to begin for two and a half years.
Now, the field’s 100 or so Chinese workers rarely leave their spartan compound for fear of being kidnapped, the company said, even though the Iraqi government recently deployed extra security to the area.
But the Iraqis’ anger has been increasingly channeled into an above-board labor movement, expressing concerns about workers’ rights, local government authority, pollution, transparent hiring practices and public accountability, among other issues.
Ghassan Atiyyah, executive director of the nonprofit Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy, said the nascent activism in Wasit Province was part of a broader shift in a society that had until recently been resistant to such demands because of years of dictatorship, economic sanctions, war and a culture that retains a strong tribal influence.
“There is a social transformation going on in Iraq that will take years to sort out,” Mr. Atiyyah said, “but what we are seeing is a new social order emerging as rural people challenge the urban people who have always looked down on them.”
The Iraqi government and the Chinese oil company have played down the tensions in Wasit Province, saying that aside from a few hiccups, things are going according to plan.
Still, the unrest also comes at a critical time for Iraq’s oil industry, which has struggled to reach prewar production levels and is preparing to auction off 10 oil fields to international companies this fall after a first round of bidding for a group of other oil and gas fields this summer led to only one signed contract.
The Ahdab field contains about one billion barrels of oil, modest by Iraq’s standards. In comparison, the Rumaila field in southern Iraq, for which the Chinese company and British Petroleum signed a development deal in June, is Iraq’s largest field with an estimated 17.8 billion barrels.
“We wanted to get a foot in the door,” said Han Ruimin, vice president of Al Waha Petroleum Company, the name of the joint venture at Ahdab between the Chinese company and ZhenHua Oil, also based in China. “Our strategy worked, because we just got another contract,” he said, referring to the Rumaila field.
The Ahdab field is surrounded by tenant farmers living in cramped, mud houses without electricity or running water. They had hoped the arrival of the oil company would end their poverty.
Instead, China National Petroleum has hired only about 450 workers, many of whom lived outside the province, according to residents and local officials.
“The problem is that people were expecting thousands of jobs right away, and then they realized that the company depended more on machines than on people,” said Ali Hussein, head of the local district council.
Mr. Hussein said the extent of local suffering had emboldened him to begin discussing the situation with the Chinese company in unvarnished language. But troubles have persisted.
Earlier this year, the area’s farmers complained that the oil company’s electrical and seismic equipment — used to help determine where wells should be drilled — was damaging fragile homes and crops.
About the same time, electrical lines, many of which were laid across farmland, were severed or stolen, as were expensive generators and other equipment. This spring, a rocket was fired, though it fell harmlessly. Mr. Han said he believed that it had been aimed at a nearby American military base, though local farmers said they suspected that the Ahdab field was the target.
More trouble could be on the way next spring when 1,000 Chinese workers arrive to build a central processing plant.
Mr. Han said hiring Iraqis to do the job was out of the question. “We don’t have enough time to train local people to do that work,” he said.
In the meantime, the field’s neighbors say they worry that they are about to be swallowed by the pursuit of the oil beneath their crops.
Ghazi Hwaidi, 39, whose wheat field now shares space with towering seismic oil prospecting equipment, said he had sought compensation for his damaged crops — and just in case, had also applied for a job with the oil company. He has not received word about either effort.
“My farm is now more like an oil field,” he said, “and I have gotten nothing for it.”
Reporting was contributed by Abeer Mohammed and Mohammed Hussein from Baghdad, and Riyadh Mohammed and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Wasit Province.
Gordon Bell, a 75-year-old legend of computer science, strolls around the San Francisco offices of Microsoft (MSFT) Research wearing what looks like a heavy black necklace. It holds a camera the size of a deck of cards. It's called a SenseCam, and it snaps photos every few minutes, or whenever a change of light signals that Bell has stepped into a different room. Sometimes Bell reaches down and takes a picture himself. One more image for his enormous memory bank.
For the past 10 years, Bell, a senior researcher at Microsoft, has been leading the life of a digital pack rat. He has been recording the twists and turns of his existence and storing all this information in vast digital files. Bell takes pictures and records his phone conversations. He maps the path of his footsteps and scans every shred of paper worth saving. All this effort is to build an electronic memory, a digital adjunct to the faulty and often delusional one between our ears. In an engaging new book, Total Recall, which Bell wrote with colleague Jim Gemmell, he argues that growing numbers of us—strange though it may sound—will soon be following his lead.
It would be easy to dismiss Bell as an outlier. Even with technical help from Microsoft, the digital documenting of a single life—"lifelogging," Bell calls it—is immense work. Yet Bell, a key figure in the development of microprocessors and the Internet, points out that millions are already pouring their lives onto social networks and Twitter. He says that lifelogging "is the next step."
Technology is evolving to support his case. Millions of us already carry a rudimentary lifelogging tool, the cell phone. And as phones add more features, from video cameras and e-mail to global positioning technology, their potential to record daily activities grows.
At the same time, companies are developing a host of specialized gadgets and Web services to sell to the growing ranks of self-observing datahounds. A new sleep-monitoring device called Zeo provides a minute-by-minute record of each user's deep sleep and rapid eye movements. A pen-shaped gadget from Livescribe turns notes into digital images and records audio from conversations and meetings. And a popular data service called Evernote allows people to pile anything they read or see online in to a vast digital drawer. For some of the 1.5 million users, it amounts to a record of their intellectual life. "We want to be a permanent repository of your memory," says Evernote CEO Phil Libin.
One goal for the early lifeloggers is to track and optimize performance, from the bottom line to the waistline. Bell, who has undergone two heart bypass operations, has analyzed his own data to draw correlations between his diet, exercise, and symptoms of angina—and to fine-tune his regime. Esther Dyson, a technology commentator (and an Evernote board member), predicts that markets will open for software to "extract order and meaning from the chaos of proliferating data."
In many areas, electronic memories could provide lifeloggers with an edge. Already, parties in divorce or workplace harassment suits use location data from cell phones and electronic toll booths to supplement or contradict human memories. Data zealots could take this further by producing records of their conversations, e-mails, and dinner meetings.
Yet data could be used against those who collect it, too. Courts conceivably could subpoena lifelogs, much the way the special prosecutors subpoenaed President Richard Nixon's Watergate tapes. And personal monitoring by lifeloggers could threaten other people's privacy. This raises thorny questions. Will people have to establish ground rules for on- and off-the-record recording? "We'll have to come up with protocols," says Bell. (Before Bell's recorded phone calls, an electronic voice announces that the conversation is being taped.)
The ultimate target for Bell is to create a searchable and ultra-detailed memory for all of us. For most people, the last week or two occupies most of the memories, with much of the past largely fading from our minds. Entire months, or even years, can be reduced to a few dinners, trips, or songs. But a record such as Bell's brings back every hour and every encounter. In his book, Bell points to Cathal Gurrin, a lifelogger at Dublin City University who has in a rotating digital photo album on his desk a shot of the moment he met his girlfriend. "Not that I knew she'd become my girlfriend at the time," Gurrin tells Bell.
In a sense, lifelogging is already afoot inside corporations. Faced with tighter tax, legal, and compliance regimes, companies are storing ever greater quantities of documents. But the march of digital data is bound to go much further, with each worker generating growing streams of information. Already, the Pentagon is looking into using such data to profile workers and soldiers and to teach others how to do their jobs. Similar research is taking place at tech companies, including IBM (IBM).
Of late, Bell has eased back on lifelogging. Microsoft opted not to develop its own suite of commercial lifelogging products given other priorities, so he and Gemmell moved on to other projects, such as building databases for cancer research. But even as he walks the streets of San Francisco, Bell still wears his SenseCam and feasts on the data of his life. "Did you know," he asks, studying a lunch menu, "that there are only three calories in a seedless grape?"
Baker is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York. Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.
Carol Jordan, a 32-year-old pharmacy technician, was living in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1999 when she became pregnant. She'd already decided against abortion, but she was struggling financially and her boyfriend was unsupportive. Looking through the Yellow Pages for help, she spotted an ad under "crisis pregnancies" for Bethany Christian Services. Within hours of calling, Jordan (who asked to be identified with a pseudonym) was invited to Bethany's local office to discuss free housing and medical care.
Bethany, it turned out, did not simply specialize in counseling pregnant women. It is the nation's largest adoption agency, with more than eighty-five offices in fifteen countries.
When Jordan arrived, a counselor began asking whether she'd considered adoption and talking about the poverty rates of single mothers. Over five counseling sessions, she convinced Jordan that adoption was a win-win situation: Jordan wouldn't "have death on her hands," her bills would be paid and the baby would go to a family of her choosing in an open adoption. She suggested Jordan move into one of Bethany's "shepherding family" homes, away from the influence of family and friends.
Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), the nonprofit pregnancy-testing facilities set up by antiabortion groups to dissuade women from having abortions, have become fixtures of the antiabortion landscape, buttressed by an estimated $60 million in federal abstinence and marriage-promotion funds. The National Abortion Federation estimates that as many as 4,000 CPCs operate in the United States, often using deceptive tactics like posing as abortion providers and showing women graphic antiabortion films. While there is growing awareness of how CPCs hinder abortion access, the centers have a broader agenda that is less well known: they seek not only to induce women to "choose life" but to choose adoption, either by offering adoption services themselves, as in Bethany's case, or by referring women to Christian adoption agencies. Far more than other adoption agencies, conservative Christian agencies demonstrate a pattern and history of coercing women to relinquish their children.
Bethany guided Jordan through the Medicaid application process and in April moved her in with home-schooling parents outside Myrtle Beach. There, according to Jordan, the family referred to her as one of the agency's "birth mothers"--a term adoption agencies use for relinquishing mothers that many adoption reform advocates reject--although she hadn't yet agreed to adoption. "I felt like a walking uterus for the agency," says Jordan.
Jordan was isolated in the shepherding family's house; her only social contact was with the agency, which called her a "saint" for continuing her pregnancy but asked her to consider "what's best for the baby." "They come on really prolife: look at the baby, look at its heartbeat, don't kill it. Then, once you say you won't kill it, they ask, What can you give it? You have nothing to offer, but here's a family that goes on a cruise every year."
Jordan was given scrapbooks full of letters and photos from hopeful adoptive parents hoping to stand out among the estimated 150 couples for every available baby. Today the "birthmother letters" are on Bethany's website: 500 couples who pay $14,500 to $25,500 for a domestic infant adoption, vying for mothers' attention with profuse praise of their "selflessness" and descriptions of the lifestyle they can offer.
Jordan selected a couple, and when she went into labor, they attended the birth, along with her counselor and shepherding mother. The next day, the counselor said that fully open adoptions weren't legal in South Carolina, so Jordan wouldn't receive identifying information on the adoptive parents. Jordan cried all day and didn't think she could relinquish the baby. She called her shepherding parents and asked if she could bring the baby home. They refused, chastising Jordan sharply. The counselor told the couple Jordan was having second thoughts and brought them, sobbing, into her recovery room. The counselor warned Jordan that if she persisted, she'd end up homeless and lose the baby anyway.
"My options were to leave the hospital walking, with no money," says Jordan. "Or here's a couple with Pottery Barn furniture. You sacrifice yourself, not knowing it will leave an impact on you and your child for life."
The next morning, Jordan was rushed through signing relinquishment papers by a busy, on-duty nurse serving as notary public. As soon as she'd signed, the couple left with the baby, and Jordan was taken home without being discharged. The shepherding family was celebrating and asked why Jordan wouldn't stop crying. Five days later, she used her last $50 to buy a Greyhound ticket to Greenville, where she struggled for weeks to reach a Bethany post-adoption counselor as her milk came in and she rapidly lost more than fifty pounds in her grief.
When Jordan called Bethany's statewide headquarters one night, her shepherding mother answered, responding coldly to Jordan's lament. "You're the one who spread your legs and got pregnant out of wedlock," she told Jordan. "You have no right to grieve for this baby."
Jordan isn't alone. On an adoption agency rating website, Bethany is ranked poorly by birth mothers. Its adoptive parent ratings are higher, although several adopters described the coercion they felt "our birth mother" underwent. But neither is Bethany alone; in the constellation of groups that constitute the Christian adoption industry, including CPCs, maternity homes and adoption agencies, Bethany is just one large star. And instances of coercion in adoption stretch back nearly seventy years.
Ann Fessler, author of The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade, has meticulously chronicled the lives of women from the "Baby Scoop Era": the period from 1945 to 1973, when single motherhood was so stigmatized that at least 1.5 million unwed American mothers relinquished children for adoption, often after finishing pregnancies secretly in maternity homes. The coercion was frequently brutal, entailing severe isolation, shaming, withholding information about labor, disallowing mothers to see their babies and coercing relinquishment signatures while women were drugged or misled about their rights. Often, women's names were changed or abbreviated, to bolster a sense that "the person who went away to deliver the baby was someone else" and that mothers would later forget about the babies they had given up. In taking oral histories from more than a hundred Baby Scoop Era mothers, Fessler found that not only was that untrue but most mothers suffered lifelong guilt and depression.
The cultural shift that had followed World War II switched the emphasis of adoption from finding homes for needy infants to finding children for childless couples. Karen Wilson-Buterbaugh, founder of the Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative, has compiled sociological studies from the era, including Clark Vincent's speculation in his 1961 book Unmarried Mothers that "if the demand for adoptable babies continues to exceed the supply...it is quite possible that, in the near future, unwed mothers will be 'punished' by having their children taken from them right after birth"--under the guise of protecting the "best interests of the child."
The Baby Scoop Era ended with Roe v. Wade, as abortion was legalized and single motherhood gained acceptance. The resultant fall in adoption rates was drastic, from 19.2 percent of white, unmarried pregnant women in 1972 to 1.7 percent in 1995 (and lower among women of color). Coinciding with this decline was the rise of the religious right and the founding of crisis pregnancy centers.
In 1984 Leslee Unruh, founder of Abstinence Clearinghouse, established a CPC in South Dakota called the Alpha Center. The first center had opened in 1967, but in 1984 Unruh's CPC was still a relatively new idea. In 1987 the state attorney's office investigated complaints that Unruh had offered young women money to carry their pregnancies to term and then relinquish their babies for adoption.
"There were so many allegations about improper adoptions being made and how teenage girls were being pressured to give up their children," then-state attorney Tim Wilka told the Argus Leader, that the governor asked him to take the case. The Alpha Center pleaded no contest to five counts of unlicensed adoption and foster care practices; nineteen other charges were dropped, including four felonies. But where Unruh left off, many CPCs and antiabortion groups have taken up in her place.
It's logical that antiabortion organizations seeking to prevent abortions and promote traditional family structures would aggressively promote adoption, but this connection is often overlooked in the bipartisan support that adoption promotion enjoys as part of a common-ground truce in the abortion wars. In President Obama's speech at Notre Dame, he suggested that one solution to lowering abortion rates is "making adoption more available." And in a recent online debate, Slate columnist William Saletan and Beliefnet editor Steven Waldman proposed that unmarried women be offered a nominal cash payment to choose adoption over abortion as a compromise between prochoice and prolife convictions.
Compared with pre-Roe days, today women with unplanned pregnancies have access to far more information about their alternatives. However, Fessler says, they frequently encounter CPCs that pressure them to give the child to a family with better resources. "Part of the big picture for a young woman who's pregnant," she says, "is that there are people holding out their hand, but the price of admission is giving up your child. If you decide to keep your child, it's as if you're lost in the system, whereas people fight over you if you're ready to surrender. There's an organization motivated by a cause and profit. It's a pretty high price to pay: give away your first-born, and we'll take care of you for six months."
Christian adoption agencies court pregnant women through often unenforceable promises of open adoption and the option to choose the adoptive parents. California's Lifetime Adoption Foundation even offers birth mothers college scholarships. Additionally, maternity homes have made a comeback in recent years, with one network of 1,100 CPCs and homes, Heartbeat International, identifying at least 300 homes in the United States. Some advertise almost luxurious living facilities, though others, notes Jessica DelBalzo, founder of an anti-adoption group, Adoption: Legalized Lies, continue to "bill themselves as homes for wayward girls who need to be set straight."
Most homes are religiously affiliated, and almost all promote adoption. Many, like Christian Homes and Family Services (CHFS), reserve their beds for women planning adoption. Others keep only a fraction for women choosing to parent. Most homes seamlessly blend their advertised crisis pregnancy counseling with domestic and international adoption services, and oppose unmarried parenthood as against "God's plan for the family."
Religious women may be particularly susceptible to CPC coercion, argues Mari Gallion, a 39-year-old Alaska mother who founded the support group SinglePregnancy.com after a CPC unsuccessfully pressured her to relinquish her child ten years ago. Gallion, who has worked with nearly 3,000 women with unplanned pregnancies, calls CPCs "adoption rings" with a multistep agenda: evangelizing; discovering and exploiting women's insecurities about age, finances or parenting; then hard-selling adoption, portraying parenting as a selfish, immature choice. "The women who are easier to coerce in these situations are those who subscribe to conservative Christian views," says Gallion. "They'll come in and be told that, You've done wrong, but God will forgive you if you do the right thing."
Mirah Riben, vice president of communications for the birth mother group Origins-USA, as well as author of The Stork Market: America's Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry, says that many mothers struggle for decades with the fallout of "a brainwashing process" that persuades them to choose adoption and often deny for years--or until their adoptions become closed--that they were pressured into it. "I see a lot of justification among the young mothers. If their adoption is remaining open, they need to be compliant, good birth mothers and toe the line. They can't afford to be angry or bitter, because if they are, the door will close and they won't see the kid."
Such was the case for Karen Fetrow, a Pennsylvania mother who relinquished her son in 1994 through a Bethany office outside Harrisburg. Fetrow, a formerly pro-adoption evangelical, sought out a Christian agency when she became pregnant at 24. Although Fetrow was in a committed relationship with the father, now her husband of sixteen years, Bethany told her that women who sought to parent were on their own.
After Fetrow relinquished her son, she says she received no counseling from Bethany beyond one checkup phone call. Three months later, Bethany called to notify her that her legal paperwork was en route but that she shouldn't read it or attend court for the adoption finalization. "I didn't know that the adoption wasn't final and that I had three months to change my mind," says Fetrow. "The reality was that if I had gone, I might have changed my mind--and they didn't want me to."
Although for thirteen years Fetrow couldn't look at an infant without crying, she continued to support adoption and CPCs. But when she sought counseling--a staple of Bethany's advertised services--the director of her local office said he couldn't help. When her son turned 5, she stopped receiving updates from his adoptive parents, although she'd expected they would continue until he was 18. She asked Bethany about it, and the agency stalled for three years before explaining that the adoptive parents had only agreed to five years of updates. Fetrow complained on Bethany's online forum and was banned from the site.
Kris Faasse, director of adoption services at Bethany, said that while she was unaware of Fetrow's and Jordan's particular stories, their accounts are painful for her to hear. "The fact that this happens to any mom grieves me and would not be how we wanted to handle it." She added that only 25-40 percent of women who come to Bethany choose adoption, which, she said, "is so important, because we never want a woman to feel coerced into a plan."
Shortly after Fetrow was banned from Bethany's forum, the local Bethany office attempted to host a service at her church, "painting adoption as a Christian, prolife thing." At a friend's urging, Fetrow told her pastor about her experience, and after a meeting with the Bethany director--who called Fetrow angry and bitter--the pastor refused to let Bethany address the congregation. But Fetrow's pastor seems an exception.
In recent years, the antiabortion push for adoption has been taken up as a broader evangelical cause. In 2007 Focus on the Family hosted an Evangelical Orphan Care and Adoption Summit in Colorado Springs. Ryan Dobson, the adopted son of Focus founder James Dobson, has campaigned on behalf of CHFS and Unruh's Alpha Center. Last year 600 church and ministry leaders gathered in Florida to promote adoption through the Christian Alliance for Orphans. And a recent book in the idiosyncratic genre of prolife fiction, The River Nile, exalted a clinic that tricked abortion-seeking women into adoption instead.
Such enthusiasm for Christians to adopt en masse begins to seem like a demand in need of greater supply, and this is how critics of current practices describe it: as an industry that coercively separates willing biological parents from their offspring, artificially producing "orphans" for Christian parents to adopt, rather than helping birth parents care for wanted children.
In 1994 the Village Voice investigated several California CPCs in Care Net, the largest network of centers in the country, and found gross ethical violations at an affiliated adoption agency, where director Bonnie Jo Williams secured adoptions by warning pregnant women about parenthood's painfulness, pressuring them to sign papers under heavy medication and in one case detaining a woman in labor for four hours in a CPC.
There were nineteen lawsuits against CPCs between 1983 and 1996, but coercive practices persist. Joe Soll, a psychotherapist and adoption reform activist, says that CPCs "funnel people to adoption agencies who put them in maternity homes," where ambivalent mothers are subjected to moralistic and financial pressure: warned that if they don't give up their babies, they'll have to pay for their spot at the home, and given conflicted legal counsel from agency-retained lawyers. Watchdog group Crisis Pregnancy Center Watch described an Indiana woman misled into delaying an abortion past her state's legal window and subsequently pressured into adoption.
Literature from CPCs indicates their efforts to raise adoption rates. In 2000 the Family Research Council (FRC), the political arm of Focus on the Family, commissioned a study on the dearth of adoptable babies being produced by CPCs, "The Missing Piece: Adoption Counseling in Pregnancy Resource Centers," written by the Rev. Curtis Young, former director of Care Net.
Young based the report on the market research of consultant Charles Kenny, who questioned women with unplanned pregnancies and Christian CPC counselors to identify obstacles to higher adoption rates. Young argued that mothers' likelihood to choose adoption was based on their level of maturity and selflessness, with "more mature respondents...able to feel they are nurturing not only their children, but also, the adoptive parents," and "less mature women" disregarding the baby's needs by seeking to parent. He wrote that CPCs might persuade reluctant women by casting adoption as redemption for unwed mothers' "past failures" and a triumph over "selfishness, an 'evil' within themselves." Though Young noted that some CPCs were wary of looking like "baby sellers," he nonetheless urged close alliances with adoption agencies to ensure that the path to adoption was "as seamless and streamlined as possible."
Young was speaking to a larger audience than the FRC faithful. Care Net runs 1,160 CPCs nationwide and partners with Heartbeat International to host a national CPC hot line. Kenny is tied to the cause as a "Bronze"-level benefactor of the National Council for Adoption (NCFA), the most prominent adoption lobby group in the country, in the company of other benefactors like Bethany; Texas maternity home giant Gladney; the Good Shepherd Sisters, a Catholic order serving "young women of dissolute habits"; and the Mormon adoption agency LDS Family Services.
The federally funded NCFA has a large role in spreading teachings like these through its Infant Adoption Awareness Training Program, a Department of Health and Human Services initiative it helped pass in 2000 that has promoted adoption to nearly 18,000 CPC, school, state, health and correctional workers since 2002. Although the program stipulates "nondirective counseling for pregnant women," it was developed by a heavily pro-adoption pool of experts, including Kenny, and the Guttmacher Institute reports that trainees have complained about the program's coercive nature.
In 2007 the FRC and NCFA went beyond overlapping mandates to collaborate on the publication of another pamphlet, written by Kenny, "Birthmother, Goodmother: Her Story of Heroic Redemption," which targets "potential birthmothers" before pregnancy: a seeming contradiction of abstinence promotion, unless, as DelBalzo wryly notes, the abstinence movement intends to create "more babies available for adoption."
Even as women have gained better reproductive healthcare access, adoption laws have become less favorable for birth mothers, advancing the time after birth when a mother can relinquish--in some states now within twenty-four hours--and cutting the period to revoke consent drastically or completely. Adoption organizations have published comparative lists of state laws, almost as a catalog for prospective adopters seeking states that restrict birth parent rights. Among the worst is Utah.
Jo Anne Swanson, a court-appointed adoption intermediary, has studied a number of cases in which women have been lured out of their home states to give birth and surrender their children under Utah's lax laws--which require only two witnesses for relinquishments that have occurred in hotel rooms or parks--to avoid interstate child-placement regulations. Some women who changed their minds had agencies refuse them airfare home. And one Utah couple, Steve and Carolyn Mintz, told the Salt Lake Tribune that the director of their adoption agency flew into a rage at a mother in labor who'd backed out of their adoption, and the mother and her infant ended up in a Salt Lake City homeless shelter. Many complaints have been lodged by birth fathers who sought to parent their children but were disenfranchised by Utah's complicated system of registering paternity.
Utah isn't alone in attacking birth fathers' rights. From 2000 to 2001, a Midwestern grandmother named Ann Gregory (a pseudonym) fought doggedly for her son, a military enlistee, to retain parental rights over his and his girlfriend's child. When the girlfriend became pregnant, her conservative evangelical parents brought her to a local CPC affiliated with their megachurch. The CPC was located in the same office as an adoption agency: its "sister organization" of eighteen years. The CPC called Gregory's son, who was splitting his time between home and boot camp, pressuring him to "be supportive" of his girlfriend by signing adoption papers. The agency also called Gregory and her ex-husband, quoting Scripture "about how we're all adopted children of Jesus Christ."
What followed, Gregory says, was "six weeks of pure hell," as she felt her son and his girlfriend were "brainwashed" into adoption. She researched coercive adoption and retained a lawyer for her son. When the mother delivered, the attorney had Gregory notify a hospital social worker that parental rights were being contested, so the baby wouldn't be relinquished. Two days later, as the adoption agency was en route to take custody, Gregory filed an emergency restraining order. The matter had to be settled in court, where Gregory's son refused to consent to adoption. The legal bill for two weeks came to $9,000.
Both parents went to college, and though they are no longer together, Gregory praises their cooperation in jointly raising their son, now 8. But she is shaken by what it took to prevail. "You've got to get on it before the child is born, and you'd better have $10,000 sitting around. I can't even imagine how they treat those in a worse position than us. They say they want to help people in a crisis pregnancy, but really they want to help themselves to a baby."
"A lot of those moms from the '50s and '60s were really damaged by losing their child through the maternity homes," says Gregory. "People say those kinds of things don't happen anymore. But they do. It's just not a maternity home on every corner; it's a CPC."
About Kathryn Joyce
Kathryn Joyce is the author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.
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