Kathryn Joyce
Kathryn Joyce is the author of The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption and Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.
All Work
‘Philomena’ Reminds Us That the ‘Baby Scoop Era’ Affected Millions
The Oscar-nominated film Philomena tells the tale of an Irish Catholic mother separated from her son by one of Ireland's infamous 20th century Magdalene Laundries. But this adoption system wasn't limited to mid-century Ireland; there are millions of Philomenas out there.
Mexico’s Abortion Wars, American-Style
After Mexico City liberalized its abortion law, a fierce backlash followed. Is its striking resemblance to the U.S. “pro-life” movement a coincidence?
The Evangelical Adoption Crusade
Even after the Silsby affair, when ten American missionaries were arrested in Haiti for attempted child theft, the Christian adoption movement is unchastened.
(VIDEO) The Danger Next Door: Anti-Choice Crisis Pregnancy Centers and Clinic Violence
Crisis pregnancy centers set themselves up as innocuous “alternatives” for pregnant women, but some are just steps away from abortion clinics and frequented by some of the most infamous anti-abortion extremists.
Seeing is Believing: Questions about Faith-Based Organizations Involved in HIV/AIDS Prevention and Treatment
For many years, faith-based health providers have received enormous sums of money from both state-based and private entities to provide healthcare services. More recently, that healthcare has included treatment for people living with HIV and AIDS. Unfortunately, many of these providers do not provide a full range of preventative care, especially advice on the use of and access to condoms to prevent the spread of HIV. Too few people have questioned whether the faith-based groups’ use of those funds is as effective as it might be. This report raises some of those questions and provides some proposals for how we might move forward towards more transparency.
Shotgun Adoption
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.
Eight Is Not Enough? The Big Families We Love to Hate
After a brief moment of "miracle news" coverage when the successful delivery of the California octuplets was first announced, criticism of the mother and her doctors began to mount from across the ideological spectrum.
Untold Consequences: Rick Warren’s AIDS Activism
Rick Warren's AIDS work in Africa supposed to negate his anti-gay and anti-choice advocacy. But Warren's AIDS activism is nearly as troubling as the rest of his ideology.
Christian Conservatives Seek to “Restore” Women
A leading figure in the Christian right anti-trafficking establishment, Linda Smith embodies the tensions between feminists and religious right activists working on this issue.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
In 1968, Catholic Church doctrine forbade the use of contraception. Forty years later, the Church's teachings are irrelevant at best to American Catholics, but outright dangerous for those living in the developing world.
Missing: The “Right” Babies
Europe is failing to produce enough babies--the "right" babies--to replace its old and dying. It's "the baby bust," "the birth dearth" : modern euphemisms for old-fashioned race panic as low fertility among white "Western" couples coincides with an increasingly visible immigrant population across Europe.
Quiverfull: More Children For God’s Army
Kathryn Joyce is working on a book about conservative Christian women's movements, to be published by Beacon Press.
Between 1985 and 1990, three books were published by small, independent Christian presses that would come to have a profound impact on Christian Right thinking on family planning, feminism and birth control. Charles Provan's The Bible and Birth Control, Mary Pride's The Way Home: Away from Feminism and Back to Reality, and Rick and Jan Hess's A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ. Together, these three books laid a comprehensive framework for the pro-natalist, anti-birth control movement today known as Quiverfull, wherein believers eschew all forms of birth control, natural and hormonal, and argue that Christian families should leave the number of children they have entirely in the hands of God.
In the Nov. 27th issue of The Nation, I profiled a group of Quiverfull believers who had broods of 8, 11, 13 and 14 children, and who spoke of their decision to have such large families as a form of spiritual warfare. That much is reflected in their name, taken from Psalm 127: "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate." Quiverfull mothers think of their children as no mere movement, but as an army they're building for God.
