The New York Times Digs into the Adoptions of Amy Coney Barrett’s Children
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When word leaked in 2005 that the New York Times was digging into the details of the adoptions of then-Supreme Court nominee John Roberts’s two children, the non-partisan National Council for Adoption issued a scathing denunciation of the Times’ “abject invasion of privacy [that] shows a shameful disregard for the integrity of the family in general and the adoptive family in particular.”
The Times never published a story on Roberts’s kids and announced that “any gratuitous reporting about the Roberts’s children” would be wrong.
“Bill Keller, the executive editor of the paper, told us that he would not stand for any gratuitous reporting about the Roberts’s children,” according to a statement at the time from the Times’ Office of Public Editor. “He said that as an adoptive parent he is particularly sensitive about this issue.”
A senior editor at the Times said reporters made “initial inquiries about the adoptions” with “great care, understanding the sensitivity of the issue” but did not pursue the issue “after the initial inquiries, which detected nothing irregular about the adoptions.”
But that was 2005, and in 2020 no such scruples stopped the Times from publishing a report on Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s adopted children.
“It took us weeks to find the orphanage the Barrett kids were adopted from,” according to one of the Times reporters who wrote the story.
Monday’s report describes the orphanage as “typical” of most in Haiti, and that children there experienced “hunger and corporal punishment.” The Times interviewed the director of the orphanage and several other orphans who were evacuated following the devastating 2010 earthquake that killed 230,000 Haitians.
Following the earthquake, “I saw the disaster and death all around. Dead moms, holding their dead kids,” John Peter Schlecht, one of 18 other adoptees on the same flight as John Peter Barrett out of Haiti, told the Times. “I got out of there, but all those people were left. They didn’t get the chance I got.”
“That was the dream — to come to America,” said Jennifer Downard, another adoptee from the same Haitian orphanage. “I was going to drink water, get food on the table, I would not be scared at night.”
The Times’ report, published Monday, doesn’t directly accuse the Barretts of a single negative thing. Indeed, the family’s decency and generosity are what shines through in the report. Adopting a child is almost universally recognized as a deeply admirable act of selfless love. I say “almost” because the Times found it fit to print that “detractors have criticized as ‘white saviorism’ the judge’s public accounts of her children’s dire situations before they left Haiti.”
The Times did not cite a specific “detractor” by name and did not acknowledge that those detractors have been widely condemned. Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi, America’s most celebrated progressive racial theorist, wrote on the day of Barrett’s nomination: “Some White colonizers ‘adopted’ Black children. They ‘civilized’ these ‘savage’ children in the ‘superior’ ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.” Yale professor Nicholas Christiakis wrote in reply: “I’m from an inter-racial family, with many adoptions. Kendi’s arguments are wrong; his ideology is dangerous.”
The more important question about the Times’s report still stands: Why was a report digging into the details of the adoptions of Barrett’s children fair game in 2020 when the Times said that publishing such a report on John Roberts’s children would have been wrong in 2005?
National Review sent an email posing that question to Philip Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards at the Times, who, according to his biography on the paper’s website, “advises reporters and editors on all standards and ethics issues relating to content and news coverage.”
In response, Danielle Rhoades Ha, vice president of communications at the New York Times, wrote in an email: “As the story notes, President Trump and Judge Barrett have both raised the adoptions in public including in the Rose Garden ceremony.”
The Times did not respond to a follow-up email asking if the paper, prior to Monday, had ever published a report revealing details of an adoption of a child of any other public official.
“Just because adoptive parents choose to share some of their story, it doesn’t give anyone else the right to dig up details they chose not to share,” Chuck Johnson, president of the National Council for Adoption, tells National Review. “Parents and ultimately the maturing child should be in control of what and with whom they share about themselves and their adoption.”
There is an obvious human-interest story about what happened to Haitian children after the 2010 earthquake. CNN’s Anderson Cooper produced some harrowing reporting about the conditions on the ground after the earthquake; many children in orphanages were sent to live in tent cities.
It’s even possible to write about the Barrett adoptions in an ethical way that doesn’t dig up details the adoptive parents and adopted children haven’t chosen to share. For example, the Miami Herald published a report on October 9 about the adoption of John Peter Barrett that does not appear to be the kind of fishing expedition that the Times’s report was.
By the time the earthquake hit, John Peter and his adoptive parents had been far along in the adoption process, but it remained stalled. The Barretts and their son were finally allowed to be united in the United States after the earthquake because the Obama administration (with widespread bipartisan congressional support) eased paperwork requirements for 1,150 children already far enough along in the adoption process. “All of the cases we were looking at, including Judge Barrett’s, fell into that category,” Whitney Reitz, an Obama administration official who led efforts to expedite Haiti adoptions, told the Miami Herald.
“There was a national call to do something to help Haiti. Congress responded in a very bipartisan way. The [Obama] administration was very helpful. They worked hand-in-glove with the Haitian authorities, and a lot of kids were helped,” says Chuck Johnson. “The leaders in that moment were Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Amy Klobuchar, Mary Landrieu. . . . There were a lot of Republicans, too.”
One reason why prying into or politicizing the adoptions of the Barrett children is “unfair and wrong,” says Johnson, is that the kids are old enough “to read these newspapers and read these comments on Twitter and other things if they wanted to.”
“It was a dangerous narrative to talk about condemning the whole population of people who adopt children internationally as ‘colonizers,’” Johnson adds. “ It might discourage families from [adopting] because they don’t want to be attacked on social media as colonizers.”
“When people use children and their adoption stories, they take something good and try to make it unseemly,” Johnson says. “That’s wrong for the institution of adoption, and it’s wrong for the families, and it’s terribly destructive to the kids.”
