Stealing Children
In The Handmaid’s Tale, the main character, June, had a daughter named Hannah. She was taken away and adopted by a Commander and his wife. The government of Gilead does this because they claim that the Handmaids were unfit as single mothers. This sounds horrific, but it has actually happened several times in The United States.
In 1958, The Child Welfare League of America began what they called “The Indian Adoption Project“. They believed that children living on First Nation reservations were not living up to American standards, so children were very literally kidnapped from their homes, even if there was no proof of parental abuse. None of them were ever documented to keep records of their birth parents, and they were given to white families for adoption.
One man named Roger St. John described being kidnapped from his home in the Sioux tribe of South Dakota by the Child Welfare League in the 1960s with a few of his other siblings. He was the youngest of 16 kids. The older children were able to run away before they were captured. His photo was put on the front page of the local newspaper, celebrating the project, saying that the government was doing such a great job “saving” these kids. He was adopted by a young married white couple in their 20’s after a priest who was part of the project pushed them to adopt Roger and three of his brothers. He grew up to love his adopted parents, but they raised the boys in poverty, because the young couple was not prepared to take on raising four boys at once. Roger grew up feeling very angry that he was denied the right to grow up with his Native culture.