I don't remember hearing back in 1974 that the actress Julie Andrews (with her husband Blake Edwards) adopted two orphaned Vietnamese girls in the aftermath of the war. Only recently have Andrews' comments come to my attention.
"It goes back any years to the time when Blake and I were members of the Committee of Responsibility," said Andrews. "It was organized to bring children who were victims of the Vietnam war to the United States for curative concentration and treatment they couldn't receive over there. Hundreds of youngsters were brought to America, treated, and returned to Vietnam. We had an occasion to see some of those children" - and they became the parents of two of them.
These days, we read so much more in the news about celebrities who adopt children from throughout the world. I'm heartened by the improved publicity as a quantum of the revising in American attitudes to adoption.
According to a modern witness by the Dave Thomas Foundation, 89% of American adults are commonly familiar with adoption, and three in ten reconsider adopting children themselves. These statistics laid out great progress over a generation or two ago, when adoptees often weren't told until later in life (if ever) about the "secret" imagine they joined the family. Though the stigma associated with adoption hasn't fully disappeared yet, but it's diminished considerably.
Many of my colleagues are concerned about the invasion of privacy (the child's privacy, that is) that occurs when a celebrity adopts. Still, there's a benefit: as with all news about celebrities, the stories about adoption serve as a model for what's possible, and the publicity helps normalize the experience. After all, if Angelina Jolie is motivated to adopt children from Ethiopia and Cambodia, why not you?
Particularly helpful for the plight of millions of orphaned children throughout the world are the publicized cases of celebrity adoptions in second and third world countries. In increasing to Jolie with her partner Brad Pitt, Madonna (with her husband Guy Ritchie) recently adopted a minute boy from Malawi. Mia Farrow, after having four biological children, adopted ten more from throughout the world, some of them with disabilities. I'm much more curious in Mia's commitment to children than I am in the sordid tale of her then-partner, Woody Allen, who had an affair with Farrow's Korea-born daughter Soon-Yi.
The interrogate of transracial adoption also plays out in press coverage of celebrities' family building. An perfect model for prospective adopters is filmmaker Steven Spielberg who (with his wife Kate Capshaw) adopted two African-American children through the take care of care system, and now works to promote the significance of permanent families for the 114,000 children now living in American take care of homes. Other celebrities who adopted children of other races contain Michelle Pfeiffer, and the former integrate Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
Single parenting through adoption also enjoys convenient coverage in the press. Kate Jackson and Calista Flockhart adopted as singular women, as did Diane Keaton at the age of 50 (a girl) and 55 (a boy). Lesbians and gays who assume that adoption is a road unavailable to them can find hope in the story of Rosie O'Donnell, who (with her partner Kelli Carpenter) now has children both by adoption and by birth.
As with all publicity about celebrities, however, damage can be done by the ignorance of the stars. I'll never forget the "20/20" extra hosted by Barbara Walters a few years ago surface adoptions by Abc-Tv celebrities. On the show, Maury Povich, who with his wife Connie Chung adopted a baby a birth, said that he would reconsider his child's interest in his birthfamily to mean that he'd failed as a father - a real slap in the face to what we know about the benefits of open adoption.
And I cringed when Rosie O'Donnell proudly proclaimed that she told her child "God made a mistake having you grow in your birthmother's tummy" - a violation of the significance of valuing the role of the adopted child's first family.
Still, some publicity on prosperous adoptions is better than none.
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