Celebrities should not be allowed to ignore adoption laws

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Madonna visits the village of Mugulula on April 3, 2009 on the outskirts of Lilongwe, Malawi.

By Jeanne Malmgren (Contact)
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Independentmail.com

So, somebody finally told Madonna “no.”

And now the billionaire megastar — a woman who has perfected the art of getting everything she wants — will return home from Malawi without the toddler girl she planned to adopt.

On Friday a judge in that African nation denied Madonna’s adoption petition, saying that she had not met Malawi’s law requiring applicants to live there 18 to 24 months while child welfare officials assess their parenting skills.

I’d imagine Madonna thought it was a slam-dunk. She has spent millions building schools and orphanages in that impoverished country through her charity, Raising Malawi. Three years ago, she adopted another Malawian child, taking him to London before the legalities were finalized. She got her way that time.

This time, it appears she won’t, although her lawyer says he will appeal.

I have mixed feelings about all this. I’m the adoptive mother of three children born in a Third World country. I understand the urge that can seize you, once you’ve been to a place like that, once you’ve seen dirty, ragged street children begging for food and sniffing glue, the trademark orange streaks in their hair that signal malnutrition.

You come home, and you can’t get the images out of your mind. Before you know it, you’re filling out adoption papers.

In 2002, while I was waiting to adopt my second and third daughters from Cambodia, another celebrity adopter, Angelina Jolie, did what Madonna wants to do. Somehow Jolie bypassed Cambodia’s adoption laws and even sidestepped a U.S.-imposed moratorium on adoptions from that country that had 300-some American families, including mine, frozen midway through the adoption process.

While we lobbied our senators for help and fretted about the children we already loved and desperately wanted to bring home, Jolie’s infant son was delivered to her in Africa, on the set of a movie she was filming. Cambodia didn’t even make her show up for the official Giving and Receiving Ceremony.

Jolie and Madonna, presumably, have good intentions. They love children. They want to be parents. They make no distinction between biological and adopted children. They use their fame, and money, to bring attention to the plight of orphans and to do good things in their children’s birth countries.

All that is laudable. But adoption laws are there for a reason. And celebrities should not be allowed to ignore them.

There’s also the argument that these high-profile adoption cases do more harm than good, encouraging poor mothers to give up their children. The news photo last week of a Malawian teen holding up a sign saying “ADOPT ME!” was chilling. I wrestle with this question myself, when I see how much it’s costing to rear my three children in America. Would it have been better to spend the money helping many children in their country — building a clinic, maybe, or digging wells for clean water?

Madonna promised the Malawian judge she would be a “deeply loving mother” to 3-year-old Mercy.

That starts with respecting the laws of the country where she found Mercy.

Jeanne Malmgren can be reached at malmgrenjeanne@yahoo.com.