A Voice of Reason

So I have been somewhat following the Madonna international adoption controvery as she attempts to adopt a second child from Malawi. Because I am not aware of all the details, and neither are the media, I am going to refrain from judging her. I will say however that it is imperative that adoptive families follow and respect the rules, regulation, and culture from any country that they are adoptiong from. Unfortunately these issue are what Madonna is being questioned on and as a bi-product the media is again presenting international adoption, as a whole, as a controversial process. I think this is very unfortunate because you just cannot compare any single adoption situation to another, yet alone any country's processes to another. I am the first to say that I fully understand that adoption is not the answer to to solving any single country's orphan crisis, but no one can deny that, there are in fact countless, children throughout the world growing up in orphanages and this is not in the best interest of the child. I also believe that families who adopt should be doing so for the "right" reasons, should be fully educated about adoption, be committed to teaching their adopted child/ren about their home country, and understand the complexities of becoming a interacial family. So back to my original intent of this post; I received a CNN news notice today of a short article in which Mellissa Fay Greene, author and mother of 5 adopted children, was interviewed about her thoughts on the issue. In summary it is REALLY nice to see a "voice of reason" being interviewed for once. You can read the article here:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/04/03/madonna.reaction.adoption.malawi/index.html