Not directly related to adoptee rights, but important.USA TODAY
March 9, 2008
Movies open door for adoption advocates
By Wendy Koch, USA TODAY
The popularity of Juno and Bella, movies about young, unmarried, pregnant women, has given the National Council for Adoption an opening.
The private advocacy group is launching a public service advertising campaign thisweek that includes radio and TV spots as well as billboards, all with this tagline: "Sometimes choosing adoption is being a good mother."
"We see (the movies) as an opportunity to promote adoption awareness," says the group's president, Thomas Atwood. He says the award-winning films, both of them about women who consider adoption for their babies, have given the issue visibility.
The ads are part of a larger government and private effort to reverse the decrease in the number of single women who place infants for adoption.
Fewer than 1% of unmarried pregnant women relinquished their infants for adoption in 2002, the most recent year for which data are available, says Paul Placek, a consultant to the council. That compares with 8.7% before 1973, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Placek says more women have kept their babies as the stigma of single motherhood has eased. Some of them have abortions, although the abortion rate has declined, too.
In 2000, Congress approved a program to promote infant adoption. The Department of Health and Human Services awards grants to organizations, including the adoption council, to train pregnancy counselors at federally funded clinics to present adoption as an option. The grants also have paid for public service ads.
Private groups, including the Minnesota-based Adoption Option Committee, have formed to try to support birth mothers, in part with college scholarships.
NARAL, a group that advocates for abortion rights, "fully supports providing information about options, including adoption," to pregnant women, spokesman Ted Miller says.
Atwood says his group's ads "are not trying to persuade anyone or twist anyone's arms. We're trying to get them to consider adoption. Infant adoption is ripe for growth, for revival."
"Some women are parenting who aren't ready to parent," Atwood says. He adds that single parenthood is difficult, and many children are placed in foster care because of abuse or neglect.
Julia Thornton, 33, a political appointee at the White House, says she was a freshman in college when she became pregnant. She found herself to be the only pregnant woman on campus. Raised Catholic, she chose to relinquish her baby girl but says she has stayed in close touch with the girl and her adoptive mother.
Janelle Kreeb, 30, placed a boy for adoption 11 years ago. "I was young and wanted to go to college," says Kreeb, of Arlington, Va.
She was adopted herself and says her adoptive parents encouraged her to consider adoption. Now studying for a master's degree, she says she knows she did the right thing. She says her son is happy and is doing well in sports and school. "I'm very proud of him."
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