Adoptions get star status

Another kind of baby boomlet is going on in Hollywood, courtesy of the developing world.
Ewan McGregor and his wife, Eve Mavrakis, just adopted a 4-year-old girl from Mongolia. Earlier this year, Meg Ryan brought home a Chinese toddler named Daisy. Mia Farrow, the first big-name proponent of international adoption, has raised 10 adopted kids. Jessica Simpson has talked about adopting from South or Central America.

And Tinseltown's most glamorous adoptive mom, now-pregnant Angelina Jolie, is raising two children — Maddox, 4, adopted from Cambodia, and Zahara, 1, from Ethiopia — with Brad Pitt.

"You can be cynical about it and say it ups the ante of celebrity uniqueness," says US Weekly editor Janice Min. "But it does enhance the stature of a celebrity because it shows the person is open-minded and cosmopolitan enough to take in children with great needs from around the world."

More than 20,000 international adoptions take place in the USA each year, says the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Devon Brooks, a child welfare expert at the University of Southern California's school of social work who specializes in adoptive placements, says that when stars adopt internationally, "there's an element of glamour because of the idea they're making a difference in the world, in a bigger scope or way."

Jolie, who told ABC News in February that she'd "love to adopt just a bunch more kids," said her children were special to her because "we chose each other."

Ryan told Oprah Winfrey in an interview in March on the talk host's show that she tried to adopt domestically first, but bringing Daisy to America was "good, because there are so many girls there who need homes." The actress said she started the Chinese adoption process about two years ago.

Celebrities are under the same scrutiny and have to slog through the same red tape as anyone else, say adoption experts, including Jane Aronson, a Manhattan pediatrician who specializes in treating children who are adopted abroad and is herself an adoptive parent.

But, Brooks says, "it's easier in that (a celebrity) has the resources, if the first agency tells her no, to move on to the next agency immediately. That's what it's all about: the ability to expedite things."

Still, the headlines overshadow the actual numbers of stars who are scooping up foreign children, says Peter Gibbs, director of the Center for Adoption Research at the University of Massachusetts: "Just because it's big news doesn't mean everyone is doing it. "

But stars can be role models. "When a person who is popular adopts a child, the public is drawn to it," says Aronson, who treated Jolie's daughter, Zahara, for dehydration and salmonella when she arrived in New York last July. "There was a positive buzz about this adoption, that a child was adopted and was ill and is now well."

Jolie "has made people think very positively about adoption."

Source: USA Today