The Heart Gallery premise is very simple. It is a special traveling exhibit of photographs featuring Los Angeles foster youth, designed to highlight the need to find loving adoptive families for waiting children.
As an adoptive parent myself of foster children, I have seen firsthand the glaring problems of the system currently facing this Nation.
I was allowed to take my adoptive father's surname. My birth certificate has a different name. My passport has both my adoptive and biological father's surnames.
Would-be adoptive parents have to struggle for years through a bureaucratic obstacle course at an average cost of $30,000.
Mum and I have always been close. Her adoptive parents died when she was 18, and she doesn't have any other kids, so I'm her only family. She lives life to the full, and I envy her vitality. She has pink hair and is a younger spirit than me.
My mother is a realist, and she's had biological and adoptive children, and she said it's no different: No matter what, they're putting a stranger into your arms. You don't know them yet.
All anti-abortion protesters should be presented, on the spot, with an application to sign up as foster parents. They should also be given the names of children in their area in need of adoptive parents. And if they won't sign or volunteer, they should shut up.
My mother birthed three children and she adopted myself and another African-American son. My adoptive parents were Finnish. I grew up in a white picket neighborhood.
Adopting means opening your home, and heart, to a life you've never known. But there is nothing as richly rewarding as being an adoptive parent.
A full accounting of adoption as an option would not underestimate its emotional challenges - the grief and loss for birth mothers, the uncertainties for adoptive parents operating under a patchwork of state laws.
