Madonna’s surprise decision to adopt an African child continues to draw fire from all quarters, with several acres of forest having been devoured in newspaper coverage of the controversy.
The Queen of pop has been heavily criticised for adopting the 13-month-old Malawi boy, David Banda, after discovering him in an orphanage in one of the poorest countries in Africa.
The main accusation leveled at her is that she has used her wealth and celebrity status to bypass normal adoption procedures and that she deliberately picked a country where the adoptions laws are lax.
However, much of the argument has centered on her own motives, with some suggesting that she badly wanted another child but at 48 is too old.
But in an open letter posted on her official website she defended her decision and explained the reasons behind the adoption: “After learning that there were over one million orphans in Malawi, it was my wish to open up our home and help one child escape an extreme life of hardship, poverty and in many cases death, as well as expand our family This was not a decision or commitment that my family or I take lightly.”
However, speaking on the Oprah Winfrey show in what seemed like a damage limitation exercise, she appeared to change her story slightly, stating she had already decided to adopt before she was aware of the situation in Malawi.
“I wanted to go into a third world country – I wasn’t sure where – and give a life to a child who might not otherwise have had one,” she said, her eyes filling with tears as she described how she had found herself drawn to the boy who had lived in the orphanage since he was two weeks old.
“An eight-year-old girl who is living with HIV was holding this child. I became transfixed by him. When I met him, he was extremely ill. He had severe pneumonia, and he could hardly breathe. I was in a state of panic, because I didn’t want to leave him in the orphanages yet know I was going to adopt him. I was just drawn to him.”
She denied that she had used her celebrity status to speed up the procedure. “There are no adoption laws in Malawi," she said. "And I was warned by my social worker that because there were no known laws in Malawi, they were more or less going to have to make them up as we went along.”
Again this statement conflicts with her own words as posted earlier on her web-site: “We have gone about the adoption procedure according to the law like anyone else who adopts a child. Reports to the contrary are totally inaccurate.”
But what is clear is that had Madonna been living in Ireland, she would not have been able to carry out the adoption process so speedily.
According to Kiernan Gildea, Registrar of the Irish Adoption Board, the procedure in relation to inter-country adoptions is heavily regulated and can take several years to complete.
“For an Irish couple to adopt abroad, they first have to be assessed by their local office of the HSE,” he explained. “It’s a very thorough procedure, and once they get a positive recommendation, they can then go to the country to begin the application to adopt. We have agreements in place with several countries and a list of other countries where the laws are broadly similar to ours. The situation in the UK is slightly different to ours; as far as I’m aware it involves the relevant local authority.”
There are strict criteria involved in foreign adoptions, and among a long list of requirements, prospective adoptive parents in Ireland must demonstrate conditions such as, “the capacity to provide an environment where the child’s original nationality, race, culture, language and religion will be valued and appropriately promoted throughout childhood.”
And depending on which country the child is being adopted from there are other complex rules. The Chinese adoption authorities for example give priority to childless couples and to those aged between 30 and 45.
Madonna would not have qualified under either of those rules. According to Gildea, African adoptions among Irish couples are becoming more popular, especially those from Ethiopia, though he confirmed there has been just one Irish adoption from Malawi to date.
Ironically, Madonna’s visits to Malawi and the whole adoption controversy may reap some benefits for the country in the long term. She has promised to raise at least $3 million to fund programs to help the roughly 12 million orphans in there, 1 million of whom are children who have lost at least one parent. She’s also financing to the tune of about $1 million a documentary about the plight of Malawian children. And she has met with Bill Clinton to discuss bringing low-cost medicines to the country.
“It’s good that we are able to talk about Malawi,” said Kate O’Donnell, an Irish Aid worker currently involved in an Oxfam project in the south of the country. “It’s certainly put Malawi on the map. It’s an extremely poor country, very underdeveloped, with a combination of poverty and disease such as AIDS where large chunks of families die early. On top of that we have a food crisis due to poor harvest every three years. But there is progress being made and we’re involved in a broad programme covering everything from improving agriculture to home based care projects.”
Did Madonna mean anything to the 11 million people of Malawi before this story broke? “They’re aware of who she is now because it’s in the news over here but I’m not sure they knew who she was before all this happened. Bono was here a few years ago and they didn’t know who he was at the time.”