A few years ago, my best friend decided to build her family through adoption. Recently, she became Mom to an amazing young boy. She's taught me so much over the last few years, both about the process but also about how how to be sensitive to adoptive parents and children.

So I was shocked when I read that a company called Teleflora, which is currently sponsoring an America's Favorite Mom contest for Mother's Day (Donnie and Marie Osmand will crown the winner on NBC's Primetime tomorrow night), categorized adoptive moms in their contest as "non-moms." An adoption blogger complained, and the company quickly realized their error. They've now change the category to "adopting moms" and issued an apology on their web page.

This weekend, I rented the Oscar-nominated film, Juno. It's easy to see why this little film generated such buzz. It's funny, smart, and heartwarming. It also brings up the perpetually relevant topic of teens, sex, unplanned pregnancy and the ever-contentious issue of "choice". As a mom, these are issues of great interest to me. As someone who has personally dealt with an unplanned pregnancy prior to marriage, it is also a subject dear to my heart.

After watching Juno, I came across an opinion piece in the Boston Globe about the film by Ellen Goodman, a well-known feminist writer. Goodman is critical of Juno and a "wave of movies about unexpectedly pregnant women - 'Knocked Up', 'Waitress', and 'Bella' - all deciding to have their babies and all wrapped up in nice, neat bows". She expresses deep concern for the row of tweens sitting in front of her in the movie theater while she watches Juno. What misleading messages, she asks, are "being absorbed through their PG-13 pores"?

Goodman is certainly not alone in her thinking. Many adults, pundits and parents alike, expressed outrage at the recent announcement of 16 year-old television star, Jamie Lynn Spears' pregnancy. In a society that offers abstinence as an "option" for teens and follows up with information about "safe sex", the parental fury over Jamie Lynn is presumably about her carelessness and ultimately, her decision to keep her baby - not her sexually active status. And understandably, no one wants to see a teenage girl go through the stigma of pregnancy, the pain of giving up a child, or the hardships of raising a child when one is seemingly ill prepared.

When I first learned that I was pregnant, I was 27 and in the middle of a series of on-air live auditions for a seat on ABC's "The View". I knew that the producers were seeking a single 20-something and that my untimely pregnancy would likely cost me the job, no matter how well I performed. Moreover, the auditions (11 in total) were going to continue for several months due to the immense ratings boost they were providing the network; it would be nearly impossible to disguise my condition through the process. I made the difficult decision to publicly announce my pregnancy (on the show). Sean and I got married in a small ceremony a month and a half later in Arizona.

I was in a committed relationship, but I was not engaged when I learned of my pregnancy. Sean was still in law school and I was on the verge of launching a television-hosting career on the hottest daytime talk show. Professionally speaking, the timing couldn't have been worse. Plus, I was deeply aware of the embarrassment and disappointment this would cause my devout Catholic parents.

Of course, there are difficulties that one must endure in making any tough choice. Witness Juno waddling through the school hallway, missing out on prom, and enduring the stares of peers, the judgmental look of a school secretary and the insensitive comment of an ultra sound technician during one of her prenatal visits. Her wit, good humor, and steely exterior did little to dissipate the pain I felt for her during those scenes - a testament to the fine acting skills of this film's rising star.

I was not a teen, but I could certainly relate to the feelings of despair that drove Juno into the "Women Now" clinic. However, what Juno (and the women in the other movies) learn, is that life's problems always look their worst when they first present themselves. In those moments we are very susceptible to underestimating our own strength and the willingness and ability of others to help us through. But it is precisely when we are gripped by fear and self-doubt that courage counts most. The films and heroines that Ellen Goodman dismisses as "fantasy" all celebrate this little life secret, crumpled bow and all.

As I have come to learn for myself, an unplanned pregnancy and child often results in unplanned and unexpected joy - and not just for the mother. What Goodman and others, fail to grasp is that in order for that to happen, one must have faith, hope, and the unsullied optimism of a teenage girl to believe in such things.

Today's celebrity rumor wins points for the details. Thanks to an 'an insider', we know not only that Jennifer Aniston is preparing a nursery for her soon-to-be-adopted child, we also know when the child will arrive (December) and his name (Alexander). Pretty impressive insider information, I'd say.

The source says that the adoption is being handled through a Los Angeles-based agency and that Jen has spent $300,000 preparing the perfect nursery in her Beverly Hills mansion. The nursery includes a nanny's suite, a playroom and two children's bedrooms. The extra room is for the daughter she plans to adopt next. "She thinks having a boy first would be best, so he can look out for his sister", the insider said.

Maybe it is just the way she's been portrayed in the press, but to me Jennifer Aniston always looks sad. Maybe some children in her life would put a smile back on her face.

Ah, the rumor mill--how it spins. Sources--and by sources, I mean our pal Perez Hilton, are starting to rumble that Madge, the Material Mom, is keen to add to her brood.

If any of this is to be believed, and it's hard to imagine given all the grief Madonna has faced over adopting her soon-to-be son David from Malawi, then she of the blond ambition is poised to adopt again. Her adoption of David is not yet complete, however, so I doubt she'll be entering those waters before leaving those she's waist deep in now.

Sources are saying Madge is looking to even out the testosterone by adopting a girl, this time from India. Madge is already mom to Lourdes, and Rocco as well as little David

A Florida woman is under lock and key for faking her pregnancy. The twenty-four year-old was supposed to be surrogating a child, and had collected nearly $6,000 for rent, medical bills and other assistance from two adoption agencies in other counties.

Shawanda Butler was found out after representatives from the Little Angels of America visited her home. She refused to show them her stomach and instead retreated to the bedroom where she allegedly stuffed her shirt with a pillow.

Butler is now facing fraud charges for allegedly faking her pregnancy to collect money from the adoption agencies.

Part of me wants to wave my fist at the injustices that we read about every day. Part of me just bats an eyelash knowing there's so much worse out there.

Critically acclaimed actress Emma Thompson has waged a legal battle to keep her adopted son from being deported. She and her husband, Greg Wise, "informally" adopted twenty-one year-old Tindyebwa Agaba, a Rwandan refugee, after meeting him at a Refugee Council party several years ago.

Now the British government may be sending Tindyebwa back to Rwanda. According to the government he has no legal right to stay in the U.K. Agaba was orphaned after his family was reportedly killed in 1994. Agaba was allowed to stay in the U.K. for five years as an asylum seeker.

I'm not sure what it means to informally adopt someone and if a more formal adoption process would have given Emma, her family and her son more rights for him to stay in the country. Agaba has been in the U.K. since 2003 and is now attending Exeter. It seems a shame that he should have to go back to Rwanda if he is happy with his family here.

My husband and I managed a date this weekend (yay!) and went to see Juno. I'd heard a lot of good things about this movie, which tells the story of a quirky teenage girl who becomes pregnant and decides to give her baby up for adoption. It did not disappoint. I laughed, I cried, and while I left the theater entertained, there was enough substance to the film to have thoughtful discussion over dinner. (And thank goodness, because otherwise we might have had to talk about the kids!)

It surprised me a little to find this article in the Chicago Tribune that characterizes the reaction of birth parents to this movie. Many are cautioning that the teen pregnancy comedy paints too rosy a picture of the decision to place a baby up for adoption. "['Juno'] gives the impression that one can hand a baby off to strangers, have a few tears at the time the baby is born, and then the next day get on with your life as if nothing happened. That is of great, great concern to me," says Mirah Riben, a board member at Origins-USA, a national organization for birth mothers.

Other women interviewed called the movie "oversimplified," "insulting," "painful," and "not true to life."

I understand where they are coming from, I really do. The character Juno has a cavalier attitude towards her decision-making in regards to her pregnancy. She walks away from the abortion clinic because she obsesses about the fact that the baby has fingernails. She chooses the adoptive couple out of a newspaper ad. She signs legal paperwork without flinching, and without any apparent involvement of her own lawyer or an adoption agency.

However, the bottom line for me is that Juno is a COMEDY. It's FICTION. If the movie were touted as an accurate portrayal of the heart-wrenching decision to place a child for adoption, it would be a documentary. (It would also be MUCH less popular.)

Anyone else who has seen this movie want to weigh in?

According to a recent interview, Gwyneth Paltrow would like to adopt! Like many celebrities before her, including her Madgesty Madonna, Gwynnie is considering a blended family with hubbie Chris Martin of Coldplay fame. Only unlike many celebs of late, she's looking in to adopting a local, homegrown babe.

Says Paltrow, " We might get one from Brooklyn. No baby is more helpless than another baby. And I'm a New York Girl." I'm not exactly sure how I feel about the "helpless" comment, but I am happy to hear of anyone adopting a baby from any area.

I've long considered adoption and have always desired to have a blended family of my own. It didn't occur to me, until Ms. Paltrow brought it to my attention, that the possibility existed of adopting a child from my adopted hometown of Brooklyn.

Good luck to Gwyneth if indeed she is planning on adopting, wherever the child may be from. I would strangely feel a sense of pride if she did adopt from Brooklyn. But then again, I'm biased--I think the best of pretty much everything can be found in Brooklyn, and that includes babies!

Remember a few years ago when all that stuff was circulating around the web about how much it costs to have a kid? The number was somewhere around a million dollars or something, or close enough to might as well be that high. Today a new article hit the world wide web courtesy (for me) of Reuters: The cost of fertility treatment.

According to a recent cost analysis it costs $100,000 to give birth using in vitro fertilization (IVF) and similar technologies when the probability of a live birth falls below 15%. Family planners might consider that kind of information very beneficial to anyone considering alternative routes for child bearing.

Doctors and patients would then consider whether to use the woman's own eggs, someone else's or adoption. IVF using donor eggs costs from $15,000--$25,000, for example. I'm not sure what the cost of adoption is, but I'm sure it's up there too. All of this information seems critical to someone considering her options.

The calculations of the probability of a live birth with the aid of technologies were derived from the age of the women in question, the levels of FSH (follicle stimulating hormone--I know, doesn't it sound specific?) and the "surrogate" measure of the ovarian reserve" to calculate the cost of a live birth. That sounds...complicated. But so is birth, however you get there!

I have a pal who is frankly probably being induced as I write this whose baby is the product of IVF. Ask her if it's worth $100,000 and I am sure she would give you a resounding "YES!" Unless she is in labor and then she's probably just screaming. Having a child myself I can say that our babies are worth all the money in the world, however they come to us.

Pic of fertilization by Sergio Godoy (on vacation-Brazil).

Wow. Who'da thunk that license plates would stir up so much trouble? Well, it turns out they can and they do. Me, I've got a Yosemite plate on our Land Rover -- who could possibly be opposed to one of the (if not the) most beautiful places on the planet? Well, the world of specialized license plates is not all granite and waterfalls. It's rife with controversy.

It turns out that not everyone likes the idea of a government-issued license plate promoting an anti-abortion message. In Arizona, the License Plate Commission denied Arizona Life Coalition's request for a "Choose Life" license plate to be made available. The group appealed and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based right here in San Francisco, ruled that the license plate commission had indeed infringed upon the coalition's right to free speech, by not allowing the license plate. A similar scenario played out in Missouri recently as well.

There are those, however, who disagree with the rulings, saying that while individuals have every right to say their piece, the government should not be required to be the medium for their opinions. I kinda agree with that, actually. According to one writer, however, if a group wants a "Preserve Traditional Marriage" plate, would you also see a contrasting "Marriage is For Everyone" plate? Well, actually, yes. Both Hawaii and Montana offer pro-choice plates sponsored by Planned Parenthood.

The Choose Life plates are available in eighteen states, including Hawaii and Montana where they far outsell the pro-choice plates. They are also now available in Arizona and Missouri, thanks to the recent court cases. Personally, I don't think it's appropriate, but if they offer both sides of an argument, I'm not going to complain about it. What do you think?

The movie Rachel and I saw last weekend was a little-known film called Juno. It tells the tale of Juno, a quirky teenager who decides to have sex with her best friend instead of watching the Blair Witch Project on TV and winds up pregnant. The majority of the movie covers her pregnancy, including her decision to put the child up for adoption, the selection of the perfect parents from an ad in the Penny Saver, and her interaction with them and her peers.

Typically, I like simple, black-and-white, films without any deep philosophical meaning or questions. I get enough in the real world; I go to movies to escape that. While this was a very funny movie, it certainly wasn't Weekend at Bernie's. It raised a lot of issues about pregnancy and parenting; Rachel and I are still discussing it.

One of the things Rachel liked about the film was that it didn't go overboard on the whole pregnancy-symptoms cliche. All I remember is Juno throwing up once and expressing a desire for an odd combination of foods at the mall -- something I wouldn't be surprised to hear any teenager order, though.

I did think the scene where Juno spots Vanessa, the woman planning to adopt her child, playing with a friend's daughter at the mall and watches her, realizing that she will be a great mom. The two then run into each other and have a great scene where Vanessa feels the baby kicking in Juno's stomach.

All in all, it was a very enjoyable film with some excellent acting (especially by Juno's parents), a good soundtrack, and an engaging story. I think it was a good choice, especially given Rachel's current condition. If you get a chance, check it out and let me know what you think.

We've all heard those heartwarming stories of twins who were separated at birth finding each other again later in life. Torn apart by circumstance and fate and unaware of the other's existence, they are understandably overjoyed to find that missing piece of themselves. Except in this case. These two "separated at birth" twins discovered their unique bond at the worst possible time. After they married each other.

Lord Alton, a peer in the British House of Lords says, "They were never told that they were twins. They met later in life and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences of the marriage that they entered into and all the issues of their separation."

The court dealt with it by annulling the marriage. But can you imagine the "issues of separation" the formerly-married twins are dealing with?

Mo O'Reilly, the director of child placement for the British Association for Adoption and Fostering, says that while this situation is rare, it isn't completely unheard of. And that makes sense, considering the fact that many of us are attracted to someone who we find to be similar to ourselves. You just can't get more similar than a twin.

A seven year custody battle has come to an end for 8-year-old Anna Mae He. The Tennessee Supreme Court ordered that the child be returned to her biological parents permanently, who plan to return to China with her.

Her parents, Shaoqiang and Qin Luo He, came here for Shaoqiang to attend graduate school. The family faced enormous financial problems and Jerry and Louise Baker became foster parents for baby Anna. The Hes signed a temporary custody agreement for the Bakers to care for Anna, but claim they never agreed to give up Anna permanently. The Bakers decided that they wanted to adopt the child and accused the Hes of being unfit parents, claiming she would have a better life here than in China.

In 2004, a Memphis judge claimed that the Hes had abandoned Anna Mae and took away their parental rights. Shaoqiang He's student visa expired but he was allowed to stay in the U.S. until the custody battle was resolved. Now that he has regained custody of his daughter, he now faces immediate deportation to China.

This is a very sad story. I cannot imagine how scared a child must feel, being returned to her parents after living with her foster family for seven years. She also now faces leaving the only home she's ever known to go to a foreign country where she doesn't even know the culture or the language.

A psychologist who is working with the family was hoping that the little girl would have more time to adjust to the change before leaving the United States and returning to China. Judge Lawrence Berman, an immigration judge in Memphis, gave the Hes until May 2 to leave the country at their own expense.

Whether this decision was right or wrong, the end result is that this child has some enormous challenges ahead of her. I can only hope that these parents give this little girl a lot of love to help her adjust to such a drastic change in her life.

Read

Not so long ago I wrote a few articles about my religious convictions (I have none) and the possibility of those for my son. He doesn't have any, yet, that I know of. After all, he's a wee nine months old.

Recently, Time Magazine posted an article about a couple denied the ability to adopt a child because of their religious beliefs. The husband is an atheist and the wife is a pantheist. Before I read this short article I admit I didn't even know what a pantheist was.

John and Cynthia Burke, originally of Newark, New Jersey, who were almost not allowed to adopt their son over thirty years ago for the same reason, were denied the ability to adopt toddler Eleanor Katherine due to their lack of religious beliefs--or, rather, lack of belief in God as a single deity. The judge denied them the right based on New Jersey's constitution that states "no person shall be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshiping Almighty God in a manner agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience."

Apparently that applies to people who are less than two years old and probably do not have any idea of a higher power. It's possible, perhaps, but questionable. So little Eleanor is once again denied a home, with two people whom the judge claimed had good morals and were ethical. Naturally the Burkes are appealing.

I can see the point in a way--many people believe it is imperative to provide some sort of religious backdrop when raising a child. Many, however, do not feel it's necessary and believe the child can make his or her own decisions when ready--and that could be at any age.

I simply feel terrible for the Burkes and very saddened for the little girl. The chance for adoption is, as we know, like catching a shooting star in some ways. This little girl had a chance for a loving home and family. Now she's back in an orphanage where she doesn't belong.

Even if you don't necessarily agree with me, or with the judge in this case, don't you think Eleanor deserves to be in a home and not in an orphanage? It's not like these people are murderers or drug dealers or something of that nature. In fact, as the judge himself pointed out they seem like wonderful people.

I hate to see a child denied the right to a family. When there are so many, many children out there without homes it seems foolish to deny one of them the ability to go home.

Pic of atheist A by mikebdoss.

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Ed. note: The article cited in this post was actually featured in Time in 1970 -- which we didn't realize at the time of this posting. Apologies for any confusion caused. --Kristin

Although she never felt the irresistible urge to have children, actress Diane Keaton says that the idea of becoming a parent was always in her thoughts. After realizing that the "strong and substantive" domestic partnership she was waiting for wasn't going to happen, she "plunged in" at the age of 55. In 1996, she adopted her daughter Dexter, now 12 and in 2001, she adopted her son Duke, now 7.

After "years of selfishness", the 62-year-old actress says that nothing beats the joy of being a mother, even though she is going it alone. "You can't sit there and go, poor me," she tells Ladies Home Journal in the February issue.

Her kids, however, might have a reason to feel sorry for themselves. Like most of us, Keaton manages to embarrass her children like only a parent can. "I like to take them to school in my bare feet," she says, leading them to beg, "Can't you be normal, lady?"

No, I don't think "normal" describes the quirkiness that is Diane Keaton.