What's Madonna's motive?

[evanovitch]

What's Madonna's motive?


DIANE ABBOTT

Sunday, April 05, 2009

Pop super-star Madonna is currently in Africa 'shopping' for a new black baby. I have mixed feelings about her adoption efforts. The first time around I actually felt sorry for her, because there was so much criticism meted out by a savage British media.


The attacks on Madonna seemed to be more centred on hating her than any genuine concern for African orphans.

I knew that Madonna herself had already had two children, so I felt it was safe to assume that she knew what motherhood was all about and that she was not just doing it on a whim. It also seemed obvious that an African orphan would be better off with the millionaire than in an orphanage. Amongst other things, she was offering top-class medical care for his many ailments. (His mother had died of AIDS.)

Adopting a black child into a white family can be problematic. But because Madonna moves around the multicultural world of pop I felt it would be better than the child being brought up in all-white suburb. And the little black boy she adopted, David Banda, was so cute it was easy to believe that Madonna had fallen in love with him at first sight.

But recently my sympathy has begun to wane. Since adopting her last black baby Madonna has divorced her husband Guy Ritchie. Divorce is always traumatic for children, let alone newly adopted children. So you would have thought that this was an outcome that Madonna would have moved heaven and earth to avoid. Now any chance of having a stable family life for any of her children seems to have disappeared. Instead, they will have to commute between America and England to keep in touch with both Madonna and Guy. And she is in the newspapers with a much younger lover. I certainly do not begrudge her a toy boy. But I think that a more thoughtful mother would have tried to be discreet, in order to avoid unsettling the children. She has also forced her Kabbalah religion (which involves dressing them all in white) and strange dietary habits on the children. And, far from devoting herself to family life, she has embarked on a world tour leaving all her children to be brought up by nannies. This does not seem fair on a child that she has adopted and brought thousands of miles away from his country of birth.


<span style="font-weight: bold">Increasingly, the little boy David Banda seems like a pet.</span>

Furthermore, commentators have pointed out that if Madonna had wanted to lift a black child out of poverty, there are thousands of black American children languishing in children's homes that she could have adopted. Many of them have been orphaned by AIDS, just like David Banda.<span style="font-weight: bold"> But, of course, that would not have had the glamour of adopting an orphan from Africa. </span>Other writers have convincingly shown that the growing practice of rich white Europeans adopting children from poor countries in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa encourages child trafficking. And it also encourages criminals to snatch children from their parents in order to sell them to unsuspecting would-be adoptive parents.

<span style="font-weight: bold">Now Madonna wants to make David Banda part of a matching pair by adopting a little girl.</span> But the courts in Malawi seem to have thrown up an obstacle in her path. After a closed-door hearing the judge, Esme Chombo, ruled that she could not allow Madonna to sidestep the normal adoption rules. &quot;I must confess that there's a gripping temptation to throw caution to the wind and grant an adoption in the hope that there will be a difference in the life of just one child,&quot; the judge said. She continued, &quot;But by removing the very safeguard that is supposed to protect our children, the courts by their pronouncements could actually facilitate the trafficking of children by some unscrupulous individuals... I have to decline to grant the application to Madonna.&quot;

<span style="font-weight: bold">The judge is right to point out that, if Madonna is allowed to bypass normal adoption procedures</span>, any <span style="font-style: italic">rich white paedophile could do the same.</span> Maybe Madonna will be successful in buying her second black baby. But I am not the only one who is increasingly sceptical about her motives.

[mariane]

Re: What's Madonna's motive?

I think Madonnas motive for adoption IS a good one

as is the case for most parents that choose to adopt.. Ok she's not perfect ( but then who is ) if her intentions are good and she loves her children ..then I guess that at least puts on on par with millions of other mothers around the world.

I guess the sad truth is &quot;being Madonna&quot; everything she does will forever be scrutinised and with so many different opinions out there she'll never please everyone.

Despite what anyone else thinks of her Madonna clearly enjoys being a mother! and fortunately for her she can afford quite comfortably to add to her family. I say 10/10 to her for choosing to adopt deprived children

[Serenity82]

Re: What's Madonna's motive?

I think she has done alot for Malawi's orphans and just wants to provide a home for another one. Nothing wrong with that.

My problem and questioning is in terms of her unhealthy sick look nowadays. That's what I'm really wondering about. She doesn't look well!

[evanovitch]

Madonna v Octo-Mom: Who Scores for the Women's Movement?

Madonna v Octo-Mom: Who Scores for the Women's Movement?


Sharon Leach


Damn that Nadya Suleman. Is it me, or is Octo-Mom the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back and in some small way even contributed to Courtney E Martin's depressingly titled article, 'The End of the Women's Movement,' which appeared last week on The American Prospect's website?

The article, which probed the issue of feminist identity and sought to discover whether a formal feminist movement still remained, and if it in fact was still necessary, would invariably spark the old debate, in many quarters - as articles of this nature tend to do - about the role of women in contemporary society.

And almost inevitably filter down to the arguments for and against working and stay-at-home mothers. No big surprise; women have been experiencing conflicting emotions (glee and guilt) on the matter since we won suffrage and later, donning our Joan Collins-inspired shoulder-padded power suits and high heels and, reeking of Chanel No 5, began storming boardrooms, those cigar smoke-addled joints that once housed the good ole boys' club.

The quandary was always going to be this: How could we not take advantage of the hard-won equal rights we obtained, which our great-grandmothers could only dream about? But, on the other hand, wasn't running with the big boys in the workplace a betrayal of our God-given role as Nurturer? Whichever route was decided on by a woman, there'd always be guilt for yearning for the option not taken. The grass, as they say, being always greener, and all of that.

My god, but isn't that the truth. I will admit to identifying a defensive note often creeping into my voice whenever someone asks me whether I have children or not. And no one in this realm or beyond can convince me that the follow-up expression that falls over their face when I say, 'No, I don't', isn't a look of judgement that suggests they think I'm a selfish [censored] for blithely ignoring the child-bearing sacrament.




Still, all this pales into insignificance in the light of the occasional bout of self-doubt second guessing. I sometimes remember with horror my resentment when, one by one, my girlfriends started procreating. A mortification creeps over me when I recall the annoyance I'd feel when an all-girls' night would be interrupted by the fidgeting and complaining of a little kid who was dragged along because a babysitter was unavailable. And then there were my two nephews, god love 'em, who, when they were wee rambunctious lads, would spend time with me at my apartment, but who, although I adored them, nevertheless left me on the brink of mental collapse, whenever they returned home to their parents and I feebly rejoiced that they belonged to someone else.

Was my decision to not have children spawned indeed by a selfish desire to not have someone financially and emotionally dependent on me for the next, what, 18 years? What if I'd passed up a golden Gilmore Girls-like opportunity to experience an inspirational and magical filial relationship, such as the one embodied for all TV posterity in Lorelei and Rory?

But, as often happens in times of deep introspection, a sign emerges from the heavens. In this case: Nadya Suleman, America's favourite new mother, the Octo-Mom, who, with the birth of the news-making octuplets, had piled 14 children into her parents' house, and didn't have a job. Watching her smirk as she vacuously answered question after question posed by the media regarding her ability to actually take care of all those children, without any sustainable income, I was once again convinced that the possession of ovaries does not guarantee a woman of becoming a good mother. A good mother being one who acts, at all times, in the best interest of her offspring and not simply to satisfy some perverse maternal craving which selfishly seeks to merely boost self-worth.

I had nothing to be ashamed about for choosing to remain childless.
But perhaps I'm being unkind. About Suleman, I mean. Maybe, beneath her bee-stung, they-look-suspiciously-like-Angelina-Jolie's lips, is a good mother. Or, at least a skin-and-bones draft of one waiting to become that.

Who knows? For we'll never know, will we, until the children have passed through to adulthood? And, is this even any kind of marker, anyway? Are the mothers of those two Columbine High School killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, considered bad mothers? Or any mother, for that matter, whose children, despite their best efforts, end up committing some similar monstrous act?

It dawns on me that what in fact makes a good mother is sometimes not so easy to define. With Madonna courting controversy once again when she landed in Africa, driven by her seemingly unending quest to adopt yet another African child, I guess I'm wondering what makes the woman, who for years was known as the Material Girl, with her now-iconic conical bras and not-so-secret sexcapades with famous men, then and now (does anyone believe she was 'just friends' with A-Rod?), a better mother than Nadya 'Octo-Mom' Suleman?

News reports about the 50-year-old, recently divorced singer seem to suggest that she's simply scooping up impoverished African children to salve the pain of approaching old age. But is this just a case of Motherhood being attacked?

Even if one questions the motives and merits of her adopting a child outside her race and the long-term socio-cultural effects this adoption will have on the children, one can't help but factor in the fact that these children are being handed an extraordinarily bright future being brought up by one of the world's richest women. Which is what distinguishes Madonna from Octo-Mom.

One can afford the financial and emotional cost of taking care of all the children she desires; the other cannot. Pictures of her first adopted baby, David Banda, show a robust, obviously well-nourished child the better off for having shaken off the poverty of his former life in Malawi, three years ago. If this is truly so, then doesn't everyone win?
Or do they?