As Sandra Bullock’s four year ordeal to successfully adopt a baby becomes an increasingly bigger story in the supermarket tabloids, Katherine Heigl’s adoption story moves ever more rapidly to the sidelines. While Heigl did not win an Oscar and then discover her husband was cheating on her, she does have an interesting story to tell.
Heigl, the former Grey’s Anatomy actor who co-stars with Ashton Kutcher in the upcoming Killers decided to adopt a child even though she and her husband, Josh Kelley, had not been told they could not conceive one by themselves. She had grown up with an older sister who had been adopted from South Korea and decided to go the same route. They had Naleigh, a special needs child, in their care in September of 2009, less than a year after they had begun the adoption process. She says, in an Los Aangeles hotel room, that she felt there were so many needy children it felt more comfortable to her to take one in than have one of her own. And she says that if she learned anything during the process, it was that most people are not prepared to be parents.
“It feels kind of selfish to not adopt when you know that there are so many needy children but it [the adoption process] is lengthy and complicated and you had better hope there is nothing in your background that they will find because they do a million background checks, which they should do, and there is fingerprinting and meetings and they come to your home and make you fill out a form. I also think that anyone who wants to have a child should fill out this form because it forces you to answer questions you probably wouldn’t have thought about unless it was put in front of you. You assume that you and your partner are on the same page about most things. But it asks questions like ‘do you plan to raise them religiously? What kind of disciplinarian do you plan to be? Is your family going to be involved in their lives? What kind of education do you plan to give them?’ So you have to think about how you feel as a unit about these things.”
Asked if she is concerned that the parents will leave South Korea and come to the United States to find their child, she says that, for better or worse, it’s unlikely to happen. “I don’t think so. The situation in Korea is that if you are an unwed mother it is very hard for you to keep your child and essentially if they don’t have a father who will claim the child you don’t have a birth certificate. If you don’t have that then you are not accepted into society. It [giving a child up for adoption] is one of the toughest choices anyone would have to make in their lives but it is really the only choice they can make if they want this child to have a shot. It’s very unfortunate but it’s cultural.”
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