Some media accounts have implied that wealthy celebrities use their fame and money to adopt any kid they want to as fast as they want to. Even the Los Angeles Times published an infamous article entitled “Shopping for Children the Brangelina Way”. (See families.com’s Rachel Whitmire’s blog about this by clicking here.)
When actress Angelina Jolie adopted her fourth child in March, questions flew fast and furious about the seeming speediness of the adoption.
The June issue of Adoptive Families magazine interviewed Heidi Gonzalez, the Vietnam program coordinator for the Pennsylvania-based adoption agency Adoptions from the Heart. According to the agency website, AFH has placed 250 children from Vietnam in the U.S. from 1995-2003. They continued humanitarian work with Vietnam’s children during the period that country was closed to international adoption and received their license to place children in Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon) in April 2006 when international adoptions resumed.
Jolie apparently spoke early last summer with her pediatrician, Dr. Jane Aronson, who is well-known in the adoption community for assessing and treating children awaiting adoption and adoptees. This conversation led her to call Adoptions from the Heart last fall.
Gonzalez said that while there is usually a long list of prospective parents for Vietnamese children, most parents want infants or young toddlers and most want girls. Last fall Gonzalez received a referral for an older toddler boy. Not having anyone waiting for a child of that age and gender at the time, she prepared to send the boy’s description to “waiting children” listservs. Just at that time, Jolie called about adopting a child of that age (Pax Thien was three years old when Jolie and her partner Brad Pitt picked him up in Vietnam in March.)
The adoption website Rainbow Kids contains a detailed account of the story. It says that Jolie’s adoption process began in September, and that in November Jolie visited the toddler room at Pax’s orphanage and saw Pax and his housemates, but did not single him out, apparently fearing to disappoint him should the adoption not be approved or go forward for some reason. (The media covered Pitt and Jolie touring Ho Chi Minh City by motorcycle but apparently did not cover the orphanage visit.) In January, Vietnamese officials received notice of the approval of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services for Pax’s US visa, and it was then that the first rumor of the adoption was leaked to the media. At that time Jolie began to visit Pax to begin bonding.
Gonzalez says that “Angelina did not ask for anything to be expedited.” The only portion of the process that was unusually short was that Pitt and Jolie stayed in Vietnam for one week instead of three. One source said that Vietnamese officials processed Pax’s passport and travel papers in one day to cut short the media frenzy surrounding Pitt and Jolie’s stay in the country.
Pax joins three siblings: Cambodian-born Maddox, age five; Ethiopian-born Zahara, age two; and Pitt and Jolie’s biological child Shiloh, age one. Since Vietnam permits single parents to adopt but not unmarried couples, Jolie adopted as a single parent. It is likely Pitt will later, with Jolie’s consent, be permitted to adopt Pax in any of several states in the U.S. The couple has already had the older two children’s last names legally changed to Jolie-Pitt.
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