A letter signed by the leaders of eleven adoption and child-welfare groups stated

We are concerned that in addition to its intended entertainment value, this film will have the unintended effect of skewing public opinion against children awaiting families both in the United States and abroad...(and) may impede recruitment efforts by feeding into the unconscious fears of potential foster and adoptive families that orphaned children are psychotic and unable to heal from the wounds of abuse, neglect, and abandonment.

My first reaction was kind of summed up by one of the tipsters who emailed us about this story: "It's like claiming Rosemary's Baby would make people stop getting pregnant." Well, it probably did, but that's kind of the point: it would have been a major, irrational leap, and those few people shouldn't dicate our collective action. Are Psycho and The Shining discriminatory against hospitality industry employees? Are The Omen and The Exorcist arguments against having kids?

No. But at the same time, it's true that any good horror movie deals with issues that scare us as a culture, on a subconscious or conscious level. Godzilla dealt with topical issues of post-Hiroshima nuclear fallout. The Day the Earth Stood Still played into Cold War fears. And yes, part of the resonance of Rosemary's Baby comes from fact that pregnancy does involve an element of being taken over, of losing control, and of physical danger.

Those who object to this movie are concerned about just this: systematic portrayal of adopted kids as sinister. And while this may seem overly touchy, it's worth knowing that the movie's original tagline was actually "It must be hard to love an adopted child as much as your own," which besides being cruel, stupid, untrue, and insensitive, implies that an adopted kid isn't "your own" - by definition inaccurate. I'm not one to dismiss these objections out of hand, simply because it's true that letting little things go is what leads to larger societal attitudes. And those who object to the film worry that older adoptees already have a rough time, given the perception that such cases are usually "troubled" - although the statistics actually tell a very different story. They wish, one assumes, to challenge certain stereotypes we take for granted. But at the same time, while I see their point - The Bad Seed has probably lodged in a lot of our subconscious - I can think of at least as many portrayals of angelic orphans as sinister ones (Annie, Oliver, Night of the Hunter, Australia, hell, even Harry Potter.) At the end of the day, the villain is usually the devil, or some more amorphous form of Pure Evil that Satanists would, I suppose, be within their rights to object to. (Or are they proud of it? I'm confused.) The truth is, no one thoughtful - and, one really, really hopes, no one considering adopting an older child - is going to be swayed by a B horror movie. And if the controversy has got us talking and thinking and actually realizing consciously that this is merely a stupid cinematic trope - I'm for it.

Challenging The "Horrors" Of Adoption [NY Times]

Adoption Groups to Challenge Orphan [Babble]

"When you lose your parents, you lose your direction. You lose your focus in life," Madonna narrates. "When I see these kids here — and I think, they've lost their father, they're lost their mother, they've lost their house — and yet they still can smile about it, I think, how could I ever feel bad about anything?"

In this clip, Madonna explains how she came to know about the 1 million children orphaned in Malawi. She admits that she didn't know where the country was at first, and had to look it up on a map.

I Am Because We Are [Official Site]
I Am Because We Are Screening Dates [Sundance Channel]

But Safer is not alone in her belief that a parent's death can be liberating. Researcher Debra Umberson maintains that it's a catalyst. "A lot of people change very deliberately. And sometimes unconsciously, they change in ways that they think their parents would admire, or to become more like the person their parent would want them to be," Umberson says. "Sometimes people incorporate the good parts of their parents in ways that are very constructive for self-growth."

Of course, we're talking about adults here: When a child loses a parent, there's very often a "double whammy" effect on her mental and physical health, Reuters reports. Dr. David Brent of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine studied 140 families in which one parent died prematurely and suddenly from suicide, accidental death, or sudden natural death. He found that parents who die suddenly are likely to have higher-than-expected rates of psychiatric disorder. Plus: Mood, alcohol and substance abuse, and personality disorders mean increased mortality — not just from suicide; also from accidents and cardiovascular diseases. "It's not the same as blaming them for having died," Dr. Brent says. "We know the risk for cardiovascular disease is about eight times higher for people with depression or bipolar depression."

How do you digest this information when your father left for work one day when you were 17 and never came back, having had a heart attack on the subway while taking your little sister to school — as mine did? Very slowly. My mother is amazing, but my relationship with my father was (is) definitely incredibly strong. I find more and more that the things I'm passionate about — writing, music, photography, obscure films — are the things he really liked. It's safe to say that his death was the worst thing that ever happened to me. It's not surprising at all that Dr. Brent found many cases of post-traumatic stress disorder among children who had lost a parent (and none among the children with two living parents.) It's a damaging, life-changing, scarring, jarring experience. When is the right time to lose a parent, anyway? Jeanne Safer may feel liberated, but her mother died "peacefully" at the age of 92 (after declaring, "This is my day!") Not all of us are so lucky. Some adult orphans may feel ready for self-growth, but surely many just feel a dull, unyielding ache?

Adult Orphans: When Parents Die [LA Times]
When Parents Die, Some Children Suffer Doubly [Reuters]