Madonna Speaks Out on Adoption

Pop star Madonna spoke publicly about her recent adoption of a Malawian boy today, saying she was worried that the "shocking" controversy it has caused will discourage others from adopting needy children from Africa.

In an interview with daytime talk show host Oprah Winfrey, Madonna said people don't understand adoption in Malawi if they think her fame and money speeded up the process. Extracts from the interview were published ahead of the broadcast on Winfrey's Web site, http://www.oprah.com/ .

Madonna, appearing on a video screen rather than in person, said she was drawn to one-year-old David Banda when she first saw him being held by an 8-year-old girl with HIV.

"I became transfixed by him," she said. "But I didn't yet know I was going to adopt him. I was just drawn to him."

Madonna said that when she first met the boy, "he was extremely ill. He had severe pneumonia and he could hardly breathe. I was in a state of panic, because I didn't want to leave him in the orphanage because I knew they didn't have medication to take care of him."

Madonna said she and her British director husband Guy Ritchie "got permission to take him to a clinic to have a bronchial dilator put on him. . . . He had pneumonia and was given an injection of antibiotics."

Madonna said Banda, who is now living with the couple and their two children in London, was "still a little bit ill, not completely free of his pneumonia, but he's much better than he was when we found him."

The boy had spent most of his life in an orphanage with 500 other children although his father was alive. Madonna said she was told his mother and three siblings had died of AIDS.

"Here's what I knew. David had been living in this orphanage since he was two weeks old. He had survived malaria and tuberculosis, and no one from his family had visited him since the time he arrived. So from my perspective, there was no one looking after David's welfare," she said.

Madonna was granted an interim adoption order by the Malawian government. Final approval is expected in 18 months.

"I assure you it doesn't matter who you are or how much money you have, nothing goes fast in Africa," Madonna said. "There are no adoption laws in Malawi. And I was warned by my social worker that because there were no known laws in Malawi, they were more or less going to have to make them up as we went along. And she did say to me, 'Pick Ethiopia. Go to Kenya. Don't go to Malawi because you're just going to get a hard time.' "

Madonna told Oprah she had no idea the adoption was causing such a controversy until she returned to England.

"I don't read newspapers or watch television," Madonna said, "but all of my friends have let me know what everybody's talking about and what's going on in the news. So it didn't really hit me until I got back to England. It's pretty shocking."

Malawian child rights groups have accused the Malawian government of breaking the law in granting the non-resident Ritchies an interim adoption order for Banda and are challenging the process in court.

Speaking about the boy's father, who has been quoted as saying he did not know what he had agreed to, Madonna said she thought he had been "terrorized by the media."

"I do not believe that is true. I sat in that room, I looked into that man's eyes," she said.

Madonna said she believes "the press is manipulating this information out of him. They have asked him things, repeatedly, and they have put words in his mouth. They have spun a story that is completely false."

Madonna said her two children -- daughter Lourdes, 10, and son Rocco, 6 -- have fallen in love with their new baby brother.

"They just embraced him, and that's the amazing thing about children," she said. "They don't ask questions. They've never once said, 'What is he doing here,' or mentioned the difference in his skin color, or questioned his presence in our life. That is an amazing lesson that children do teach us."

Asked if she had been hurt by the controversy, Madonna said: "I wouldn't say I'm hurt by it, but I would say I'm disappointed. I understand that gossip and telling negative stories sells newspapers. But I think for me, I'm disappointed because it discourages other people from doing the same thing -- for anybody who had the idea that they, too, would like to open their home and give a life to a child living in an orphanage who might possibly not live past the age of 5."

She said that "anybody who had that idea might be discouraged from doing it. For me, that's what disappoints me the most."

Madonna urged her critics to "go to Africa and see what I saw and walk through those villages . . . to see 8-year-olds in charge of households. To see mothers dying, with Kaposi sarcoma lesions all over their bodies. To see open sewages everywhere. To see what I saw. It is a state of emergency. As far as I'm concerned, the adoption laws have to be changed to suit that state of emergency. I think if everybody went there, they'd want to bring one of those children home with them and give them a better life."