National Adoption Day -- making the family connection

Friday, Nov. 20 marked the seventh year Boston has participated in National Adoption Day. More than two hundred families were able to bring their children home -- permanently -- last week.

The second floor atrium of the Edward W. Brooke courthouse rang with applause at 9:30 a.m. Rep. Gloria Fox was addressing the crowd of soon-to-be parents and grandparents who were juggling babies or herding children.

"I was a ward of the state," Fox told the audience. A foster child for most of her life, Fox held a special appreciation for National Adoption Day, a product of the "hard work of brothers and sisters who were raised in foster care themselves."

After recounting her "story of searching" for her biological family members (Fox still has yet to find her brother), the co-chair of the Foster Care Caucus applauded the parents in the audience. "God bless each and every one of you that has the time and the ability to take in a child," she said.

Adoptive families -- including Laura Alefantis and Rochelle Rousseau, a Lawrence lesbian couple -- joined Fox behind the podium for the reading of a formal proclamation in honor of National Adoption Day.

Alefantis and Rousseau were finally able to adopt D.O., their five-year-old foster son, on Friday. "The first time we met him, he was funny and amazing. We didn't expect to meet the little boy we met. When you read histories on paper, they're very scary," Alefantis, a special education teacher, told Bay Windows' Ethan Jacobs.

"We read his history, and although there were definitely a lot of rough spots in his life, we still wanted to meet him ... He was just a happy, bubbly, energetic four-year-old boy who captured the room. He was charismatic. He was so amazing," Alefantis said.

Janice Halpern, the director of public relations and fundraising at Massachusetts Adoption Resource Exchange, Inc. (MARE), strongly supports LGBT couples seeking to adopt, citing their activism as one of their best parenting skills.

"LGBT families can be among the best families for children who've been in foster care, who've experienced abuse, neglect, perhaps discrimination because of their home situation, and we want to make sure LGBT adults -- single, married, or partnered -- know that there are hundreds of children in the state who need loving parents, and that LGBT parents can be and are those loving families for many of the children in need," Halpern said. "LGBT adults have experience advocating for themselves, and that ability to advocate for yourself -- for your own rights, for your own needs -- is a valuable skill in advocating for the needs of a child."

In a recent article from the United Kingdom's Times Online, LGBT parents -- lesbians in particular -- were reported to be better at raising children than their straight peers. Stephen Scott, the director of research at the National Academy for Parenting Practitioners, revealed the organizations latest research. The finding that stood out the most, according to Scott, was that "lesbians make better parents than a man and a woman."

Scott's research revealed that "children brought up by female couples are more aspirational and more confident in championing social justice."

The daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, out lesbian Mary Cheney, earlier this month debunked socially conservative myths that LGBT parents should not raise children. "Every piece of remotely responsible research that has been done in the last twenty years has shown there is no difference between children raised by same-sex parents and children raised by opposite-sex parents," Cheney said. "What matters is being raised in a stable, loving environment."

Cheney and her partner Heather Poe welcomed their second child, a daughter, earlier this month.

Of the more than two hundred couples that will be celebrating their first Thanksgiving as a legal family, Melanie Gilbert and Ann Louise (Snip) Francis are particularly thankful. The couple "voted with their feet" in 2005 and moved the 750 miles from Michigan to Massachusetts in protest of the November 2004 vote that added language to the MI constitution restricting marriage to heterosexual couples. Gilbert and Francis were the first two women to be married in the Old South Meeting House in July of 2005.

"Two years ago this month, we signed up for a [Massachusetts Approach to Parenting Partnership] training through Cambridge Family and Children's Services. Nine months later, we were parents ... Friday, we [became] parents," Gilbert said. She and Francis are now mothers to biological siblings Karla and Bryan. "We chose foster care because we believe in homegrown adoptions and wanted to build our family with existing children," Gilbert said. The couple was well received by the Department of Children and Families (DCF) upon their cross-country move. "That openness and acceptance is why we left our home state of Michigan."