Adoption ain't what it was. Time was that you could adopt a child just by creeping into a house at night, chloroforming some parents, making away with a baby and raising it as a penguin-servant in your underground sewer lair.
Not that Madonna would ever go to that length to adopt a baby; mainly because she doesn't even know if Malawi has sewers or not, and she only wants a baby from Malawi because they're the most fashionable sort at the moment. Anyway, trying to keep up with all this Madonna Malawi adoption kerfuffle has been insanely difficult, but so far we think that Madonna has been given interim custody of little David Banda for now. However, a bunch of human rights groups in Malawi are now looking to halt Madonna's adoption of David Banda because they say that international adoption rules are being bent. Well, that's one reason – the human rights groups are worried about the mental impact of David Banda seeing his new Mum dancing about in the kitchen wearing nothing but a mind-shudderingly pornographic gynotard for the first time, too.
You'd have thought that Madonna would have been able to guess that playing around with the life of a child is a dangerous thing to do. After all, when you think of the way that Madonna has treated the crucifixion of Jesus, the responsible treatment of horses and the act of making books where she sits around on a chair in a mask and a leather bra with nipple holes sucking her fingers or weeing on Naomi Campbell on a beach, the first word that springs to mind tends to be 'conscientious'.
But Madonna's big Malawi adoption adventure hasn't exactly gone swimmingly to say the least. Even leaving aside the fact that it looks like Madonna is copying Angelina Jolie and Meg Ryan by jumping on the foreign child adoption bus, everything's been handled especially badly from a PR standpoint. First Madonna went to Malawi to adopt an orphan, then Madonna's slaves said she wasn't adopting anybody, then Guy Ritchie apparently threw a wobbly about the adoption, then Madonna did decide to adopt a boy from Malawi – even though his still having a father negates the whole 'orphan' thing – and late last week Madonna was granted an interim custody order of the boy.
Strangely enough, people are starting to claim that sequence of events isn't really the proper way to handle the adoption of an actual child. According to People:
The Human Rights Consultative Committee (HRCC), a grouping of 67 human rights NGOs in Malawi, tells PEOPLE they hope to halt Madonna's adoption of a 13-month old baby boy for the moment. Justin Dzonzi, HRCC's chairman, says the group wants to make sure Malawi's laws "are not bent" for the 48-year-old singer. "The laws of Malawi are clear that if one wants to adopt a child one has to stay with the child for at least 18 months for assessment," he said.
The main problem seems to be that Madonna would usually need to stay in Malawi for a long time before she'd be allowed to adopt anybody, and that's something she hasn't done – instead preferring to make staggering amounts of money by showing the outline her minge off to audiences around the world while she sings some bad techno at them. And that's something that angers Morderchai Msisha, a senior constitutional lawyer from Malawi. Not the bit about the minge, the bit about not spending much time in Malawi:
"If Madonna wants to adopt this baby she has to stay here. Someone is bending the laws for Madonna."
What happens next is anybody's guess. Perhaps Madonna's financial muscle will push the adoption through, or maybe the Malawi human rights group will put an end to the adoption altogether. Or maybe this whole malarkey will get dragged out in the courts for months and months and months until everyone involved loses interest. We just don't know.
Boy oh boy, are we ever regretting skipping that particular lesson of our Malawi International Adoptions Legal Minutiae GSCE class at school now.
Read more:
Human rights group tries to halt Madonna's adoption – People
[story by Stuart Heritage]
