Queen Latifah a mom? Star says she may adopt a child.
Could Queen Latifah soon be a mom? That’s what the actress and rapper said to Barbara Walters on ABC’s “The View” yesterday, saying she was “totally serious” about adopting a child.
“I think I saw one of those specials... you know those movies of the week. And it was like – and I just always wanted to bring a child home,” she said.
When Walters pressed, asking Queen Latifah if she was really serious about adoption, the actress said yes, and that she was “actually kind of working on that.”
“I’m totally serious,” she said. And then, because it’s Queen Latifah: “so if you got a kid that you don’t... just give me a year – let me set up camp and then send me the kid.”
(She’s got a lot on her plate – she’s set to star in a television movie version of Steel Magnolias next year.)
But she said again that she was really serious about adopting.
She would be in good company.
The celebrity world is filled with star-studded adoptions. There’s the Jolie-Pitt clan, of course, with kids hailing from Cambodia, Ethiopia and Vietnam. Katherine Heigl and husband Josh Kelley adopted a daughter from South Korea. And Madonna, who fought to adopt daughter Mercy James from Malawi.
Latifah wouldn’t even raise eyebrows as a single celebrity mom adopting. Think Charlize Theron and Sandra Bullock.
But as the Monitor has reported, adoption is far more than a celebrity trend – it’s an American phenomenon. In 2010, there were 52,891 domestic adoptions reported through public agencies in the US, and 11,058 international adoptions, according to the State Department. In 2002, the National Survey of Family Growth estimated that 18.5 million American women ages 18-44 had considered adoption.
As Modern Parenthood editor Clara Germani wrote recently, in her introduction to the heartwarming – and, we’ve discovered, controversial – series about a Monitor editor and his family’s journey to China to adopt their second daughter, most of these adoptions go right.
Adoption, then, is a beautiful American story – one of parental love, of families morphing into new and enduring shapes, of bonding that goes beyond DNA and bureaucratic regulations.
“I’m here to tell you it’s the antidote to the adoption angst that media and popular psychology seem to focus on, such as infertility grief, bureaucratic tangles, and the uncertainties of timing,” Germani wrote.
We hope you’ll check out Gretchen Belsie’s dispatches. She and husband Laurent, the Monitor’s business editor, are back in China with their first adopted daughter, Grace. They have been waiting five years to adopt their second daughter, Madeleine, who is now 7. Already the series has led to smiles, tears and an intense debate among our readers.
Meanwhile, we’ll just have to wait for Queen Latifah’s next move.
