Word: mother
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...know what I'm asking them to go through," says Rossow, who is mother to 16 adopted children, many of them severely handicapped, plus three of her own. Apart from her more formal duties as a consultant, she serves the foster families as a sort of group mother and their public stand-in. "And yet I also know that the only reason it's going to hurt so much when the child dies is because they loved him so much when he was alive." For this privilege, the state pays the foster families a monthly stipend...
They seem like normal families, with the sweet chaos of child rearing merely complicated by secrecy and the endless visits to doctors, social workers and birth mothers. Some foster families end up taking in the birth mothers too, when they become too weak to care for themselves; some remain ambivalent. "I always felt sympathy for her, until the night they put him in intensive care," says the foster mother of an 18-month-old boy with ARC. % "They told me that if his breathing got any worse they'd put him on a respirator, and at that moment I hated...
There is one other remarkable thing about these families. By 18 months, children normally lose the antibodies acquired from their mothers, and about half of them become HIV-negative. "I was so happy I could've gone and shouted on the rooftops," says one mother, whose child tested negative. "But you can't." The practice, when children turn out healthy, is to move them away from the AIDS foster families into permanent homes, making room for more AIDS babies. Thus what the foster parents risk is loving the children and having to give them away, or keeping them to love...
...prescribed morphine for Denise's pain, and Helen has begun to sing, "Jesus loves me! This I know," as she rocks the child. "It's O.K. to go," she whispers. "These arms will hold you again." At a hospital soon after, with Helen and her husband and the birth mother all cradling one another and the child, Denise heeds Helen's sweet voice and dies...
...occurred in the wake of California's adoption two years ago of an initiative declaring English the official language. Until recently language, which has sparked wars and altered national boundaries abroad, was not a political issue in this country. Now a growing number of Americans seem to feel their mother tongue needs protection. Voters in Florida, Arizona and Colorado have approved similar initiatives, bringing to 17 the number of states with such laws...