Madonna appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show today to discuss the controversy surrounding her adoption of little David Banda. She talked about how she found him and how sick he was when she first met him in person.
"I'm financing a documentary about orphans in Malawi, so I was allowed to view footage and photographs of a lot of the children. An 8-year-old girl who is living with HIV was holding this child. I became transfixed by him. … But I didn't yet know I was going to adopt him. I was just drawn to him."
David had spent most of his life in an orphanage with 500 other orphans. Madonna didn't know the state of David's health when she was visiting Malawi and considering adopting David. She brought a pediatrician to test all of the children's health for their overall well being, and later learned that David tested negative for tuberculosis, malaria, HIV and other common illnesses striking African orphans.
"When I met him, he was extremely ill," Madonna says. "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. We 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. He's still a little bit ill, not completely free of his pneumonia, but he's much better than he was when we found him."
Madonna also discussed recent contradictory statements by the boy's biological father that he didn't understand what the adoption entailed.
"Here's what I knew. David had been living in this orphanage since he was two weeks old," Madonna says. "He had survived malaria and tuberculosis, and no one from his extended family had visited him since the time he arrived. So from my perspective, there was no one looking after David's welfare."
Once David's father was located, he initially said he gave his son up for adoption always hoping that someone like Madonna would be able to give him a better life, and agreed to the adoption. Now, according to the press, David's father is saying he did not fully understand what he was doing when he agreed to let Madonna adopt his son.
"I do not believe that is true. I sat in that room, I looked into that man's eyes," Madonna says. "I believe that the press is manipulating this information out of him. I believe at this point in time, he's been terrorized by the media. They have asked him things, repeatedly, and they have put words in his mouth. They have spun a story that is completely false."
Madonna sounded very sincere and was quite emotional during the interview. And just look at this darling photo released by Madonna's publicist! Baby Davie is clearly happy with his new family, which includes a loving mother and father and two siblings who are already close to him. We say, Davie's found a good home, leave the family alone.
Madonna appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show today to discuss the controversy surrounding her adoption of little David Banda. She talked about how she found him and how sick he was when she first met him in person.
