Political Quotes

“Thank you. This is also very important in my State. As I mentioned, we have the highest rate of international adoptions in the country. We have families who have opened their hearts and their homes to kids from every country, including Vietnam, Guatemala, Nepal, and Haiti. In my background as county attorney, for 8 years I oversaw the lawyers who worked with foster care and adoptions. We made it a huge priority to try to speed up the process for kids to be adopted from foster care. Right now in our country nearly 400,000 children are living without permanent families in the foster care system. Over 100,000 of these children are eligible for adoption, but too many of them will languish for years in foster care--oftentimes with very good families for them, but obviously a permanent home is what you want. We talked about international adoptions around the world. There are estimated to be nearly 18 million orphans who have lost both parents and are living in orphanages or on the streets who want, again, a permanent home. Senator Blunt talked about some examples from his own State. One example is the Hatch family. Emerson Hatch was one of these orphaned children. They started the process to adopt her from India in 2000. Emerson was one of 300 kids living in an orphanage built to house 34 children.…”