It’s heroic and important. The film Lifemark is a moving testament to its value.
It’s heroic and important. The film Lifemark is a moving testament to its value.
Birth mother: Did you ever hate me?
Son: I just wanted to know if you ever thought of me.
Birth mother: Every day.
T hanksgiving has come early this year. The dialogue comes from the movie Lifemark, currently in a limited run at theaters. It’s a true story of adoption. Lifemark was inspired by the documentary I Lived on Parker Avenue, which chronicled a young man (David Colton) as he journeyed to meet his birth mother and father. (The abortion clinic that Colton’s birth mother walked away from in Indiana is on Parker Avenue.) The words above come from when they finally met.
Lifemark doesn’t sugarcoat the pain that is involved in separation or the emotional uncertainties. At the same time, it presents the blessing a child can be to both a couple and a young mother who is not prepared to raise the baby within her. Since the Mississippi abortion case that ultimately ended Roe v. Wade was argued before the Supreme Court, we’ve seen some hostility to adoption as an option for a pregnant abortion-minded woman. Lifemark shows quite clearly how it can go from a non-option to transformational for all involved — most especially the child who is allowed to be born.
Having been a huge fan of the short documentary, I was skeptical that a movie could capture the beauty of the story that’s captured in real time by Parker Ave — but it sure does. And it’s timing is quite helpful for this moment.
The premiere of Lifemark was earlier this month at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., and Kirk Cameron, probably best known for his teenage role in Growing Pains in the 1990s, was in attendance. Cameron plays Colton’s adoptive father. And growing pains is exactly what we are having in America right now. Roe is gone. We’re starting to have the debates that Roe shut down. Most Americans want some restrictions on abortion. They also want to know that women have choices. Adoption is also widely considered a good. An estimated 2 million American couples long to adopt a child. And yet, as adoption advocate Elizabeth Kirk (also a law professor and adoptee and adoptive mom) points out, the ratio of abortion to adoption in America is 50 to 1. (She has written an excellent paper for the Charlotte Lozier Institute about adoption after Roe.)
Compared with the number of abortions in the U.S. annually, adoption is relatively a non-option. This is a place where pro-choice Americans and pro-life Americans should be able to work together. Only about 18,000 babies born in the U.S. are placed for adoption annually. A majority of Americans have a favorable view of adoption, and yet the majority do not consider adoption as a way to grow their family.
Pregnant women often don’t consider adoption because they associate it with the foster-care system, and they don’t want their child to wind up there. That’s not going to happen if a mother heroically chooses adoption. But it’s a major educational challenge for us all, whatever one’s position on abortion. (No parent wants her child in the foster-care system, which needs serious reform — and AEI’s Naomi Schaefer Riley, author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives, has suggestions.)
During remarks after the movie premiere, Lifemark writer Kevin Peeples shared that his favorite line in the film was one that one of the actors improvised. Colton’s best friend discovers that his sister is pregnant and considering abortion. He says that that baby could be someone’s best friend one day. “One choice ripples through generations,” Peeples said about the possibilities of adoption.
David Colton is now a lawyer in Louisiana (where he was raised) who helps facilitate adoption. (In a touching scene for anyone who recognizes him, he plays the adoption lawyer in a brief cameo). He believes that Lifemark will save lives and help build families through adoption. His birth mother, Melissa Cates, prays that the movie communicates that every life has a purpose and that it will help women and girls in situations like the one in which she found herself — pregnant, scared, unmarried — “choose life,” seeing the potential of every life and the gift that is adoption.
Actor Kirk Cameron hopes that at this turning point in our culture, we would talk more about not only women when it comes to abortion, but the babies who are already present, developing. Watching Lifemark or I Lived on Parker Avenue, you can’t avoid the reality that Colton could have died in that abortion clinic Cates found herself in. (She was on the table when she changed her mind.) Cates in no way regrets that her son is alive; she’s overjoyed with gratitude for his adoptive parents — who are, no question, his parents — who welcomed him as their own.
Produced by the Kendrick Brothers (who are behind Evangelical movies, including Fireproof) and Cameron, it’s clearly aimed at a Christian audience — and people of faith, beyond couples who want to adopt babies, absolutely need to get more serious about considering adoption. Older children wind up all too often stuck in the dreaded foster-care system, sometimes getting themselves arrested after aging out, simply to have somewhere to sleep and eat and be. Most of us don’t think about them daily, but they are part of life in America.
Now that unfettered abortion is not the law of the land, if you can handle some acknowledgment of the existence of God, consider seeing Lifemark, to support education on this front and to get started on a casual conversation about critical challenges.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.