Right to be Wanted, Right to be Loved

About the Book

Right to Be Wanted, Right to Be Loved is intended for reading by parents to help children understand adoption before entering school, where they may otherwise hear of it first on the playground.

The author appreciates that receiving this information is likely to be an unsettling experience for children–just as imparting it is not always easy for adopting parents, either. Nor is Right to Be Wanted, Right to Be Loved intended just for adopted children and adopting parents. It is suited as well for assisting all parents and all children to understand the power and value of love that can underlie the adopting process.

Children who are not adopted may, through this book, come to understand better those children who are adopted–and to learn that the same values are reflected in their relationship with their own parents.

They, too, have a right to be wanted and a right to be loved, and to know that it is right–a good thing–to be wanted and to be loved.

Aware that younger children often relate more readily to stories in which the characters are gentle animals, Right to Be Wanted, Right to Be Loved conveys its theme through Mother and Father Rabbit and their little adopted daughter, Allison (Bunny) Rabbit.

Bunny is confused, angry, and afraid when Mother and Father Rabbit tell her she was adopted. They help her lose her confusion, anger, and fear and regain her feeling of security as a member of the family when they explain to her that they wanted her from the very beginning and that she will always be loved by them.

She realizes she has a right to be wanted and a right to be loved–and that it is right, a good thing, to be both wanted and loved.

This book’s theme is taken from a true-life story that culminated in 1957, a story of immense public drama that was all over the news, domestically and internationally. The celebrated “Hildy Ellis Case” produced such a groundswell of public interest that some 25,000 telegrams and letters (this was long before e-mail) poured into the office of the then-governor of Florida.

The author, who was on the governor’s staff at that time, recalls: “The governor was faced with whether to extradite back to Massachusetts a Florida couple by the name of Ellis who had legally adopted, in 1951, a little girl who was the baby of an unwed mother near Boston. When the physical mother discovered the adopting parents were of a different religious faith than she was, she sought to undo the adoption.

“The adopting parents resisted, and officials in Massachusetts brought a charge of kidnapping against them. For six years, the legal battle ensued, until it finally came before the Florida governor as a matter of extradition.

“His legal staff informed him the kidnapping charge and the extradition warrant were seriously legally flawed. He could have denied extradition, and that would have been the end of it.

“However, he went one step further, an immense step. In denying extradition, he wrote out, in his own hand, a decision that said in part:

“‘The great and good God of all of us, regardless of faith, grants to every child to be born first the right to be wanted and secondly the right to be loved. It was the Ellises who wanted Hildy to be born. It was the Ellises also who have given of themselves to Hildy, as only parents can understand, thereby fulfilling Hildy´s right to be loved.’

“Newspapers, national magazines, and television, in its earlier days, flashed that news around the world, calling it a Bill of Rights for Children. People of low and high station alike flooded the governor with praise.

“The Ellises never even once tried to exploit Hildy, and she and they vanished from the public eye. I never learned what happened to any of them. Hildy would by now be 52, possibly a mother, even a grandmother.

“The Florida governor, now deceased, was LeRoy Collins. Many peopl

About the Author

John L. Perry is a prize?winning newspaper editor and reporter, a journalism graduate of Northwestern University. He served on two White House staffs, and is now a columnist for NewsMax.com. A corporate-affairs counselor, he was responsible for the 1982 World's Fair public relations. Three Thumbs Up! is his first novel. He recently published, through Xlibris, a book to assist parents telling children about adoption, Right to be Wanted, Right to be Loved. John and Mary Mayne Perry are retired, more or less, in their native Knoxville, Tennessee, epicenter of 11 grandchildren.