Childless Families With Hope
Many Americans may not be very familiar with Margaret Bush, a member of President Bush’s extended family, but she aims to change that.
Wife of the president’s brother Marvin, Margaret Bush has embarked on a high-profile mission to raise adoption awareness. CBS News Correspondent Thalia Assuras reports that it is a very personal mission that grew out of her own infertility, the result of a childhood cancer.
Margaret was diagnosed with a rare form of ovarian cancer at the age of 5. Her cancer spread and almost killed her. To save her life, doctors removed her ovaries, making it impossible for her ever to conceive a child.
Despite this, she is a mother to two adopted children, 16-year-old Marshall and 12-year-old Walker.
“When I was 12 1/2, my parents had a baby and it was my baby and I really have always loved children and knew that I would definitely adopt,” she said.
Adoption is not an easy process. Every year, half a million Americans seek to bring a child home, but only 120,000 adoptions are realized. The competition is fierce and many emotions are involved.
That is why Margaret, once a teacher and now an actor, is offering her White House cache to help the cause.
She is championing a cable channel reality series on adoption. The series’ cameras follow and record the frustration and joys of several couples hoping to adopt.
Margaret says she believes pregnant teen-agers will discover in the series that they can give a precious gift to some families: "They will learn from this series that they can be the solution to someone else's inability to create a family."
Margaret knows her own children may ask one day about who their birth parents are and why were they given up for adoption.
“There may come a time in their life that they feel they need to know who that is,” she says. “I would never want it to become the forbidden fruit that then was an issue that became insurmountable.”
Little would seem insurmountable for Margaret Bush whose own story of courage and compassion is proof of what is possible.