Leading by example

Adoption | How one ordinary couple with extraordinary compassion helped build an adoption-friendly church | Susan Olasky

|BEL AIR, Md. -- Harford County, MD., is one of those fast-growing exurban areas attractive to families with young children. Located north of Baltimore and just west of the Susquehanna River, it's a land of forested rolling hills, farmland, leafy neighborhoods, and small towns playing a losing game of tug-of-war with strip shopping centers, malls, fast-food eateries, and housing developments.

On Churchville Road stands an old church, Mount Zion, and the church graveyard, which contains a secret known only to historians of abortion and those with long family memories: One grave is that of a 19th-century woman buried there after undergoing an abortion. Now the church has another almost-secret: In the past year, families in the church have adopted nine children, and about 20 church families in all have adopted.