An 86-year-old woman from South Carolina has been a foster mother for 40 years, helping 189 children — and she has no plans of stopping.

According to TODAY, in 1983, Hannah Ford was a widowed mother of five adult children and was feeling alone when a friend suggested she consider becoming a foster mother.

“There are so many children out there that need help, that need love,” Ford told ABC 15. “We do not know some of the conditions these children have experienced at an early age. […M]y children got grown and moved away. It was an opportunity for me to give some of their experience and give back to the community to help these children.”

A man from Texas is hoping to adopt a young boy whom he found abandoned in a trash can while visiting his native country of Haiti — but first, he needs to raise the money.

Jimmy Amisial, now a 27-year-old student at Texas State University, found a baby boy covered in ants in the garbage during a visit to Haiti in December 2017. Amisial was on his way to visit an orphanage with presents for the children on New Year’s Eve when he saw a crowd of people around a garbage can. Inside was an abandoned baby, but, according to Newsweek, no one was helping the child.

Seventeen years ago, desperate parents in Vietnam gave their sick, premature baby to an orphanage in the hope that he would have a better future with someone else. Now, at 18, he’s graduated high school — and with his adopted parents’ help, reunited with his family in Vietnam.

When Hope Ettore, an epidemiologist working in southeast Asia, met Nguyen Le Hung, he had a large hemangioma — a benign vascular tumor — covering much of the right side of his face. He also was covered with scabies, and had other health issues. According to his birth certificate, his parents were Le Xuan Hung and Nguyen Thi Lien, and leaving Hung in the orphanage at 16 months old was a heart-wrenching decision for them.

The world was shocked to hear that actor Ray Liotta, known for his roles in movies like “Goodfellas” and “Field of Dreams,” died in his sleep at just 67 years old. The beloved actor had been filming a movie in the Dominican Republic, and tributes have quickly poured out, including well-wishes for his daughter, Karsen, and his fiancée, Jacy Nittolo. But one aspect of his life was not as well known: he was an adopted child who struggled — yet finally made peace — with his adoption.

In an interview with PEOPLE last year, Liotta talked about how he was angry for a long time.

A sanitation worker in Tehran, Iran is being praised for rescuing an abandoned baby who was thrown in a dumpster.

The event was caught on video, with footage showing the man lifting a plastic bag out of the garbage. He places the bag on the ground and carefully rips it open to reveal a newborn, with its umbilical cord still attached, placed inside.

According to the New York Post, the man heard muffled sounds coming from the bag, and that’s when he decided to investigate. After rescuing the newborn, the man called emergency services who transferred the baby to a local hospital, where the Iran Front Page News reports that he is in stable condition.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author.

I was an unplanned pregnancy. My birth mother was 16 years old when she became pregnant with me and 17 when she gave birth. Shortly after I was born, my parents adopted me into their conservative Christian home. From the moment they held me in their arms, they told me that I’m a gift from God as every child is. Because of my origin story, as it will, I’ve always been pro-life, as are my two sisters who were also unplanned pregnancies. I’ve always thought that adoptees would be the most pro-life people around but as I’ve discovered in the past few weeks, that’s disturbingly wrong.

Facing an unplanned pregnancy and choosing life for a child is not the end of the story for any woman. It’s a new beginning. And for some women, the beginning of their motherhood story starts with choosing to place their baby with an adoptive family. It’s a selfless decision that requires a lot of strength and sacrifice —  and it can be heartbreaking. Here’s how you can help a woman you know who is placing her baby for adoption.

Listen. When a friend tells you she is planning to place her child with an adoptive family, she is going to need you to listen rather than tell her what you think about adoption.

Singer Haley Slaton auditioned for American Idol while she was over five months pregnant. She’s since given birth to her baby, but it’s not yet known how far she made it in the star-making reality show. It has also been revealed that while filming American Idol, Slaton met her now-husband who didn’t shy away from the fact that she was pregnant.

During the auditions, Slaton met Jordan Myles, who was also a contestant on the show. The tryouts were held in October; the couple married months later in December. “We got married pretty quick,” Slaton told the Gazette. “We just knew.

CLEVELAND (CNS) — An estimated 5.2 million children in 21 countries, including the United States, lost at least one parent, a custodial grandparent or a primary caregiver to COVID-19 during the first 20 months of the pandemic, social researchers and child well-being advocates said in a new study.

Notably, the researchers estimated that the number of children orphaned because of the pandemic nearly doubled during the six-month period ending Oct. 31, 2021, a period corresponding largely with the surge in the delta variant of the coronavirus.

The total number of orphaned children during the study period parallels the roughly 5 million COVID-19-caused deaths during the same time frame, the study said.

The Jagges had a dramatic race to leave the country with their new son, who was battling pneumonia.

Texas couple bring home their adopted baby from Ukraine, just in time

After going to urgent care due to stomach pains, an Illinois woman discovered she was 34 weeks pregnant, and gave birth to a baby boy. 

As the Daily Mail reported, it seems the news was quite an unexpected blessing, as Nicci Garlic and her husband Kelsie have been trying to have a baby for nearly a decade. The couple married in 2014 and tried unsuccessfully to have a child through in vitro fertilization treatments. After three years of trying to get pregnant, the couple assumed it would never happen for them. The couple then decided to become foster parents, eventually being paired with two brothers, and they hope to become their long-term guardians. 

The special bond formed between a woman and one of her students led to a forever family. Seven-year-old William had cycled through six families in foster care when he met Paige Bramlett, who had been hired as a behavioral specialist. She began working with William, who was in kindergarten, and their connection was immediate.

Bramlett was scheduled for three hours of one-on-one time with William each day, due to his struggles from being in foster care.

“He was very isolated because he didn’t know coping skills, and he really struggled,” she told Good Morning America. “Since I was one-on-one with him, a lot of our time was spent working on coping skills, behavioral skills, talking about how we behave in school, those types of things.

Lauren and Dave Sager are parents to four biological children — three boys and a girl — and when their daughter entered kindergarten, she became fast friends with one of her classmates. After learning that her new friend and her younger sister were in foster care and available to adopt, the couple decided to open their home and welcome the girls into their family.

“The day [the two girls] met, all I heard about was this friendship,” Lauren told WOTV. “And so we came to find out, getting to know this friend and her family, that she was a foster child and we started reaching out to the family and we had other friends that were friends with their kids.

When South Dakota couple Blake and Rachel Schmieg welcomed 18-year-old Sadie as a foster child, it didn’t take long before they knew they wanted to adopt her so that the young woman would always have a place she could call home. When they hit an unexpected roadblock that said their hopes for adult adoption weren’t legal, they didn’t let it stand in their way. Instead, the family advocated for change and got the law rewritten.

In an interview with Keloland, the couple explains how they got the call that Sadie, a senior in high school, needed someplace to live. Although the family had previously only fostered young children, they agreed to take Sadie in.