Proclamation 6629—National Adoption Week, 1993 and 1994

Our Nation's families are the guardians and first teachers of our most valuable resource and our primary responsibility--our children. Unfortunately, too many children do not have the opportunity to live and flourish in a family of their own. They have been orphaned, abandoned, neglected, or abused. They have been denied the protection and nurturing that a loving family environment can best provide. Now is the time to break the grip of the great crisis of the spirit that has far too long held our Nation. Now we can begin to bring about a change. There is much for each of us to contribute.

During National Adoption Week, it is vitally important for all of us to recognize the joys adoption can bring to the lives of children who are in need. For children who have been deprived of belonging to a secure, loving, and permanent home, an adoptive family can provide the most important ingredient in a child's life--love.

This Thanksgiving week, families across America will gather to give thanks to God for the blessings we all enjoy as individuals and as a Nation. Children who have no permanent families, who are waiting to be adopted, may not have as much to be thankful for this year. At this happy time of family celebration, we must not forget the children for whom the affection of a family remains only a dream.

These children have so much to offer. They deserve our best efforts to remove the public and private barriers to their adoption into permanent, loving families. We must reach out to the many Americans who long for children to love, and we must find homes for the thousands of children who are waiting for adoptive parents to take them into their lives and into their hearts. And we must also acknowledge the unselfish sacrifice made by many birth parents to ensure a better life for their child.

Every effort should be made to inform the public and prospective parents that there are many thousands of children available for adoption. We must involve the media, private and public agencies, adoptive parents, advocacy groups, civic and church groups, and businesses. We must ask them to provide publicity and information to heighten community awareness of the crucial needs of these children and of all those who work tirelessly to place them in loving families.

Now, Therefore, I, William J. Clinton, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim the week of November 21, 1993, and the week of November 20, 1994, as National Adoption Week. I call upon all Americans to observe these weeks with appropriate programs, activities, and ceremonies.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-fourth day of November, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and ninety-three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and eighteenth.

WILLIAM J. CLINTON