‘Daddy’ Show Takes Reality TV to a New Low

Re Adam Pertman’s “The ‘Daddy’ of TV Tastelessness,” Commentary, Dec. 21: As someone who was first told at 27 that I was an adoptee, and who has found part of my birth family at 40, I can say the reunion experience is akin to emotional open-heart surgery. If you think meeting a stranger who is a parent is easy to process, no matter how tastefully orchestrated, guess again. What a shame “Who’s Your Daddy?” wasn’t around back then. I could have bypassed all that “feeling my feelings” nonsense and opted for pure “fun and healthy” entertainment.

Inspired by the idea, I came up with some others. How about a wife with a cheating husband trying to guess which woman is the mistress. If she’s correct, she gets to keep her husband and beat the mistress into a bloody pulp on national television. People with fatal diseases could try to choose the real undertaker out of eight. If correct, they get a funeral fit for a royal. But who am I to judge what the public wants to see? Jesus correctly picked Judas out of 12 contestants. And that show has been in reruns for a couple of thousand years.

Karen Kaye

Los Angeles

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I disagree with Pertman’s comparison of yesterday’s “closed” system to today’s widely accepted “open” adoption. Adoptions marketed as “open” still reek with “denial, degradation and deceit.” As past president of a national organization in support of family preservation, I hear stories daily from birthparents who had been enticed into choosing adoption because of the prospect of visitation with their child, only to experience the “open” door slammed shut.

We need to get back to the initial purpose of adoption -- finding homes for children who have lost their parents to death. We must discontinue the nationwide search of infants for childless adults, which leads to all kinds of devious practices. There is no legal recourse for the birthparents when the open adoption closes. Every little girl should know who her daddy is.

Karen L. Vedder

Carlsbad