Children's Home Society of Virginia was founded in 1900 by an act of the General Assembly. The mission of the agency is to find permanent homes for all children and provide related counseling to birth and adoptive families. Since our beginnings, we have found permanent homes for more than 12,000 children. We have provided counseling to many more birth parents than that, for not all of our clients choose adoption.

We are, after all, an agency that believes professional counselors do not have a preconceived notion about the outcome of our counseling. Every year we see many women who use our services as a way to make informed decisions about their abilities to
be parents. A times we see very young women who want help in broaching their own parents about an untimely pregnancy. Once that is accomplished many families pull together to raise children together - grandparents and parents sharing equally in the tasks. At other times women seek our counsel in understanding the rights and responsibilities of an absent birth father. Some desire help in talking with a baby's father about a pending birth. Some birth families need to have the respite provided by our foster care services while they make up their minds about their abilities to be the kind of parents they want for their children. Some birth parents choose adoption.

Children's Home Society of Virginia offers a wide range of choices to the birth families who wish to explore adoption. We work with families who want a traditional placement, where we accept the custody of a child and choose the adoptive parents. We work with those who desire the openness of a parental placement, a way for the birth parents to meet and choose the family who will raise their child. We also work with every legal option between these two options. An example of this would be where Children's Home Society of Virginia passes an annual update from the adoptive parent to the birth parent who has an interest in how her child is doing but does not wish to be an active part of his life.

We place all of the children who come into our care, healthy, medically fragile, black, white and children of other cultures. Our job is to help assure there is a permanent family for each child, regardless of his/her condition. We place the children who enter our care and work with several public agencies to place children in the public foster care system.

I hope you can tell from these brief remarks that we are interested in keeping options open for those we serve. Our desire for women to have the facts to make informed decisions is what led to our partnership with Planned Parenthood of the Blue Ridge. They, too, want women to be thoughtful about their options. Further, our partnership places one of our counselors on site at the Hydraulic Road facility. This is because both Planned Parenthood and Children's Home Society want women to have immediate access to additional information. It is easier for a woman in need to walk to another office for additional information than to have to be referred to another facility at a different location.

Children's Home Society has provided all of the services mentioned above to women whose first contact was with Planned Parenthood. We take mutual pride in offering comprehensive services to the community.

If Planned Parenthood of the Blue Ridge is banned from proving services to women here, Children's Home Society of Virginia is banned as well.

It would seem we would all want our daughters to have the ability to make informed decisions. It would also seem senseless to remove a source of information from them.

Thank you for allowing me to speak on behalf of the women who need the full range of services provided through the partnership of Planned Parenthood of the Blue Ridge and Children's Home Society of Virginia.

Peter Pufki, November 9, 2004

Editor's Note: In response to a speaker preceding him, Mr. Pufki added, "I wonder if I am the only person here who sees the irony in demonstrations, protests, anthrax and bomb threats against Planned Parenthood and then complaints by those demonstrating that it ruins their property values."