Madonna on Oprah

Madonna's answers to some tough topics on the Oprah show:

Does Celebrity Affect the adoption process?

"I assure you it doesn't matter who you are or how much money you have, nothing goes fast in Africa," Madonna says. "There are no adoption laws in Malawi. And I was warned by my social worker that because there were no known laws in Malawi, they were more or less going to have to make them up as we went along. And she did say to me, 'Pick Ethiopia. Go to Kenya. Don't go to Malawi because you're just going to get a hard time.'"

The state of David's health

"When I met him, he was extremely ill," Madonna says. "He had severe pneumonia, and he could hardly breathe. I was in a state of panic, because I didn't want to leave him in the orphanage because I knew they didn't have medication to take care of him. We got permission to take him to a clinic to have a bronchial dilator put on him. … He had pneumonia and was given an injection of antibiotics. He's still a little bit ill, not completely free of his pneumonia, but he's much better than he was when we found him."

At home with Lourdes and Rocco

"They just embraced him, and that's the amazing thing about children," she says. "They don't ask questions. They've never once said, 'What is he doing here', or mentioned the difference in his skin color, or questioned his presence in our life. That is an amazing lesson that children do teach us."

Madonna addresses David's biological father's recent comments

"Here's what I knew. David had been living in this orphanage since he was two weeks old," Madonna says. "He had survived malaria and tuberculosis, and no one from his extended family had visited him since the time he arrived. So from my perspective, there was no one looking after David's welfare."

Once David's father was located, he initially said he gave his son up for adoption always hoping that someone like Madonna would be able to give him a better life, and agreed to the adoption. Now, according to the press, David's father is saying he did not fully understand what he was doing when he agreed to let Madonna adopt his son.

"I do not believe that is true. I sat in that room, I looked into that man's eyes," Madonna says. "I believe that the press is manipulating this information out of him. I believe at this point in time, he's been terrorized by the media. They have asked him things, repeatedly, and they have put words in his mouth. They have spun a story that is completely false."

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