Jane Aronson: The Guardian Angel
Jane Aronson: The Guardian Angel
She is a Woman of the Year because: “She has a heart the size of Texas and a drive like Tiger Woods, and she has made a huge difference to countless children and their families.” —Hugh Jackman, actor and longtime supporter of Worldwide Orphans Foundation
November 3, 2009
by Susan Dominus
Photographed by Brigitte Lacombe in Maplewood, New Jersey, surrounded by kids from families she has advised and supported through the adoption process; her sons, Ben and Des, are directly behind her.
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“What got to me most was the smell,” says pediatrician Jane Aronson of her years touring overseas orphanages in the nineties, “that terrible odor of filth and illness and neglect.” Once home, she couldn’t shake the sights she’d seen: famished, sore-covered babies in Romania; glassy-eyed AIDS-doomed kids in Vietnam. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” says Aronson. “There was no way I was going to continue practicing medicine without helping the kids left behind.” Her solution: Worldwide Orphans Foundation (WWO), which she started in 1997. Within a few years WWO was providing AIDS drugs for HIV positive children in Ethiopia and Vietnam—one of the first organizations of any type to do that; launching the “orphan rangers,” essentially a Peace Corps through which volunteers work in orphanages; and building a school in Ethiopia. Today Aronson is credited with bringing the plight of orphans and the importance of adoption to the world’s attention. “She shone a spotlight on what we should be doing,” says adoption expert Adam Pertman, head of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute. “A lot of people give lip service to wanting to make the world better for children. She actually does it.”
As an advocate, Aronson has improved the lives of 20,000 kids; as a doctor, she saves them one at a time. From her small Manhattan office, wallpapered with photos of smiling children, the jeans-clad pediatrician works with adopting parents—including celebs like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt—giving them the medical and emotional support they need to ensure that their new family can work. “Dr. Aronson gave us courage,” says Meg D’Ariano, who adopted a now perfectly healthy girl from China after being told the baby had insurmountable health problems. “She said, ‘Go get her.’” A parent to two adopted children, Aronson is determined to show the world’s orphans that she will always look out for them. She notes that she’s learned to say “see you soon” to the kids in six languages. “I never say goodbye.”