Barbara Walters on a Topic Dear to Her

Barbara Walters makes only two specials a year for ABC, so in addition to her Academy Awards show with a handful of Hollywood stars, the second one has got to be something she really wants to do, she says. This one is.

Tonight, Walters, who adopted a daughter more than 30 years ago, profiles several of her broadcasting colleagues’ experiences with adoption on “Born in My Heart: A Love Story.”

Walters said that after three miscarriages, she was thrilled to finally get a daughter. When the two would share a bath, she would tell little Jackie that the child was “born in my heart” instead of her womb. (And she recalled being tickled by some viewers’ reaction: “When word got out that I had a baby, people wrote in and said, ‘We knew you were pregnant.’ ”)

Jackie, who for the first time sits down for an interview on the subject, shuns the limelight and makes it clear that although it was tough being the daughter of a famous person, it was a joy to be raised by a mother who loved her.

“She just wanted to be accepted for herself,” Walters said.

It was only recently that Jackie would even allow pictures to be taken of the two of them together. That she spoke frankly with reporter Cynthia McFadden, who also was adopted, “touched me enormously,” said Walters. “I thought it’s a sign of the kind of love we have for each other. And Jackie wanted people to understand about adoption.”

On-air personalities who share their experiences are Carole Simpson, whose adopted son, Adam, asks about his birth mother for the first time on camera; Connie Chung and Maury Povich, who struggled with infertility and now have 5-year-old Matthew; and medical consultant Timothy Johnson, who with his wife took home an abandoned toddler years ago in Indonesia. And any show on the subject would seem incomplete without the outspoken Rosie O’Donnell, now mother of three as well as one foster child.

But the most moving story is an update on a “20/20” segment from several years ago that showed neglected children in a Romanian orphanage. A producer, a single woman who was there to make the program, flew back to New York before deciding to return and adopt a particular baby girl, now 10.

Despite her experience with adoption, Walters said she had not considered making a special on the subject until now.

“It hadn’t occurred to me five years ago,” she said. “My daughter would not have done it then. It was only when she really became older and very much herself and her own person that she was able to talk freely about being my daughter.”

Jackie, who stands more than 6 feet tall, recently was married in Maine “at her house overlooking the water wearing a white sweater, white miniskirt, fishnet stockings and hiking boots that went up to her knees,” Walters said proudly.

But at ABC, adoption had become water-cooler conversation. “Connie and I talked about it because she has a boy,” Walters said. “Cynthia McFadden asked if my daughter was interested in finding her biological mother. There are so many whose lives have been touched by adoption at ABC.”

Walters avoided focusing on Hollywood stars. “I didn’t want to do the story about why movie stars adopt. These are friends; these are people I know.”

Walters stressed that people should not attach an “adopted” label to a child.

“If you want to adopt a child out of love, the bond is enormous,” she said. She believes that Jackie “was ordained to me,” so she said that referring to her as adopted is a painful irritation.

“This is not a documentary,” she added. “There are no facts or figures in it. I think we give information without making a documentary.”

O’Donnell recalls that people ask how she adopted three children so quickly. Her answer is that if you are not picky, if you will take a child whose family “is in crisis” or has medical problems, the path tends to be simpler.

The plight of Romanian orphans will be the focus of a follow-up piece on “20/20” in May.

“The thing that amazes us now is that it’s been 10 years, and other countries have improved [their orphanages], but it is evidently as bad as it was then,” said Walters. “A lot of these babies are still there--they are now 10.”

* “Born in My Heart: A Love Story” airs at 10 tonight on ABC.