If you believe people are “called” to certain tasks in life, you have to believe it was destiny that led Sean Kearney and Alissa Tschetter-Siedeschlaw to adopt two foster children many people had given up on.

Kearney is the chairman of the speech and theater arts department at Grand View College, and his wife, Tschetter-Siedeschlaw, is a stay-at-home mom who homeschools their children. Together, they’re two of the most effective advocates in Iowa – or anywhere – for children dumped in the child-welfare system.

The couple already had two biological children, but saw their family as incomplete. They wanted to adopt children they knew would have a difficult time finding a permanent home. Race and ethnicity weren’t important, except to the extent that the couple embrace diversity. Their only consideration was maintaining birth order, so their older children wouldn’t become younger siblings.

Their adopted daughter was born methamphetamine- and alcohol-affected. Her medical prognosis – that she might never see or walk, or might require institutional care – would have dissuaded many potential adoptive parents, but the couple searched their hearts to determine what they could handle and what they couldn’t. “You are never guaranteed anything with a pregnancy,” Tschetter-Siedeschlaw says. “No one promises anything.”

Seeing the children laughing and playing in the yard of their Des Moines home, you wouldn’t guess they might have been regarded as “throwaway” children. (Say that to Tschetter-Siedeschlaw, and she’ll bundle up all of her passion – and this young woman exudes passion with every breath – and let you know there is no such thing. “These are not throwaway kids,” she says of foster children. “They are all precious and worthwhile, beautiful, wonderful and deserving kids.”)

Their experience as adoptive parents of special-needs children has exposed them to deep cracks in the child-welfare system. They worry that shrinking government budgets will hurt the most vulnerable of Iowa’s citizens, children born to parents who lack the will or the means to care for them. For example, the life of their 3-year-old son, born three months prematurely with a severe brain bleed and also methamphetamine-affected, is sustained by a feeding pump. Yet they’ve had to appeal to judges to keep the state medical assistance that makes “unadoptable” children adoptable. And they know the ins and outs of the system and how to fight for their children’s rights. Without people like Kearney and Tschetter-Siedeschlaw, what happens to these children? Where will they go? Who will love them?

The couple insist they have no special kind of love. “Anybody can do this,” Tschetter-Siedeschlaw says. “It’s too easy to think somebody else can do it.”

On a late summer afternoon, the two children were eager to show off the caterpillars they’d spotted in the garden to visitors and share what they know about their life cycles. The caterpillars will spin a cocoon, and then emerge as butterflies.

The irony of that is lost on them. They don’t know that labels like “failure to thrive” and “destined for institutionalization” were hung on them at birth, or how the chrysalis of love provided by their parents changed their lives. To those who encounter them, they appear to be happy, well-adjusted children. Of course, there are problems related to the neglect they suffered in the womb and in the foster-care system, Tschetter-Siedeschlaw says, but nothing the couple weren’t prepared for or can’t handle.

The children offer convincing evidence of the power of love to transform lives. The pity is that with hundreds of children in Iowa’s child-welfare system, there aren’t nearly enough couples like Kearney and Tschetter-Siedeschlaw.