For Mother’s Day weekend, NBC and Teleflora hosted a contest called “America’s Favorite Mom,” which invited people to vote on mothers grouped in various categories. Intended to celebrate a diverse array of mother figures, it instead denigrated a whole host of women with the title “non-mom.” After many complaints, the category title was changed on the website to “Adopting Mom” with this statement:

Teleflora is immediately changing the name of our “Non-Mom” category to “Adopting Moms”. After closer examination, we can see how this may have been offensive to moms who have adopted children — moms who are indeed real moms to their children in every sense of the word. In fact, many of us at Teleflora are “adopting” parents ourselves, including our president and owner. The essence of this category still focuses on a grandparent, neighbor, step mom, or mom to adopted or foster children, each one raising and loving a child.

This show of insensitivity on our part was in no way intended and we deeply apologize for any concern or distress we may have caused. It was always our intent to salute and celebrate all moms.

This was flagged for us by PunditMom, who wrote a very thoughtful post about the appalling incident, questioning the need – in a society as diverse as ours – to brand our families. You can read it here: http://punditmom1.blogspot.com/2008/05/non-mom-really-are-you-sure-you-want-to.html.

The Teleflora mishap was also written about by the Wall Street Journal.