Feature Lede/ Nutgraf Placement

By John Blake
CNN

(CNN) -- Wendy Duren thought she did everything right. She broke off relationships with men who didn't want to settle down. She refused to get pregnant out of wedlock. She prayed for a child.
Duren's yearning for motherhood was so palpable that her former fiancé once offered to father a child with her. But he warned her that he wasn't ready for marriage.
"I get bored in relationships after a couple of years," he told her, she recalls.
Those events could have caused some women to give up their dreams of motherhood. But Duren, a pharmaceutical saleswoman, didn't need a man to be a mom. At 37 years old, she decided to adopt.
"It's the best decision I could have made in my life," Duren says, two years later. She's now the mother of Madison, a 1-year-old daughter she raises in Canton, Michigan.
"People say I have never seen you so happy," she says, "but it's also the hardest thing I've ever done."


The Nutgraf actually comes into play with a headline section which makes it easy for the reader to see what the actual article will be about.

What's driving more single African-American women to adopt.
Marriage and motherhood -- it's the dream that begins in childhood for many women. Yet more African-American women are deciding to adopt instead of waiting for a husband, says Mardie Caldwell, founder of Lifetime Adoption, an adoption referral and support group in Penn Valley, California.

I thought this article was great because it grabbed my attention as a feature story "that pulls at the heart strings" as I have friends who have adopted, but it also related to a larger issue involving the increasing trend of African American women who adopt.