Times may have changed, but attitudes lag. Enter Adam Pertman, a 22-year veteran reporter
for the Boston Globe, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a series he did on adoption. He
got so immersed in that world as the father of two adopted children and the author of
the book Adoption Nation that he left his journalism career to help America undergo
an attitude adjustment about adoption. He takes his message wherever people will listen,
including a recent Carolina Panthers NFL game.
About a hundred million Americans today have adoption in their immediate families, but
its impact is far greater because whether you know it or not, your relatives, neighbors,
friends and co-workers have adopted or were adopted or gave birth to a child who was adopted.
We are in the midst of an adoption revolution. We are not hiding anymore.
With me tonight, my Nightline colleague, John Donovan.
Ted, Adam Pertman loves his kids and in a way that is his bottom line. It's what brought
him to our attention. It's what landed him the job of executive director of the Evan
B. Donaldson Institute, an institute that is the country's only think tank focusing
on adoption because Pertman's love for his own kids grew into something else. They're
adopted and he wants the world made better for the adopted in general and for the rest
of their families. You may agree or disagree with him, but again, at bottom, his career
change is about his own kids and how much he loves them. And that's why he is so passionate
about all of this.
People will come up to you and say, this really happens. I'm not saying it happens every day.
This really happens. People will come up and say, you are so lucky. You adopted children.
That is so great. You get to be a parent that's so wonderful and that child gets a wonderful
home. I bet you are giving that kid a great home.
You do very good patronizing.
But I am sorry you couldn't have any real children.
Wow.
And that's with the kids standing there?
Sometimes. Now, two things. One, my kid looks real. You can touch him. He runs around like
he's real. Why does he have to wonder why I'm not his real parent? I think he thinks I'm
his real parent and I am. But also, it reveals an underlying attitude, doesn't it? I mean,
if I'm so lucky, how come you feel sorry for me? And the answer is, you do think I'm lucky,
but you think that my family might not be quite up to snuff. Not quite as good as it
should have or could have been. It's just as good.
So what you're asking for is for all of us to accord more honor to that word, adoption.
Absolutely. That's very well put. Our families aren't honored. We talk about adoption in
ways that we would never talk about other families. We still use the words that describe
my children as an insult. You're adopted. My kids aren't an insult. Neither are anybody.
I can't hold it together when I say this, but no kids are an insult. But we still use
that and that's the remnant of that world.
You mean when you say as an insult, it's a put down?
Absolutely. You must be adopted if you want to really insult a kid.
Pick up a newspaper on any given day and you might see Ted Jones was arrested yesterday
for lighting fires. Jones, who was adopted, what exactly did that have to do with the
story? It's in stories every day, coast to coast. Jones, who was adopted, how about Jones,
who was born by Caesarian section, or how about Jones, who is black, or how about Jones,
who is a Jew? Why would we do that if it has nothing to do with the story? It has nothing
to do with the story.
And you think the newspapers go to that because?
Because they don't know better. Because they think it's a pertinent piece of information.
Because they think it's pertinent.
But there's nothing in that story that indicates the adoption had anything to do with his lighting
the fire. That's why the story's in the paper. But it's also revealing of some underlying
attitude because it might be there because we do think that maybe...
That's why he lit the fire.
That's why. And it's worse than just revealing of the attitude of the person who wrote it.
It sends the signal to all the readers that maybe it's there for a reason. So maybe there
is something wrong with adoption. Every parent's dream, every parent's goal in life is to make
the world better for their kids. And I decided my kids cannot grow up in a world in which
people think that their family is lesser, in which the words that describe them are
still used as an insult, in which people so deeply do not understand who they are, what
their desires are, and how they live, in which adopt the highway signs are up everywhere
they look around, or adopt a book, or adopt a parent, or adopt a child.
What's wrong with that?
Because it's sponsorship, first of all, not adoption. It's commercial. And there are kids
all over the country who see those signs and say, oh, is somebody...or think, does somebody
else sponsor me next week? And we turn them into products. Those are products, all of
them.
My kids aren't products. And we shouldn't use the same language to...the same language
should not apply to human beings as to things that you buy and sell and trade.
Tell me you're not creating a new category of political correctness on this one. Tell
me why you're not.
Because it's not political correctness to want human beings treated differently than
road signs. If that's political correctness, I plead guilty. I've talked about how the
depictions of adoption sometimes undermine the families involved. A good example is the
first Stuart Little movie, in which the birth parents come back to the family and ask for
their kid back.
Where are his parents?
It turns out they're fraudulent. They're not really the birth parents.
Stuart, it shames me to say this, but you weren't born into a prosperous home.
That's right. We couldn't feed you, dear.
Couldn't feed him. How much could he eat?
And the adoptive parents give him back.
I know families in which the children went screaming out of the movie theater. They're
little kids. They don't know that doesn't happen. They went screaming out of the movie
theater. Now, I don't think that the producers and writers meant to do that. I don't think
legislators or movie makers mean to sit down and say, I wonder how I can hurt kids and
families today. They don't do that. But ignorance does not yield good outcomes.
We're stretching the definition of family. We're changing the definition of family.
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And what's the revolution, given that adoption has been going on for generations? What's,
what's, why do you use the word revolution about today?
Well, because I think that there's, it's revolutionary in two ways. Internally, the process simply
works not at all like it used to. This was a process that existed in the shadows. People
adopted, white people adopted white children, very often, most often pretended they didn't,
very often didn't even tell their kids they were adopted. And we knew that, we determined
that that doesn't work very well. And so we, we lived lies of pretense and the birth parents
were shunned aside as though they were baby making machines who had done their jobs and
were supposed to go away. That was the old model. As late as roughly the night, mid 1960s,
hard to do research on secrets. Um, as many as 80 to 90% of all unwed mothers, the children
of unwed mothers wound up in adoptive homes because you simply couldn't raise your own
child if you weren't married.
And that was associated at that point with shame and secrecy.
That's right. And today that statistic is under 2%, roughly 2%. As we get, as we age
as a, as baby boomers and have careers, especially women later and later, we start forming those
families later. Infertility rates go up and people still want to have families. So they
want to adopt and all these white babies aren't around. And the simplest example is an infant
adoption in America today. The birth mother typically and the father if he's around, picks
the new parents for her child. It's very different from how it used to be.
It used to be the complete opposite.
Complete opposite. It's done 180 degrees with all the implications of that. The relationships
that form, we're transforming the nature of families in America.
What mechanism does the birth mother pick the adoptive parents? Do they meet or does
she sit on paper?
Oh, they meet. Typically they meet. Sometimes, I mean, the internet plays into this. Sometimes
it happens on the internet. Agencies most often are involved or a lawyer or practitioner
of some sort. But more and more, it's independent. More and more, it's people doing their own
thing. People searching out their birth mothers, the birth mother seeking, searching out prospective
parents. That woman coming to visit on Sundays at, you know, your neighbor's home may well
be the birth mother of those children. We're stretching the definition of family. We're
changing the definition of family. And let me give you an example. One little girl in
an all-white schoolyard, say a Chinese girl, we can use any example because there are lots
of those across America, is changing the way all the teachers in that school teach family
formation. That's a pretty big impact for one human being. All the kids growing up with
that girl have a different view of what families are than we grew up with, of what nature,
of the balance of nature and nurture, of the importance of blood ties, of whether children
need to look like their parents. There are lots of kids of color who need homes. And
in fact, there aren't enough parents of color to provide those homes or we probably wouldn't
have as many white people gravitating toward those children or the same needs. And one
of the lacks, I think, as a society, one of the things we haven't done very well is recruit
kids of color. So we have these kids who need homes and we don't have enough parents who
do look like them who understand their issues. When I was a reporter in Romania in the early
90s, it was the beginning of a real huge wave of Americans going to those orphanages that
were just packed with kids. A lot of times there's money passing on the table. Nevertheless,
kids are coming out. Presumably, we think, as Americans, we think that those kids are
better off, number one, because they're in a loving environment. Number two, I think
we think they're better off because they're in America than in Romania. Romanians weren't
too crazy about this. Romanian people, nationalists and just ordinary folks, saw it as insulting,
not that they were getting to a warm, loving family, but that there was the notion that
you can come and buy our kids. What about that? I kind of think if I were in a Romanian's
position, I might feel the same way. What do I think? I don't like it. The sad fact
is it's not true in our country. It's not true in Romania. It's not true in most countries.
Those governments are not taking care of their children. So somebody needs to. If that kid
stays in the orphanage in Romania or pick another country, is he or she better off in
the home country? Or is that kid better off or will she be adopted within Romania? Numbers
indicate the answer is no. She will probably grow up in an institution all of her life.
Who is going to argue that that's better? My wife and I both thank God that we were
infertile. The powerful new Suvarado is here. Still available
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soloist Joseph and Jeffrey Brooks join the Yakima Symphony Orchestra January 11th. Knowing
what you know now about the kind of family you can have by adopting, would you conceivably
earlier in your marriage when you were trying to have your kids naturally, would you consider
not even bothering trying to have kids naturally, even if you could, and adopting instead?
Without knowing what the kids are, I think the answer is probably yes because we were
old enough and it was a pain in the butt, literally enough, if anybody knows what infertility
treatments consist of, it was that it wouldn't have been worth it. If I really knew then
what I know now, no, we wouldn't have done all of that. We did decide that we were going
to adopt almost very, very quickly. We adopted Zach first. He's now eight years old, Zachary.
Three years later, after several fall throughs of birth mothers who decided that they were
going to parent their kids, we had that grief cycle too. It's not a problem for me. It was
at the time, certainly. I realized at some point that it is the adoptive equivalent of
miscarriage. You don't want it. You do grieve it. The difference in the adoptive version
is the child is alive and well in the arms of someone who loves her. It's not a horrible
outcome. Then we adopted Amelia, Emmy, who is now five. We stopped there because we were
too old to have any more children. There's some real cosmic sense to all of this. These
are the kids we were supposed to raise. This is the life that we get. Life is not simple.
No form of family formation is simple.
What's your relationship with the birth mothers of your two kids?
Good question. We have an open relationship with Emmy's birth mother.
Which means that you all know each other.
We know each other. We talk to each other. We meet each other. In Zach's case, and we
do not have an open relationship with his birth parents, we would love to have it. We
have made efforts toward that and not yet. People have to do what's right for them in
their lives too. I respect that. We're amenable to it and in fact, desirous of it.
The agency was not encouraging you to get to know each other very well. They were subtly
discouraging you to keep distance.
They were saying that this is sufficient.
What do you think now?
I wish to God that they live next door.
Why?
A, because it respects them and doesn't turn them into baby making machines. I am very
grateful to the people who made me a parent. I'm extremely grateful. Selfishly, as a parent,
I'll do a better job if I have more information. If I have ongoing medical information, genealogical
information, information about what the parents were like growing up so I can see what patterns
are real and what patterns maybe aren't so real with my own children.
When did Zach and Emmy understand that they were adopted? Always?
Now that's the most common question. When do you tell your child? I always answer this
with an anecdote from a social worker friend who was placing an infant, a baby, into the
arms of a couple who were going to adopt her. They whispered, when do we tell her she's
adopted? You know, this child is big. The social worker looked back and said, on the
way home.
So it's always there?
So it's always there.
So there was never a sit down with Zach at the age of seven and say, Zach, there's something
I want to tell you.
Right.
From the start. Emmy, my daughter, who's five, tends to ask more questions. You know, what
does he look like? What does she? It's simple stuff at this age. I expect not yet, but any
day now, I expect that we will start getting real questions about why did my birth parents
not want to keep me.
Is that heavy enough for you?
Yeah, I mean, what are you going to do with that question?
We're going to answer it.
And what are you going to say?
Well, I'm not going to tell you before I tell him.
Do you know what you're going to say?
Yes, we're going to tell him the truth. Absolutely.
Is there any argument to be made whatsoever that keeping some secrets could also be good
for your children?
I think there's very little that in the end, and that's important to say in the end, that
you want to keep secret from them. It is their lives. It is their heritage. It is their biology.
It is their history. They have a right to it. It doesn't mean they have a right to all
the details at the age of eight.
It's probably a tough question because you obviously love your kids. Would you rather
have had kids by birth?
The answer to your question is my wife and I both thank God that we were infertile.
Really?
Oh, thank God.
Is there anything that you feel that you miss as a result of your children being adopted?
No.
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There's a question I would never ask an adopting parent unless I knew them extremely well,
but to you because it looks like you can take anything on these questions.
Is there anything that you feel that you miss as a result of your children being adopted
and not your natural kids?
Okay.
I think it's an unfair question.
No, I think it's a fair question. And I think people probably ask themselves that and I'm
sure that people outside of adoptive families ask them that or wonder.
The only thing I miss is probably seeing someone who looks like me.
And I don't miss it.
I mean that's theoretical.
I think there are probably people for whom it's not theoretical.
And you can grieve that.
That's okay.
You can feel like you miss something in your life without your life being incomplete.
It's not as though you don't have something in return.
I have someone who looks better than I do.
I have two of them who look better than I do.
They have improved the gene pool.
They have absolutely given me more delight in my life than I imagined conceivable.
No pun intended.
That's a big payback.
That's a very big payback.
And by the way, if you have a kid biologically, there's no guarantee she'll look like you either.
So what do you do then?
Turn them back and be disappointed?
You love the kid you get.
You love the kid you get and you give them the best life you know how.
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