Adoption’s Not a Secret, but Why Harp on It? Parents Ask

It was news coverage of the Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman divorce that catalyzed years of accumulated exasperation into an actual campaign. No, it wasn’t the blitz of reports on the marriage’s end but the repeated references to the couple’s two young children as “adopted.” Those constant reminders that Cruise and Kidman had adopted Isabella and Conor was flint to tinder, sparking a nascent nationwide grass-roots movement in the adoptive community.

“It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Rachel Adelson, president of a computer and home electronics publication. In 1998, she and her husband, who live in North Carolina, adopted a daughter. “Why does the media see the need to mention that someone is adopted? It happens all the time, even when people are elderly, even when they’re dead, and it’s just irrelevant.”

Adelson and other parents who have adopted children have launched a campaign to convince the media that millions of people are insulted when they are identified as “adopted” regardless of whether that fact is pertinent to a story. In an effort to accomplish this efficiently, they have drafted a letter, now circulating widely in adoption circles, that will be sent to the Associated Press, which is headquartered in New York. The letter asks that AP include guidelines for “adoption” in its widely used style book.

While many media outlets create in-house style guides for their journalists, for decades the Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual has set the industry standard for word usage. It is often required reading for students of journalism, and veterans remember how as cub reporters they were ordered to memorize it cover to cover.

“Instead of going after reporter after reporter and editor after editor, I thought it would be wiser to write to the editors of a book everyone consults,” Adelson said. AP has guidelines for addressing issues of race and sexual orientation, she said. “These are matters the media has had to address as society has changed over the past few decades.”

This is subtle social tinkering through word power.

“We in the media do have to remember that the way we refer to things becomes the way people in general refer to things,” said Michael Feazel, managing editor of Warren Communications, which publishes newsletters for the audio industry. Feazel has taken the lead in circulating the letter, primarily over the Internet, to the adoptive community.

AP, however, does not single-handedly determine correct usage and then impose it by fiat, according to the editor of its style book, Norman Goldstein. Instead, AP often responds to what is already in popular use. There is no committee or system by which new entries are included, and suggestions flow to his desk from teachers, activists, religious leaders and editors, among others. Goldstein exhaustively vets suggestions with journalists within the organization and the wider journalism community before changes are approved.

For example, AP altered the accepted spelling of “Koran” to “Quran” in its 2001 edition, but the change was years in coming. ‘We received letters from a number of Muslim groups and Islamic groups, and we checked usage with our editors, particularly our international editors and Middle Eastern correspondents,” Goldstein said. “Eventually we felt usage with a ‘Q’ was becoming more common, and it’s probably closer to the more accurate transliteration.” (The Times’ style guide spells the word “Koran.”)

And sometimes AP plays catch-up with the public.

In April 1989, Jesse Jackson called for black people to refer to themselves as African American, and within a year the term was in common use. Three years later, AP still had no entry for African American. It now does but still says preferred usage is “black” unless individuals and organizations specifically refer to themselves as African American.

Under “adopt,” the AP’s stylebook advises: “Amendments, ordinances, resolutions and rules are adopted or approved. Bills are passed, laws are enacted.” It says nothing about people. The letter suggests this rule: “As in the case of race or gender orientation, the fact a person was adopted should be mentioned only if it is absolutely essential to the story. ... Mentioning adoption when it is not relevant wrongly implies a separate category of family relationship.” (The Times’ style is to use “adopted” and “adoptive” only when they are essential to a story and not to use “real” “natural” or “own” as a substitute for “biological” when referring to parents.)

Egregious examples abound, activists say. They point to recent obituaries of Maureen Reagan that typically noted her brother Michael was adopted. “The fact that he was adopted 50 years ago was as relevant as information that someone else was born prematurely or by C-section,” the letter says. Also, adoptive parents should be referred to as a child’s mother or father, the letter says, and biological parents should be called such, instead of “real” or “natural.”

“I’m Korean, so the fact that I’m adopted has always been very obvious because my parents are not,” said Susan Cox, vice president of public policy for Holt International, an adoption agency with programs in 14 countries. “People would say to me things like ‘Who are your real mom and dad?’ I would give the names of my parents, and they’d say ‘No, no, no, I mean your real parents.’ I’d say they are my real parents. ‘Oh, well, I mean your Korean parents.’ Then I’d say I don’t know,” Cox said.

Drafts of the letter are still in circulation, and Adelson and her co-authors, Feazel and Alan Breznick, executive editor of Genuine Article Press, are gathering signatures from adoption agency executives, parental groups and individuals in order to present AP with what is a de facto petition.

“I think it’s an enormous and important step,” said Beth Hall, director of an Oakland-area adoption agency and co-author of last year’s “Inside Transracial Adoption.”

Hall and other advocates stress that their campaign is not a matter of semantics. The constant attention paid to whether a child was adopted, they say, is a subtle imposition of second-class status on adopted children and their families.

More than 6 million people who live in the U.S. were adopted, and when their extended families are factored in, an estimated 100 million Americans have been touched by the practice. As the numbers grow, the nature of adoption has changed and old stigmas have begun to fade. Since the late 1970s, advocates for “open adoption” believe that children should neither be denied the knowledge that they have been adopted, and that after adoptees reach adulthood, they should have the right to their original birth certificates, which include the names of their biological parents. Oregon, Alabama, Alaska, Kansas, Delaware and Tennessee have passed laws giving adults adopted in those states unrestricted access to copies of their original birth certificates.

Transracial and international adoptions are now commonplace where only 10 years ago they were unique.

“When I adopted my daughter 10 years ago from China, only 35 children from China were adopted here,” Feazel said. “Last year more than 6,000 children were.”

And while adoption is no longer a secret to be kept at all costs, say advocates, it’s also not something that needs to be mentioned gratuitously in news stories.

“I’m not talking about political correctness, I’m talking about respect,” said Adam Pertman, author of last year’s “Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution Is Transforming America.” ’We want language that affirms who our children are.”

What he receives sometimes instead are crass questions and comments about his family--sometimes even from acquaintances who should know better.

“I was at a supermarket with my son Zach, who was 4 or 5 at the time,” Pertman said, when an acquaintance--”a perfectly cognizant, educated person”--walked up and said right in front of the boy, “So why did his real parents give him away?”

The questions and comments from the public and constant references in the media spring from ignorance, not malice, Pertman and other advocates say.

“I don’t think there’s any harmful intent,” Feazel said. “I’m fairly confident that once we point out that it needs to be fixed, it’ll get fixed.”