As a veteran journalist at the Boston Globe, Adam Pertman had it made. At 48, with 20 plus years experience and several major awards to his credit, Pertman could pretty much pick and choose his assignments. And so he wore a variety of journalistic hats, ranging from California Bureau chief to restaurant reviewer. In each capacity, Pertman made it his mandate to write with clarity and accuracy and by all measures, he did so successfully. He did not seek to fundamentally alter the way that people think. At least not until recently. Then things changed.

“Knowing less than nothing is worse than knowing nothing. At least if you know nothing, you know that you know nothing.” 

Adam Pertman, journalist-turned-crusader, rails against the perils of knowing less than nothing. Or to be more specific, he rails against the self appointed experts who know “less than nothing about adoption.”

“How can I, as a father, stand by and have people say and do things about adoption that hurt adoptees... that hurt my children?" And that is why Adam Pertman, successful journalist, Pulitzer Prize nominee, left the Boston Globe. He left the Globe because he is a father and he wanted to do right by his children. 

Awareness Unfolds

Adam Pertman can easily remember a time when he knew very little about adoption. Like so many people who become parents through adoption, Pertman was informed only by the powerful awareness that he wanted to become a father. When fertility treatments did not result in a successful pregnancy, the Baumwoll-Pertman’s took a serious look at adoption. Pertman remembers that the decision was easier for him than for Judy. He speculates that his ease with adoption was rooted in his family’s experience as immigrants.

Adam Pertman’s parents were Holocaust survivors who came to America after the war, bringing with them their four young children. As a family, the Pertman’s joined the legions of immigrant families who came before them, as well as those that would follow, in a national adoption. America adopted them and they adopted America. For just as adopted persons feel a deep connection to the parents that gave them roots and the parents that gave them wings, the Pertman children grew up as Americans who knew that they would always feel a special connection to their native Poland.

And so when it came time to contemplate parenthood through adoption, Adam Pertman found that he had little, if any, difficulty with the concept. He wonders, also, if his experience as an identical twin added to his comfort. Unlike so many other adoptive parents and potential adoptive parents, Pertman did not feel a particular longing to carry on his lineage. Perhaps the need that might otherwise have been there was satisfied when his twin brother became a father.

Whatever. Adam Pertman was comfortable with adoption and adoption worked for him. He and Judy welcomed Zack into their home and their hearts. Their love for their child came as no surprise to the new parents, but something else did: their feelings towards Zack’s birth parents. To their surprise, Adam and Judy found that they had deep feelings of love, as well as gratitude, for Zack’s parents.

Like most other adoptive parents, Adam Pertman and Judy Baumwoll had initially approached the idea of meeting their child’s birth parents with trepidation, wondering how a face-to-face meeting would go. They were concerned that the adoption might fall through and feared that, even if all went well, they would be left with an indelible mental picture of two people whose faces they would see each time they looked at their son. They wondered, as new-to-adoption couples do, whether they would feel like Zack’s real parents.

Zack’s adoption, and Emmy’s which followed two years later, made Pertman realize just how little he knew about adoption. He realized, also, that his lack of information was at least partially the result of the misinformation that surrounds adoption. Had he not heard legions of self-appointed experts demonize birth parents, he would never have approached openness in adoption with fear. And what if he hadn’t been fed so much misinformation about how adoptees feel about their birth and adoptive families? Surely he and Judy would not have felt so vulnerable in the adoption process. To Pertman’s horror, he realized that much of the “ less than nothing” knowledge about adoption was promulgated by the press. Yes, the community he worked in and was proudly a part of was the same community that was saying and doing things that were harmful to his children.

An Unlikely Crusader

Adam Pertman is an unlikely crusader and he would be the first to say so. Even when he proposed a series on adoption to the Boston Globe, he did not see himself as a crusader. Rather, he was a journalist, writing about a topic that was of personal interest and concern to him. He wanted to write the series because he looked at what was being written -- and not written -- about adoption and found what nearly every adoptee, adoptive parent and birth parent learned long ago: the press knows less than nothing about adoption. It knows less than nothing and writes from that vantage point, disseminating distortions and untruths.

Pertman has other gripes with his colleagues. When he looked at what people were writing about adoption, he found that they reported only on the extremes -- the rare adoption horror stories and the soppy and flowery adoption reunion stories. “Real life,” Pertman says, “happens between the extremes.” But to his surprise, very few journalists were writing about the real life of adoption.

And so in 1998, Adam Pertman set out to write the real story of adoption. He persuaded the Boston Globe to let him do a three-part series that addressed several “less than nothing” areas of adoption knowledge: who are birth parents and why do they place their children for adoption, the rights and longings of adoptees, legal issues, the experience of adoptive parents both in the adoption process and in the years that follow. He wrote the series, it was published and Pertman expected to proceed with his life as a journalist... that is, until he heard and read people’s reactions to his articles. 

Pertman’s series was very well received by the press, so much so that it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. But much as he enjoyed the accolades, Adam Pertman remembers that it was the personal letters and phone calls that moved him. He received an out-pouring of responses from birth parents and adoptees. Disenfranchised, misunderstood and isolated, these people whose lives were so shaped by adoption were so deeply grateful to finally have a voice, a spokesperson, a fair and accurate representation in the media. It was this gratitude that convinced Adam Pertman that the series was a beginning rather than an end. Now he had more than a job. He had a mission. Soon that mission would become a crusade. Adam Pertman’s crusade has a seemingly simple, but thus far elusive goal: to provide people with clear and accurate information about adoption.

Why is this is so important to him? Why did Pertman leave the Globe? Why does he allow his crusade to interfere with his time with Zack, now seven, and four year old, Emmy, who also joined the Pertman family through adoption? To all these questions, Adam Pertman offers one answer. “I do it for my children. Can a father stand by and allow people to say things and write things and believe things that hurt his children? I can’t wait for the world to finally come around and ‘get’ adoption. I have to change things for my kids.” 

As Pertman sees it, a world that knows less than nothing about adoption does a great deal of damage to everyone whose life is touched by adoption. And that everyone is a lot of people. He recounts with delight and some amazement all the times that adoption has come up and someone has told him that their sister or their mother or their best friend was adopted. In November, 1997, the Evan B. Donaldson Institute, an adoption think tank, released its findings that said that nearly six of every ten Americans had a “personal experience” with adoption. With the proliferation of adoptions in the last few years, Pertman is wondering if that number is even higher. 

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