Respectful Adoption Language

Honest and Accurate but Probably Not What You'd Expect

by Jessica DelBalzo

“Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.” – Benjamin Lee Whorf

We all know how powerful words can be. We may comfort our children with the old saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me,” but the truth is that offensive language can bruise the psyche of its target. Currently, the words used by the media to describe adoption range from dishonest and inaccurate to hurtful and discriminatory. Many of these labels are tantamount to the racial slurs used against African Americans prior to the abolition of slavery and the advent of the civil rights movement. Just as journalists (and all members of polite society) steer clear of using names like “nigger” and “colored person,” degrading adoption terms need to be removed from our collective vocabulary.

The same is true for adoption-related words that disguise reality or perpetuate the myths that the $1.4 billion adoption industry would have us believe. First, let’s examine the discriminatory labels that have been applied to parents who have lost their children to adoption. “Birth” and “Biological” are common prefixes that the media and others apply to parents, grandparents, and extended family members of adopted children. Often, adoption agencies and would-be adopters refer to “birth” mothers and fathers whose children have yet to be born. These labels are an attempt to degrade the importance of a child’s true family, reducing them to a single function in their children’s lives.

In the case of pre-birth labeling, the users of this offensive language are clearly aiming to convince parents that they are dispensable even before their children have come into the world. Rather than perpetuating the unbelievable and degrading notion that one’s family can be “switched at birth” (or even later, in the case of older children’s adoptions), we need to take care to use respectful and honest language. It is not necessary to separate parents who have lost children to the adoption industry from any other parents in our society. Mother, father, grandparents, aunt, uncle, and cousin are all perfectly descriptive words on their own. Knowing that a child has only one true family makes it unnecessary to use discriminatory words to mark the difference between relatives and adopters.

When one needs to convey the fact that a parent has lost a child to the adoption industry, it is more appropriate to describe them as a “natural mother/father,” “parent exiled by adoption,” or “mother/father of adoption loss.” These terms are accurate in relaying the experience of losing a child to adoption, but they don’t reduce a parent’s role to that of an incubator or sperm donor.

The second set of offensive adoption words is degrading to children and their true families, as well as dishonest and deceptive. These words – “adoptive mother/father/family” – describe something that simply doesn’t exist. Families are not created on paper, upon payment of the necessary legal fees. Families are created by nature, through the unbreakable bond that ties together past and future generations. Despite being separated over many years or many miles, family members still manage to share their traits with one another, and it is only natural for them to do so. It is a fallacy to suggest that strangers can step in to replace a child’s true family in any situation.

Pretending that adopters are the parents of another family’s child is incredibly disrespectful to that child, his or her heritage, and the real family that he was given by nature. It implies that children can be passed around and sold to the highest bidder as slaves were sold in the 17th century. In the interest of honesty, it is far better to describe the people who adopt children as “adopters,” “caregivers,” or “guardians.”

Adoptees shouldn’t be expected to play make-believe when it comes to something as serious as their families, and the rest of us shouldn’t perpetuate the lies created by the adoption industry as a means of peddling children to wealthy, infertile couples. In the end, the most important thing is respect for children and the families that nature has given them. Growing up, we’ve all been taught that honesty is the best policy. What are we teaching today’s children if we force them to accept strangers as parents and to deny their true families? What message are they being sent about themselves, if their own mothers and fathers are constantly being degraded and abused by our society’s adoption vocabulary? Whether they’re adopted as infants, toddlers, or older, children deserve better than the lies the adoption industry offers them.