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I was clicking around on the adoption.org website and I came across an essay called “Why we don’t adopt highways,” by Chris Peters.
Of course I wanted to read it. I’ve never gotten why the adoption community had such a beef with “adopt a whatever” programs. I wanted someone to explain to me why it is such a big deal – something worth writing letters about when there are so many other things in the world more worth writing letters about.
Peters starts his article like this:
At first, adopting a highway seems like a reasonable, even noble idea. A local business pays a fee to help keep a local highway clean. In return, the business will have its name displayed on a sign on this highway, to advertise itself as having a conscience for keeping highways clean. But in the world of adoption, paying money to have a highway cleaned up has nothing to do with creating a family. Supporting a worthwhile cause through monetary donations is called sponsorship, while adoption is about loving a child forever as your very own.
In my area, paying a fee to keep a highway clean is not what happens. Around here, in exchange for having its name on the sign, that business commits to care for the highway. Employees of the company, or homeowners in the subdivision, or members of the club, or whoever (I even know a local family who sponsors part of a road near where I used to live). The people who clean up the road don’t pay a fee. If, as I suspect in some cases, the actual members of that organization don’t clean up the road, then they pay someone else to keep it clean. Kind of like daycare.
The writer goes on:
When the new family member arrives, either through birth or adoption, the family is overjoyed. All the family members are excited, full of hope and love for the new little person who has joined them. Birth and adoption are the way we grow families. It is doubtful that if a person adopted a highway into their family, that there would be the same concepts of love and joy. Clean highways can be created but not by birth or adopting them.
You aren’t getting an argument from me that people are overjoyed when the “adopt a highway.” I don’t know that very much love is involved. But there’s certainly pride and responsibility and commitment.
Here’s the definition the American Heritage Dictionary gives for “adoption”:
a·dopt (ə-dŏpt’)
tr.v., a·dopt·ed, a·dopt·ing, a·dopts.
1. To take into one’s family through legal means and raise as one’s own child.
2. To take and follow (a course of action, for example) by choice or assent: adopt a new technique.
a. To take up and make one’s own: adopt a new idea.
b. To take on or assume: adopted an air of importance.
3. To vote to accept: adopt a resolution.
4. To choose as standard or required in a course: adopt a new line of English textbooks.
Under this definition, adopting a highway is not a misuse of the word. 2a, “to take up and make one’s own,” applies to the highway, as does 2b, “to take on or assume.” Sponsoring a highway, which the writer of the essay says is a better way to name these kinds of highway clean-up programs, would imply that you are paying for the highway but not caring for it…which, if accurate, makes some sense. But that’s not what happens around here with the road clean-up. Is that what happens where you live?
Here’s how he ends the essay:
Our children and in fact, people everywhere, need to know that adoption is not about clean highways but about creating families that are permanent. Adoption is not about temporary, monetary sponsorship but about a lifelong commitment of loving our children and family.
And here’s how I’ll end mine: he didn’t convince me. Just because a word, in this case, adopt, is used differently than the way we want it to be used, does not mean it’s being used incorrectly.
Should professors not adopt textbooks?
Should legislators not adopt and new laws?
Is adopting a puppy wrong, too? (I’ve heard in the adoption committee that it is wrong – only people can be adopted…)
I don’t think so. I think too much emphasis is being put on one word to little purpose. There are so many other examples of poor adoption language or offensive or discriminatory situations to get all worked up about…I don’t think this one is worth the time.
But what do you think? Am I completely off the mark?
