A Businessman's Revolution

When I asked Dave Thomas whether he considered himself a rebel, he shrugged off the question with an amused/bemused "not that I'm aware of," and explained that he was "just a hamburger cook." Which was roughly the equivalent of Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs (also an adoptee who found his birth mother) portraying himself as just a word-processor technician. To be fair, though, the president of Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers seems not to realize his role in the adoption revolution.

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The image Mr. Thomas projects in his television commercials, that of a self-effacing regular guy, appears to reflect who he really is. Moreover, he studiously stays away from any topic he views as controversial. So this soft-spoken businessman undoubtedly would be surprised to learn that he's in cahoots with groups like Bastard Nation and the American Adoption Congress in a struggle to change the world. While other agitators engage in high-profile political fights, he is concentrating on two steady grassroots efforts: increasing the number of public adoptions, discussed in Chapter Seven, and persuading U.S. businesses to make it easier for their employees to adopt.

Thomas' work clearly shows how money can be used to enhance rather than depreciate the adoptive process. It also demonstrates, yet again, how far popular attitudes toward adoption have advanced, and how far they still have to go before the practice and its participants achieve parity with families formed by procreation.

Thanks partly to persistent prodding and logistical support from the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, the proportion of U.S. companies offering adoption-related benefits jumped from eleven to thirty percent between 1990 and 1998. The National Adoption Center, which helps develop such corporate plans, says the total has been climbing since then, led by Fortune 500 firms -- about sixty-five percent of which now provide adoption benefits. The center estimates the average aid package nationwide consists of $4,000 in reimbursements per adoption, plus one week to several months off with pay, commensurate with the time given to employees who have children by birth.

Most job-holders also are eligible for up to 12 weeks' unpaid leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. Like many initiatives during the Clinton administration, that legislation sought to normalize adoption by placing it on a par with biological parenting. It was both an outgrowth of and a contribution to adoption's reformation. But, much the same way as civil rights laws were enacted because equal treatment for all Americans hadn't evolved voluntarily, the fact that the government felt compelled to intervene demonstrates how inadequate and prejudicial most people's thinking about adoption had been -- to the extent that they'd thought about it at all.

Just a decade ago, almost no company even considered that infertile personnel were paying into health plans from which they would never derive maternity benefits and which didn't automatically extend coverage to their adopted children. It never occurred to most employers, who routinely gave women time off after a delivery, that new adoptive parents might have deserved similar treatment. And since this was a subject people didn't discuss, much less negotiate about, workers seldom asked for any of those things or even informed their bosses that adopting might require some flexibility for traveling to another country, being interviewed for a home study or appearing in court for a legal procedure.

The reticence thankfully is ending, so most business owners no longer have the excuse of ignorance, and some have responded with striking generosity. Among the most notable are MBNA America, the bank and credit-card corporation, which offers its employees $10,000 toward each adoption plus four weeks' paid leave, and CMP Media, a provider of high-tech information and services, which allots $15,000 that can be used for either an adoption or fertility treatments. You can bet your house that the companies leading this parade had their sensitivities heightened by a triad member or two in their higher echelons, but you can be just as certain that the procession would have come to a grinding halt if its participants had found they were headed in a fiscally painful direction.

What they're learning instead is that providing adoption benefits not only displays social responsibility and an ability to respond to changing conditions, but also makes for more satisfied workers. For most companies, this is also a cheap investment, since only about half of one percent of all employees avail themselves of adoption benefits annually. Some small or struggling enterprises may have trouble incurring any additional expenses, but the hundreds of thousands of solvent firms that could offer adoption benefits, yet don't, could contribute enormously to leveling the playing field for less-affluent Americans. If a hamburger chain can stay in the black while offering its workers $4,000 for each adoption and $6,000 if the child has special needs, along with six weeks of paid leave, then most other businesses in this country can probably handle the burden, too.

"It's a no-brainer. For a little investment, it sends a really good message that a company cares and gives an alternative to people who can't have children any other way," Thomas says in a matter-of-fact manner that belies the fervor he clearly feels for his cause. "It should be a regular part of the culture, not a special benefit, but people don't think about that because they don't understand their workers' different lives or how much they could help kids who really need homes. I think they just have to be made aware. Education is so powerful, and that's all I'm trying to do is to educate people."

Just as nothing about Thomas' voice or demeanor betrays his commitment to radical reform, nothing about his background seems to account for his passion about adoption. If anything, his experience was more negative than most. His adoptive mother, Auleva, died of rheumatic fever when he was five. Rex Thomas was a laborer who traveled often, married three more times, and wasn't the kind to show his son affection.

Dave's unwed mother gave him up just after he was born, but he didn't learn how he'd come into the Thomas family until he was thirteen. His maternal grandmother, the only person who consistently gave him love and attention, decided it was time for the boy to know. He took the news like most adoptees do when they learn they've been deluded all their lives: He was irate, hurt and distrustful of everyone, except Grandma Minnie. Every day he went to school, and every night he immersed himself in a twelve-hour-a-day restaurant job. Two years and another city later, when Rex announced he was moving again, Dave rented a room at a YMCA in Fort Wayne, Ind., and said he was staying put.

Other adoptees -- or nonadoptees for that matter -- might have been embittered by such an upbringing, might have been rendered socially dysfunctional, might have blamed their parents, their bad luck or themselves. At the age of fifteen, Dave Thomas gritted his teeth, somehow achieved the insight to be grateful for having had a family at all, and vowed that other people were no longer going to chart the course of his future. "I had to work myself out of that mess," he says, which he has done, creating a world that is the polar-opposite of the one he left behind. He has been married to the same woman for forty-six years, has five children, and has gotten wealthy from the chain he started with a single restaurant in 1969. Having endured a life of bouncing from home to home, Mr. Thomas decided to help other children escape comparable circumstances.

He saw hundreds of thousands of them in the foster-care system, and saw adoption as their salvation. That conclusion may seem paradoxical, given Thomas' personal history. But he grasped that his problem hadn't been adoption but a lack of affection and stability, factors that aren't guaranteed for children raised by their birth parents either. He also retained a belief most Americans clutch while their incomes are relatively modest, but too often relax their grips upon as they approach the upper rungs of the economic ladder: that a lack of money shouldn't impede people from attaining the basics of human existence, such as decent health care, shelter or family.

Assuming adoption benefits are becoming routine, they promise to accomplish more than just increasing the rate of special-needs adoptions, making the process more equitable and contributing to a greater sense of optimism. In an intensely business-centered culture like ours, the participating companies serve as models for other segments of society to follow suit. And that could throw the normalization of adoption into mainstream America into hyperdrive, with all sorts of direct and tangential implications. Here are just a few not-too-farfetched fantasies:

Insurance firms could realize that they, too, can provide a specialized type of adoption assistance. That is, they could give infertile policy-holders a choice between lump-sum subsidies toward an adoption, say $15,000 or $20,000, and their standard coverage for treatments designed to achieve pregnancy, which can easily exceed $50,000 per patient. Many people would snap up such an alternative, and their numbers would grow as this became a routine option and as adoption's image continued to improve.

The combination of financing from employers, insurance firms and government tax credits would make adoption a viable alternative and even a desirable goal for millions of additional Americans. Since there's no evidence that the supply of white infants would rise commensurately, the heightened demand would lead to a steady upsurge in the ranks of older, disabled and otherwise needy children moving into permanent homes, both within the United States and from institutions abroad.

On a human level, weaving adoption into the regular patterns of life means people would talk about it even more freely, further dispelling the stereotypes, shedding the embarrassments and addressing the problems. In particular, lifting the stigmas and the shame -- if we're really lucky, combined with less money-driven behavior by practitioners -- would leave women with crisis pregnancies less susceptible to pressure, making the adoptions that do occur more stable and comfortable for everyone concerned.

Just one last vision, for now, this one for my son and daughter and all their kindred spirits who didn't pick their still-unconventional status or the complications that come with it. When the negative influences of money are excised from the process that replaces children's parents, their feelings toward the people who raise them will never be tainted by questions about their self-worth. When adoption becomes as widely accepted as divorce, which it beats hands-down as a productive social institution, and when birth parents are as widely accepted as in-laws, who also run the gamut from wonderful to worrisome, the only people for whom adoption will become an ignominious subject will be those few wayward politicians and baby traders who still defend phony birth certificates, sealed records and enforced separations of blood relatives.

And here's why that final dream may come true: The unwitting comrades-in-arms appalled by the status quo don't just consist of rabble-rousers in reform organizations, or even just the growing majority of birth and adoptive parents, researchers and practitioners whose own experiences have taught them the value of honesty and openness. They also include quietly influential people like Dave Thomas. After all, just because he prefers to stay away from hot topics publicly doesn't mean he has no feelings about them.

"I think everyone has a right to know something about their mother and father. I think it's one of our God-given rights," he told me during an interview that had focused mainly on his efforts to broaden benefits for adoptive parents and provide more homes for children in foster care. After deflecting my initial questions about "controversial" issues like closed records, he evidently decided to finally make his sentiments known. "Those things are controversial for people who have never been adopted, who really don't understand," he said, an edge entering his voice for the first time.

"Everyone should be able to get their birth certificates, their own information. I'd hate to think I couldn't get mine," he continued. Even as he disclosed his previously private thoughts, Mr. Thomas remained in character, urging a conservative approach to prevent any disruption of the adoptive family's life. He suggested that adoptees be legally entitled to obtain their documents when they turn twenty-one, the same age at which he said they should be free to seek out their birth parents. That's how old he was when he found his birth mother, using papers Grandma Minnie gave him.

Too many Americans still operate on the basis of wrong-headed views about adoption. They mean well, but they haven't been told the truth yet. That's where people like Mary Insulman, the elderly retiree in Oregon, and Bill Troxler, the college president in Maryland, and Dave Thomas come in. They are not hot-headed radicals or callous manipulators who pursue their own interests without regard for the impact on anyone else. Everyone should take heed when they tell their stories, whether the subject is money or unsealing records, because theirs are the voices of reason and impending change.

For more information, please contact:

Adam Pertman, Executive Director
Adoption Nation Education Initiative
apertman@peoplepc.com
www.adoptionnation.com
617-332-8944 (work)

Credits: Adam Pertman