2000. A fitting year for the publication of Adoption Nation, Adam Pertman’s effort to help American’s see adoption through a clear lens. His are not rose tinted glasses. He writes in the introduction, “Adoption is emerging into the warm, if sometimes harsh, light of day. It is changing rapidly, radically and for the better. It’s not quite a caterpillar shedding its cocoon, emerging as a flawless beautiful butterfly. Light reveals imperfections, after all and sometimes even causes them. Still, the darkness was a far gloomier place to be, and problems that we see are easier to deal with and resolve than those that remain hidden.”

• Adoptees are regular people. In Adoption Nation, Pertman quotes a study from the Evan B. Donaldson Institute that found that when asked if adoptees were equal to other people, 70 percent said yes. What does this mean, Pertman queries. Why is the number not 100 percent? Why is someone considered inferior in any way simply because he/she was adopted?

• Birth parents, for the most part, are loving people who are unprepared to parent the children that they give birth to and deeply love. For some strange reason, birth parents have long been maligned as careless people who “put their children ‘up’ for adoption.” Pertman, who deeply loves his own children’s birth parents and who holds other birth parents in high regard, challenges this notion and demonstrates how offensive it is. Birth parents make loving, carefully thought out plans for their children; they don’t “put them up” for a transaction.

• Adoptive parents are real, authentic, permanent parents and as such, most know and understand that they have not reason to be suspicious of birth parents. Long since gone are the days when adoptive parents feel that they should pretend that they gave birth to their children. Today’s adoptive parents understand the challenges that they face in raising children who have experienced loss and who come with different ethnic, cultural and genetic histories, but they do not love them any less nor parent them with diminished authority. Yet they are often deeply hurt when others say such cruel things as “What do you know about her ‘real’ parents?” or “Maybe now you’ll get pregnant and have one of your own.”

• The stories about the adoptions that don’t go well are the exceptions and that is why they make the news. Just as no one reports on all the planes that land safely but a crash makes a newspaper’s front page, so also are all the safe adoption landings unremarkable.

• America is not only a nation of adoptees--people whose origins were in other lands--but it is also a nation of adopters. There was a time, years ago, when adoption seemed to be an unusual way to build a family. (Perhaps it was more common than it appeared to be but it was shrouded in secrecy.) Today American families with children from China, Cambodia, Korea, Guatemala and India are everywhere. They have put a new face on adoption and on the American family. These changes coincide with other changes in the American family -- single parents, homosexual parents, children through egg and sperm donation. Adoption is redefining the American family and raising a generation that no longer expects families to look a certain way.

A crusader’s life can be a lonely one and certainly Adam Pertman’s new calling comes with a dose of isolation. Gone are the Globe’s clear assignments. Gone the framework of deadlines, the camaraderie of colleagues, the security of a salary. Instead, a road less taken. But for Adam Pertman, a father, a real father, the crusade offers other rewards... the gratitude of adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents who have been too long in the shadows and the abiding hope that his efforts will make a difference in the lives of his children.

Read the first page of An Unlikely Crusader