Listen to my full interview with Michigan Radio (June 8, 2018)
Check out my videotaped interview with Michigan Radio (June 8, 2018)
Producer Mercedes Mejia speaks with author Rudy Owens during an interview for the Michigan Radio news program Stateside. Photo credit: Michigan Radio.
During the first week of June 2018, I visited my birth state, Michigan. My goal was to highlight the denial of equal rights and human rights for literally thousands of Michigan-born adoptees because of the state’s adoption secrecy laws.
My advocacy followed the May 2018 release of my newly published memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, on my adoption experience and examination of the system as a public health, legal, and political issue.
In addition to speaking to lawmakers and their staff in Lansing, I also reached out to Michigan media.
Sharing my story on Michigan’s broadcast media:
Two broadcast organizations sat down with me over two days to talk about my book, the unique maternity hospital where I was born where thousands of mothers were separated from their infants, and problems with Michigan’s laws that deny adoptees equal treatment by law in making it almost impossible for most of them to find their family and receive their original birth records.
Michigan Radio: The highlight was my conversation on June 8, 2018 with Lester Graham, one of the co-hosts of Michigan Radio’s Stateside program, on how Michigan denies most adoptees born in Michigan their vital records and how this undermines public health and denies basic rights given to all other non-adoptees in Michigan, who can obtain their true identities and original vital records.
The interview on Stateside aired on June 8, 2018. You can listen to a rebroadcast of that nearly 11-and-a-half minute interview (click on the podcast link here.)
Michigan Radio, an NPR affiliate, also did a video segment they posted as well. See the full segment here. Or see the post on Michigan Radio’s Facebook page.
Author Rudy Owens was the guest of radio hosts Steve Neavling and Nurse Charms on the 910 AM Superstation in Southfield, where he talked about the history of adoption in Detroit from the 1930s through the 1970s.
910 AM Superstation: A day earlier, on June 7, 2017, I had a 90-minute and thoughtful conversation with Southfield, Michigan-based 910 AM Superstation, which has a largely African-American listener base in metro Detroit.
Independent journalist and host Steve Neavling, the publisher of the Motorcity Muckracker news site, invited me to his program, The Muckracker Report, which normally takes on controversial issues with a progressive perspective. Even he expressed amazement of the story of Crittenton General Hospital, where I was born and where literally thousands of families were separated by adoption from the 1940s through the mid-1970s.
He shared that his father was an adoptee from Pennsylvania who never found his biological family. We had a great conversation on the history of adoption placement, the way the Crittenton maternity homes and hospitals became centers for adoption promotion nationally and in Detroit, and how these past issues that I describe in my book had a direct connection to the controversial policy of the Trump White House to separate families and children at the southern U.S. border as a form of immigration deterrence.