The character Tyrion Lannister on HBO’s Game of Thrones provides expert advice for adoptees who may forget who they are in the eyes of the law (image used for editorial and commentary purposes).
Let me give you some advice, bastard: Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not.
Tyrion Lannister, Game of Thrones, Season 1
This week I found a very interesting discussion on case law concerning efforts by adoptees to legally annul their adoptions and reclaim their original identities that were taken from them by the states and by state law that governs adoption.
There was a back and forth discussion about the merits of the cases and if adoptees have legal rights to their original identities. I decided to weigh in on the thread, even though it was three years old. Here is the crux of what I shared:
For a good background on how the courts have made clear that adoptees have no legal inheritance rights to biological kin, I suggested reviewing articles by University of Baltimore law professor Elizabeth Samuels. Her 2001 Rutgers Law Review article, “The Idea of Adoption,” makes clear adoption law is designed to protect all biological parents, including fathers-by-sperm only, from any legal claim to their estates and assets by illegimate children given up for adoption.
Before 1943, Samuels writes, adoptees “were usually permitted to inherit from their birth parents as well as from other birth relatives.” By 1970, 21 states expressly forbid such inheritance. This trend matched the pattern of states creating discriminatory laws that prevented adoptees from knowing their past and obtaining their records, which most could usually access before the 1950s in practice, even in states that had sealed records. For Samuels, these laws reflected a prevailing societal idea promoted by adoption supporters that families created by adoption could be the equivalent of families created by kinship and blood. I, however, see a much different set of forces at play, documented over centuries in the denial of rights, property, and even life of those born illegitimately.
This revival of legal prejudice against adoptees, almost all of whom are bastards in the full sense of the word, is not new. It is a carryover from the English and Catholic and canonical legal tradition of treating illegitimately born humans as outsiders and bastards—filius nulius (children of no one or non-people). Bastard children had no claim to land, title, or property. Many were denied basic care and treated to cruelties we cannot begin to imagine. (See the excellent book on this topic: Bastardy and Its Comparative History, edited by Peter Laslett.) Infanticide of bastard babies has been widely documented up through the mid-1800s in Europe and even colonial America, for example.
Michigan’s Treatment of Adoptees and Bastards
The stamp mark of “SEALED” is meant to show me that I am not a real person in the eyes of the state and that I am an adoptee, who must bear the burden of that status on my legal records, which I am entitled to as a human right.
In my case, the state of Michigan intentionally adulterated the original birth certificate I received in 2016, after a bruising fight and court order. It arrived 51 years after my birth, and after I had petitioned for it over three decades.
In my assessment of both the law and the action by state vital records/public health staff who were handling my court ordered petition, they sought to confirm my bastard status and to affirm I did not have legal rights as the person I was born as. The state of course offered another rationale, but the effect was to imprint my identity document with the legal equivalent of a giant scarlet “B,” as in “bastard.” It was an expression of power of the state over “bastardized” and illegitimately born people, like me.
Legalese conversations about case law and law in general overlook the root and clearly documented history of discrimination that underpins this practice. I discuss this at length in Chapter 9 of my new memoir on the U.S. adoption experience.
One cannot separate historic discrimination of illegitimate people when having any conversation about the law, courts, and treatment of U.S. adoptees. Prejudice taints the entire case record and legal system regarding adoption, and to say otherwise is to ignore the legal reality impacting millions of adoptees today. It is that simple. My memoir on this experience explores this reality and its public health implications for millions of U.S. residents.
Changing Your Name Will Not Change Who You Are
Rudy Owens birth certificate after legal name change, showing the state of Michigan did not remove my adopted name (from 2009)
Before I received my original birth certificate, I had petitioned to change my name to incorporate my original birth name that I had known of since 1989 into my new name in 2009, and I was successful, becoming “Rudolf Scott-Douglas Owens.” My new name incorporated my birth name of “Scott Douglas Owens” with my adoptive name of “Martin Rudolf Brueggemann.”
I then requested Michigan’s vital records office to give me my revised birth record. Yet Michigan denied my right to my past and my former legal identity at the time of my birth by still keeping my amended birth certificate’s adoptive name, “Martin Rudolf Brueggemann,” as the prominent name on my now legally changed birth certificate. The new record puts my new legal name in barely visible micro letters below it, even though my new name is my true legal name that the courts bestowed upon me.
So even as adoptees assert their rights to their legal birth records, names, and identities, state public health agencies like the those in Michigan will assert through the perks of bureaucracy that an adopted bastard will have been erased, even if nearly impossible legal petitions exist for only the boldest and most defiant bastards and adoptees to reclaim their true identities.
Regardless, now I will die with the kin name I was born with, and the state cannot erase that. It tried to do that for decades, and it lost. And this bastard has never forgotten how the world has treated those born into this status.