By Rudy Owens, MA, MPH
Published April 7, 2024
On Jan. 15, 2024, I sent a “letter to the editor” to a national publication called The Nation’s Health, a public health newsletter published by the American Public Health Association (APHA). My letter was about 300 words and focused on clearly documented public health practices promoted by the country’s national public health organization.
In my letter, I noted, “Today, most health and public health experts, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), encourage all Americans to know their family health history to share with their medical providers to promote better health.”
I read the entire letter in my video here.
I pointed out in my letter that “no medical health group or public health groups have publicly supported changing state adoption laws that deny birth records and family medical history to millions of U.S.-born adoptees.”
I ended my letter with a call to action, for what the public health field commonly calls evidence-based, upstream public health interventions. That is precisely what adoptee rights advocates have been calling for, for more than 50 years, asking for reforms to state laws to unseal original birth records that would provide millions of people better health by allowing them to better know their health history.
I ended my letter noting: “This year, public health practitioners can join with adoptees in legislative advocacy to improve the health of millions by changing these laws.” My note even highlighted my own family’s story about being a Finnish-American and having lost a close birth relative to heart disease very tragically on Dec. 29, 2023.
Even with the death of a close family member and the clearly documented evidence regarding what all health and public health experts say is a best practice, to know one’s family health history, I never heard back from the editorial staff of The Nation’s Health.
I respectfully resubmitted my letter three more times, a total of four times, since Jan. 15, 2024. I have never received confirmation if my letter would be accepted or if it was rejected.
I am assuming now that the letter has been rejected. I believe my letter was not accepted because of the tension such a letter raises.
In my view this tension may even cause internal denial and reveal professional and national patterns of cognitive dissonance by a field that proclaims to promote public health but has embraced national practices on millions of adoptees that harm their health and the nation’s public health.
In my 2018 book examining adoption from a public health perspective and on my website, I’ve long called upon health and public health groups to support adoptees.
“Both have a moral obligation to advocate for the well-being of all adopted Americans as a population,” I write. “Both also have a responsibility to correct their past historic roles creating a system that denies adoptees rights and also health information that could potentially be life-saving for some.”
This field has long supported U.S. adoption practices, particularly in the erasure of millions of U.S-born adoptees’ identities and by creating new and “not truthful” amended birth certificates bearing names of adoptive parents as the legal parents of adopted children and the sealing of original birth records (vital records) in most states, as part of the system’s wide expansion by the 1950s. (This is documented in many books, which I provide links to on my website.)
If you work in public health and want to support adoptee rights in legislative policy debates, I welcome your support. Contact me, and I can help guide your involvement where and when it can count.
Finally, in the time since I first reached out to APHA’s publication, adoptee rights bills in 2024 have stalled in Michigan and Georgia, delaying health and justice to countless tens of thousands of adoptees who needed “experts” to advocate on their behalf. These outcomes could have been different had health and public health experts provided supportive testimony.
Adoptees are, to date, collateral damage to outdated public health practices and laws that no longer serve any purpose when commercial DNA testing has virtually eliminated absurd notions of “secrecy.”
It’s time to fix this where it counts—in policy debates to change state laws and restore rights to adoptees by law.
(Also see my article published Jan. 13, 2024: “Adoptee rights is also a moral issue to ensure equal rights to good health, yet public health and health professionals ignore this intentionally.”)