Rudy Owens holds his completed memoir.
My mission statement provides a succinct summary that lets my readers know who I am and why I told this important and overlooked national story of inequality in the United States. My advocacy goals in publishing this book and telling my personal story about my journey through the American adoption system are to:
- Promote equality for all adoptees and birth parents,
- Achieve lasting political reform to change outdated and harmful state adoption laws that keep birth records hidden from adoptees and birth parents,
- Generate greater awareness of how adoption impacts human health and public health,
- Encourage meaningful public actions by those who created the American adoption system to take ownership for their past deeds and work to create fair outcomes for adoptees and birth parents.
All of these outcomes are achievable and have already occurred in countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom. This will require meaningful political pressure, political will, and leadership from adoptees and birth parents, because no one else will really care unless the people whose lives were most touched by adoption work to implement these clear objectives.
Specifically, my strongest possible call for a public health approach to reform the American adoption system is grounded in proven approaches used to improve the health of populations. An evidence-based way to improve U.S. population health, immediately, is to allow all adoptees and birth parents to have unfettered access to their birth records and family medical histories. Knowing one’s family medical history is a practice recommended by nearly every major medical and health sciences research group, not to mention the U.S. Surgeon General.
I encourage visitors to this website to acquaint themselves with my existing writings and advocacy on adoption, the public health aspects of adoption, and the inequities how adoption works, particularly as administered in Michigan by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.
(Links updated Nov. 3, 2023)