Category Archives: Adoptee Rights

Will legacy media ever dare invite adoptee authors and researchers as guests to discuss adoption?

Promotion for an episode on U.S. adoption by the show “It’s Been a Minute,” aired on Nov. 26, 2024; image provided for purposes of editorial comment and criticism only.

Once again we have a show in the public radio universe, “It’s Been a Minute,” on Nov. 26, 2024, centering the voice of someone who, while being a worthy academic author, is not an adoptee and will never fully have the critical perspective of lived experience.

For the record there are dozens and dozens of adoptee authors who have contributed significant research to policy debates on the harm of this system to millions of separated families. They continue to be boxed out, denied any access, and ignored by legacy media who could care less about their expertise to actual policy proposals for restoring legal rights and assisting those harmed, including intercountry adoptees now in legal limbo with the incoming Trump administration promising unprecedented mass deportations of people.

And I personally object to this framing—”coming out of the fog” (a term other adoptees use, and that is always their right to describe their experience any way they want).

The promotion notes: “But adoptees and birth parents are opening up online about ‘coming out of the fog’—a term for becoming more openly critical of adoption, or facing the grief within their adoption stories.” I don’t use or even acknowledge that term as relevant to having an honest discussion of the history of mass family separation of millions of families, in the United States and abroad. For millions of us, this is a critical issue of denied legal and human rights, and such terms that don’t center the root legal inequality, promoted by the foundation of lies and deception to this system, prevent us from talking about solutions. I’ve never had fog. What I’ve had are denied basic human rights—that exist on the books to this day.

Finally, where the hell were Brittany Luse or NPR when, for instance, there were real policy debates going on in Michigan between November 2023 and February 2024, on bills that could have restored legal rights to tens of thousands of people denied their vital records only because they are adopted.

Do better public radio, NPR, and your many hosts. Talk to the experts and talk about real solutions.

Update to FAQs for Michigan adoptees seeking court orders for original birth records

I have updated my frequently visited “FAQS for court order requests in Michigan for original birth certificates” webpage.* I created this in 2018 for all Michigan-born adoptees and adoptee rights advocates, lawmakers, policymakers, and the media, explaining the process for securing an original birth certificate for adoptees, especially those born between 1945 and 1980. I hope these resources are helpful and provide information that the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) will not share with tens of thousands of adoptees, as part of their concerted efforts to discriminate against this class of thousands of persons who were separated from their birth mothers and kin by this inequitable system.

In addition to updating links to MDHHS’s intentionally unhelpful web resources for adoptees, I  added this:

Will MDHHS ignore court orders to release an adoptee’s original birth certificate? [UPDATED NOV. 15, 2024]: Yes, MDHHS will ignore state law and will ignore court orders, based on my experiences requesting two additional copies of my original birth certificate in mid-August 2024. In my case, MDHHS took 80 days to release two copies of my original birth certificate after getting my order for rush service on Aug. 16, 2024. The process, as it occurred with denials and delays, violated not one but two court orders requiring MDHHS to release my vital record, as required by state law. I had to get a state court to intervene after I received a denial letter. The two birth certificates arrived on Nov. 4, 2024. (Note, I already had a standing court order from 2016 when I first won my legal fight for my vital record.) See my essay, video, and links to four other stories and videos documenting MDHHS’s actions that did not comply with state law and defied a Michigan state court and judge.

*Note, I have never made a penny from providing this resource to the public, outside of the incredibly modest sales I have of my book documenting the history of the U.S. adoption with a public health lens and how my story being separated from my biological family helps explain that system and the legal discrimination rooted in law harming millions of adoptees to this day.

After 80 days, Michigan finally releases my original birth certificate

The Michigan health and public health agency, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), took 80 days to release two copies of my original birth certificate after getting my order for rush service on August 16, 2024.

The two copies of the true record of my birth, and my biological kin relations provided in this critical vital record that is a human right of all persons, finally landed in my mailbox on November 4, 2024. The process, as it occurred with denials and delays, violated not one but two court orders requiring MDHHS to release my vital record, as required by state law law.

I had to get a state court to intervene. (Note, I already had a standing court order from 2016 when I first won my legal fight for my vital record.)

See my video highlighting this clearly wrongful and unlawful delay.

Even though I secured a second court order on September 19, 2024, to compel this mostly hostile agency to thousands of Michigan-born adoptees to release my original birth record, that second court order was also denied.

A section of the latest court order requiring MDHHS to release two copies of Rudy Owens’ original birth certificate

MDHHS received that second court order on October 4, 2024 (I have a legal record confirming its delivery) and then sent a denial by letter on October 7, 2024.

In MDHHS’s signed letter, which did not provide any statutory reference—because there was no law allowing this—State Registrar Jeffrey D. Duncan noted, in all capital letters, “YOU MUST HAVE A CURRENT ORDER TO GET SEALED RECORDS.” (Note, this is false, and no such statutory provision in any law exists.)

As I shared already in my update and video published in mid-August 2024, there are several relevant Michigan statutes that set out adoption laws relevant to issues facing adoptees of my generation: § 710, 333, 368.

None establishes any conditions to deny the release of more than one original birth certificate to a Michigan-born such as myself who provided a court order already.

In fact, the statute § 333.2882 does state, the original birth certificate is accessible “upon a court order.” I met this condition with the court order already sent to MDHHS in June 2016, forcing it to send me a copy of my original birth certificate. I re-sent MDHHS on August 13, 2024, what I sent earlier in June 2016, and a copy of my vital record it sent me in July 2016 to prove it has already released the record before.

It’s important to highlight for lawmakers, the media, and any group that advocates for state agency compliance of state laws the harm and insanity of what denied and delayed justice means to myself and to tens of thousands of adoptees who may never even find their kin or get their original vital records.

I met my birth kin and my mother had sent in a signed consent form to release my birth certificate in April 1989—that was more than 35 years ago!

The court sided with me in late June 2016 to compel MDHSS to unseal my original birth certificate 27 years after I found my birth parents. I’m not a secret, but I continue to be treated like a bastard who is not a person protected by state law and the state constitution.

Lastly, throughout this entire process of obtaining what is mine as a human and legal right, my original birth certificate, the only government office that ever did anything to provide fair and balanced basic service involving what is ultimately a matter of law was the Third Circuit Court in Detroit and the personnel who worked there.

The state of Michigan intentionally chooses to be an adversary to a group denied basic legal rights bestowed on millions of other Michiganders, and its personnel all the way to its senior leadership, Director Elizabeth Hertel, appears committed to harming those who were severed from their biological families by the inequitable system of adoption for decades.

Multiple generations of people in Michigan have now suffered because of this, and no one seems to care about solving the problem outside some courageous lawmakers who unsuccessfully tried do that that in fall 2023 and winter 2024.

See my other stories and videos documenting my lawful request for my original birth certificate, and the delays and denials by MDHHS:

 

Some thoughts on ‘adopter ownership’ of adoptee voices and this horrible adoption-promotion month

November is the month that the enormous adoption industrial complex, all the way to the White House, promotes this system rooted in family separation and inequities that denies rights to persons born domestically and outside of the United States.

NPR host Scott Simon (photo from of NPR, used for editorial comment and criticism purposes only)

Right on cue, Scott Simon, an adoptive parent and host of the National Public Radio’s (NPR) show “Weekend Edition Saturday,” decided to mix his own advocacy to celebrate his, yes, “white savior/adopter” status with current affairs, being the election.

With his pro-adoption talking points that would satisfy the entire board of the National Council for Adoption, the largest pro-adoption and advocacy group in the United States, Simon gushed about his role “saving” his kids from a terrible fate in China.

His syrupy monologue, broadcast on November 9, 2024, on “Weekend Edition Saturday,” proclaimed, Look everyone, because of him and his wife, these supposedly discarded humans found on a roadside in China (his summary in his own words, and we cannot fact check the actual origins), are now adults who vote in the United States.

“I stayed back while my wife and daughters checked in to vote, and in that moment it struck me: Our daughters, born in China, left along roadsides, and grew up in our family of mixed nationalities, languages and faiths, were voting for who would be the next president of the United States and their city council member. And their votes would count the same as any cast by a Nobel prize winner or a billionaire.”

So, this is my request to NPR and its almost entirely pro-adoption news staff that I’ve been listening to now for decades, almost daily.

We adoptees recognize that your legacy media organization has rarely given agency to adoptees and has never meaningfully covered adoptee rights issues for domestic and international adoptees, concerning denied legal rights. Even with this incredible bias that you appear unable to see and correct, please refrain from promoting adoption, unless it’s based in facts and news.

A search on Google found many online resources published in November promoting the system of adoption.

If NPR, its news team, and its hosts actually cared about tens of thousands of foreign-born adoptees today, after Trump has promised to deport 15 million “illegal immigrants,” they would not run this schmaltzy adoption PR.

They would have, instead, have reported that many thousands of “immigrants” could be adoptees without secure legal status at no fault of their own, and they may now be threatened by the clearly fascist policy agenda of Trump and the entire incoming GOP Congress to deport millions of people. They would be covering how so many adoptees born outside the USA and brought without any say to this country had adopter parents who failed them by not securing their legal rights.

Finally, to anyone like NPR’s host Simon or countless others who talk publicly about adoption, remember you do not own the voice of the person you raised. Please do not speak for your adult adopted kids.

If they can vote, they can speak their minds.

Taking “ownership” of another’s voice is coercion. Doing this with public storytelling, like Simon’s essay, which is by definition in public spaces, happens constantly, and it’s a form of control adopters exert. In fact this story was by definition a form of coercion over someone who is an adult. The adopter, who needed to affirm their heroic status, intentionally told the country with NPR’s blessing, that he “owned” the adoptee’s voice.

No one but the adoptee has the moral agency to speak for themselves.

In the end, too many adoptees will leave this world alone

Rudy Owens self-portrait with the latest health challenge on full view

My current health situation, that has only started and won’t get better for a long time, reminds me of my years intervening to support my adoptive mom (who I call “mom”) and my adoptive sister. Mom died in February 2020 after a long bout with Alzheimer’s, and my adoptive sister, who is in a nursing home, is not well.

Maybe I could have done more to help both of them. I still do what I can to help my adoptive sister. My stepdad did more than seven years of heroic caregiving for my mom, and I appreciate what he did. Now that I find myself with serious health challenges, it’s sobering to realize how no one should go through life without someone to watch their back, particularly at the end of life.

In my case, there is no one in my adoptive family or stepfamily of 41 years who would step in to help me, even if we lived in the same community. Right now, I’m sure my three stepsisters know I’m injured by talking to my stepdad, and yet none have even sent an email. We live scattered, far from each other. This is the reality for all of these relations. If I am injured worse than I am now, I am entirely on my own. I continue to plan my life and the next chapter of my life with this as a daily priority to address.

I also think about being adopted and what compassion and care mean for the millions denied their biological relations by this oppressive system rooted in law, religious bias, politics, economics, social practices that have exploited many groups and single moms, racist practices that remove children of color from their kin networks, and corruption that has brought hundreds of thousands of persons to the United States to meet a “market demand.”

We adoptees are robbed of our many, many kin—parents, siblings, half-siblings, cousins, second cousins, aunts, uncles, second aunts, second uncles, third cousins, third aunts and uncles, nieces, nephews, and countless more. All of these relations are also those who naturally and logically would be there to help us through life’s challenges. This is because the nature of our biological kinship, the root to our survival as a species from a socio-evolutionary perspective that is documented clearly in scientific research.

Rudy Owens and his recently found bio-kin in Finland, photographed in September 2024–we are family at the most elemental level and especially by blood kinship.

In my case, I am entirely on my own. No one is there to “watch my back.” It is a situation I have to deal with.

The one positive note from this sobering reality is I at least know I have biological kin in Finland—found in 2023—who genuinely care about me because we are kin. We are not all aligned politically. We are connected by biology, blood kinship, and genetics. At least I have this reservoir of knowledge to draw upon understanding how kinship works at a biological level in how we treat each other.

My blood kin in the United States, many who have died, live far from me. For those on my biological mother’s family, I am not connected with many. Some never even knew about me until recently, and our close “proximity” to each other as blood kin also creates tension that they cannot accept. The real barrier is my status as the bastard—the dark and dirty secret who had to be abandoned to this system of adoption to preserve society’s needs and to remove the dark stigma that illegitimacy has always represented globally to society all the way down to the individuals in families.

I cannot change anyone, and I cannot make anyone want to know me. What I can do now is make a plan to be ready for this final chapter.

I accept what adoption has done to my natural biologically-rooted safety net—because that is reality. Finland is very much on my mind as place to consider my last chapters. At least there, it is a society that cares for everyone, unlike our country that is unable to achieve lasting change for the better of us all.