Category Archives: Adoptee Rights

Adoptees’ access to their original birth certificates

Adoptees are entitled to their original birth certificates as a human right. Mine was withheld from me for decades, and likely illegally, by the State of Michigan, even after I found my biological kin. (I have intentionally hidden information in this copy.)

My book on the U.S. adoption experience, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, uses my personal story as an adoptee to explore how the former rights of U.S. born adoptees have been restricted and, in many cases, annulled over decades through lawmaking at the state level. My discussion of this larger issue, as part of a wider analysis of human rights and the loss of those rights by U.S. adoptees, is mostly found in chapter 7 of my book: “Legalized Discrimination Against Adoptees: The Demon Behind the Problem.”

Some of the best published resources explaining this history can be found on my recommended reading list, which includes the works of historian E. Wayne Carp and law professor Elizabeth Samuels, among other unbiased and carefully researched works that dispel many of the false myths about adoptees and the history of adoption in the United States.

Another trusted source I reference in my book, in my writings, and on my website is the Adoptee Rights Law Center, run by Gregory Luce, a Minneapolis-based attorney and fellow adoptee, who also shares my birth year and status as a Crittenton kid. I have never met Luce, but I have communicated with him over the years on a sporadic basis regarding shared areas of advocacy interest regarding legal reform, which he works on nationally. He has proven to be a highly trusted source of fact-based information that informs the public and key stakeholders.

Luce has just published several resources I want to recommend to the larger adoptee and research, media, and policy-making community who deal with adoption law and the restriction of rights to adoptees. Luce plans to publish more resources later on original birth certificates and other records restricted from adoptees. The more factual information can be shared, versus myths and propaganda by the pro-adoption interest groups that still dominate the public discourse on adoption issues, the more likely advocates can achieve long-overdue reform.

FAQ: Original Birth Certificates (published December 2020): Luce writes “this FAQ relates to original birth certificates of adopted people born in the United States. FAQs on additional issues, including those related to intercountry adoptees, are forthcoming.”
A video documenting the erosion and loss of human and legal rights by adoptees to access their original birth certificates (published December 2020).
Original Birth Certificates Map, available on the Adoptee Rights Law website (updated continually). This map explains and show what states restrict access, provide compromised access, and provide access to original birth certificates for adoptees — an invaluable way to understand how legalized discrimination still denies millions basic legal rights given to non-adoptees.

What have Michigan public health officials written about me?

The public’s right to all public records in Michigan is a clear matter of law and backed by court precedent.

On Oct. 12, 2020, I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS). As of today, those records have not been released, pending my efforts to reduce an exorbitant charge of $1,168.44 for “labor” in processing my public records request. I will be appealing this charge.

My requests for records included all communications and documents that referenced:

The petitioner, me, with either my original, adoptive, or later changed legal name (now Rudolf Scott-Douglas Owens)
My book on the U.S. adoption system and my decades-long denials for records, including from the MDHHS (You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are: An Adoptee’s Journey Through the American Adoption Experience),
My websites (www.howluckyuare.com; www.rudyowens.com), and
Any article written by the petitioner.

All of these requested items are, by statute, public records and have to be released by law in a short time period.

This is not just an issue of an adoptee wanting to know what adoption officials think and say about them.

This request highlights a larger matter of policy. The records requested provide the clearest insight into the systemic way lawful adult adoptees are treated by adoption records-keeping officials — all with no regulatory and legislative oversight and with almost no media and public interest.

Only by obtaining and then sharing public records that document the workings of state public health officials can the public begin to understand the treatment countless tens of thousands of adoptees have experience over decades in the Untied States trying to answer life’s most basic question, “Who am I?”

That is why this matters. That is why I made this request. That is why I am doing this — to help other adoptees and perhaps the public who care about equality and fairness.

In other words, this request is about what happens behind the scenes when public health and state adoption officials deny, obstruct, and challenge adoptees’ requests only because of their status as adoptees.

My FOIA request asked for records generated by former MDHHS Director Nick Lyon and current MDHHS Director Robert Gordon.

Why MDHHS Records Documenting Communications About Adult Adoptees Matter

The MDHHS is the state agency that manages Michigan’s large adoption system. The MDHHS also oversees all decisions concerning the release of adoptees’ records. Because of statutory authority, it also is charged with providing information about the state’s laws that, by statute, restrict Michigan adult adoptees from accessing their original birth records. (See my FAQs about this poorly organized and managed system).

I have been dealing with the MDHHS since 1987, when I first requested my limited adoption records I was legally allowed to receive.

Since then, the state’s adoption records agency, now housed at MDHHS, have been tenaciously obstructionist and, I would argue, intentionally hostile in denying me assistance for decades now. It took a court fight and a judge’s order in June 2016 to finally compel the MDHHS to release my original birth certificate, 27 years after I had already found my birth kin and knew my biological family identity and ancestry. Not once have I received any assistance that members of the public might expect for something as simple as their vital record and most important identity document — their original birth certificate.

Since 2016, I have published a book on the MDHHS’s oversight of adult adoptees’ records. My book examined the decision-making of its senior staff and the state’s outdated laws that treats literally thousands of lawful Michigan natives as second-class citizens only because they are adopted.

Shortly after publishing my book in May 2018, I directly lobbied dozens of lawmakers in Lansing in June 2018, to replace the state’s outdate adoption secrecy laws and to implement reforms to address the poor treatment of adoptees.

I also have published multiple articles on the state’s laws, including an op ed on Michigan’s denial of equal rights to adoptees, published by the Detroit Free Press on Jan. 4, 2020. This past August, I also made repeated efforts to obtain my adoptive parents’ adoption study records, which are perhaps the most protected of all adoptees’ original adoption records.

My FOIA request also requested records from current MDHHS officials Elizabeth Hertel, Chief Deputy Director for Administration (left), and JooYeun Chang, Senior Deputy Director, Children’s Services Agency.

The MDHHS claimed they did not have a copy of those records, which I can never confirm with any third party. The MDHHS also refused to provide any assistance after more than a dozen emails to multiple senior officials, even though their assistance could have been made with a phone call in support at no cost to the state. They told me to “try again” and ask my successor adoption agency for these now more than 55-year-old records about my adoptive mom and dad. I had made a request in 2017 that was rejected through an incorrect interpretation of law.

Given the state’s latest reluctance to assist me in my lawful request for records that lawfully belong to adoptees, I filed my FOIA request to determine how MDHHS officials have been documenting my advocacy and my many requests for records.

How FOIA Should Work In Michigan

The state’s Freedom of Information Act, Mich. Comp. Laws Ann. 15.231-.246, for public records, compel the state to release those records to the public in five business days, or in some cases after 10 additional days after a formal request is made.

The state’s FOIA law is a critical tool for the media and the public to hold state officials accountable. This is one of the most important functions of public records legislation at the state level. In Michigan, the law provides transparency how state officials carry out their duties and fulfill legal requirements, such as treating all residents equally and fairly, as required by the state’s Constitution. This is, ultimately about a constitutional issue of fairness that only records can shed light on.

What’s more, as a matter of policy and court precedent, Michigan courts throughout the state’s history have both expressed and implemented the fundamental principle that the records of government belong to the public and not to the government officials who manage said records. The public’s access and ability to inspect are a matter of fundamental right. What’s more, the public does not have the burden of justifying the requested inspection, and the custodian bears the duty to justify any exemptions, restrictions, or delays in providing public records.

This is the invoice MDHHS sent to me, for $1,168.44 for generating public records, despite the law’s requirement that records can be provided with no fee upon request if the petitioner documents the release is in the public interest. I provided that documentation and my fee waiver request was denied.

The reply and charge I received a week after my request sent a clear message that the state had little interest in having records it has been creating about me and without my knowledge should be released. The invoice claimed that I would have to pay $1,168.44 for the labor of preparing these records. This charge came despite my clearly documented case that, by law, I should be granted a fee waiver.

I argued I was entitled to the waiving of fees allowed by the law for the following reasons:

My request concerns public my reporting, public stories and scholarly work, and media coverage that may involve my advocacy work on Michigan’s management of vital records. They were all matters of important public policy, and my reporting intended to inform policymaking and legislation, which are fully in the public’s interest.
My request focuses on policies concerning the management of vital records of adoptees, which is public policy matter debated widely in Michigan and all 50 states by elected and public bodies.
Adoptees number in the millions in the U.S. population, and debates over the management of sealed and original birth records and the way adoptees’ legal requests are treated by public bodies remain major political topics that are in the public spotlight and are of substantial local, state, and national interest. As a matter of public policy, records issues have been in the public interest and debated by public bodies now since the 1930s.
My request concerns furnishing copies of the public record showing how state bodies and their officials deliberate on journalists and those who report on public policy issues. Shedding light on how public bodies make internal decisions to manage those public records is therefore beneficial public information that will only serve the public good and the people of the state of Michigan.

Groups supporting open records strongly document the state has an overarching legal responsibility to provide records and waive fees. What’s more state’s law specifically states: “A public body shall utilize the most economical means available for providing copies of public records. A fee shall not be charged for the cost of search, examination, review, and the deletion and separation of exempt from nonexempt information as provided in section 14 unless failure to charge a fee would result in unreasonably high costs to the public body because of the nature of the request in the particular instance, and the public body specifically identifies the nature of these unreasonably high costs.”

I my case, the state did not identity its “unreasonably high costs,” and it’s impossible to tell that any economical means were used, with the charges at more than $1,100 for a member of the public.

What is clear, given these charges, is that the MDHHS and its officials likes have amassed a lot of records about me. It would be impossible to conclude otherwise. My FOIA request from 2016 unearthed documents how the state’s former State Registrar, Glenn Copeland, failed to correctly interpret state law and Deputy State Registrar Tamara Weaver told a subordinate to start tagging me in their system and further claimed that I had “an agenda” in asking for my original birth certificate — which I was on record asking for as far back as 1987.

My 2016 FOIA request charge came to $173 for 198 pages of emails. My charge now is nearly seven times as much, indicating officials have been writing a lot about me. It’s time for the state to release those records, follow the law, and not punish a member of the public requesting public records fully entitled to a fee waiver required by the state law.

Two-year anniversary of publishing my adoptee memoir

Author Rudy Owens at a September 2019 lecture on his memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are.

It is amazing to think that two years have passed since I announced the publication of my memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are: An Adoptee’s Journey Through the American Adoption Experience.

My story remains one of the most distinct books ever written on this hidden chapter of U.S. History.

You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are details my experience being born in one of the largest maternity hospitals devoted to separating families through Adoption, Crittenton General Hospital.

It then examines my life story amid millions of other stories of U.S.-born adoptees and what we know from the long ignored facts about this institution that still denies basic legal and human rights to millions of persons.

Unlike other works on the U.S. adoption system, my book uses a wealth of facts from multiple disciplines: biology, evolutionary psychology, history, public health, sociology, and original source material to provide an overview of the public health impacts on millions of adoptees. This is because adoption cannot be understood without the research from multiple fields and because adoption has to be understood as a public health issue.

That fact matters now more than ever in our COVID-19 world, when many people can finally see the connections between systems, laws, policies, and health outcomes.

I self-published my book in May 2018, through a publishing company I created called BFD Press. You can order it here, or get a copy from Amazon, IngramSpark, or from your favorite online bookseller.

Rudy Owens holding his completed memoir.

Rudy Owens holds his completed memoir.

Since that time, I’ve heard from many readers, in the United States and abroad, who have purchased my work and have shared how much they appreciate me telling this story.

My work has been especially helpful to Michigan-born adoptees like myself, who continue to struggle with my birth state’s extremely hostile treatment of adoptees and its discriminatory laws that make it nearly impossible for uncounted tens of thousands of adoptees to know their past, their medical history, and their family history.

I want to let all of my readers to know that I remain humbled by the trust you have placed in me and my story. You, the readers, have always been my inspiration and the silent yet powerful supporters who kept me going when I wanted to put this project aside because it had no interest to traditional publishers.

Two years since I published my memoir, I can still say with certainty that adoption remains one of the few sacred institutions in this country that strangely binds the political left and the political right in terms of policy.

I can still say with certainty that adoption, as a system of practices and laws, still marginalizes an entire class of people because of their status at birth and because of hidden bias. Few admit to such prejudice that is manifest in the collective and systemic practices against so-called illegitimately born human beings.

Adoption remains an institution that is sanctioned by state laws that still discriminate against millions of Americans only because they are adoptees.

I continue to promote my book to the public and the media, including any opportunity to do book readings. I can always be contacted if you are interested in inviting me to speak to your group, including medical professionals, policy-makers, public libraries, and bookstores.

As a final note, I also can still say with absolute confidence that the underlying truth about my identity has not changed since I first published my work. I have not forgotten who I am and what motivates me to continue to supporting all adoptees in their quest for equality and human rights.

I will never shy away from calling myself the “Bastard from Detroit.” This name honors my true identity, rooted in our country’s historic discrimination against so-called “illegitimate” humans. I will continue to work on behalf of all adoptees because I strongly believe there is no such thing as an illegitimate person.

My sister will die never knowing her past

On Jan. 3, 2020, The Detroit Free Press published my guest column on Michigan’s discriminatory and restrictive adoption records law that denies Michigan’s adoptees legal access to their original birth records, except by overcoming restrictive barriers.

In my adoptive sister’s case, she falls in the 35-year period, between 1945 and 1980, for which the state statutes have almost impossible barriers for an adoptee to overcome to get what is theirs as a legal and human right. My sister, who is seriously ill and bedridden in a skilled nursing home, will likely die in the near future without knowing her biological kin, her biological parents, and her ancestral past.

This unfortunate outcome is intentional. In fact, this scenario was the design of those who created Michigan’s biased law that is zealously enforced by Michigan’s vital records guardians at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

My sister and I both were born in these post-World War II boom years of adoption, that saw nearly 3 million adoptees separated from their biological kin through the U.S. adoption system.

It is no coincidence that Michigan’s lawmakers adopted the most restrictive rules for adoptees in this cohort, because records secrecy continues to hide from the public how widespread and systemic that system was in the United States, impacting literally millions of Americans.

My book on my own experience challenging this discriminatory records-keeping system details how adoption history has been hidden, preventing adoptees from knowing themselves and their past and the public from knowing the truth about the many players who promoted this system for decades.

Author note: The guest column published by The Detroit Free Press has slight changes from the original I submitted, without changing the substance of the submitted column.

A great story: the perfect holiday gift

Books remain one of the best passports to understand others and the world around us.

The stories we remember are those that tell us something new and also something universal. My tale, as an adoptee who spent decades reclaiming my past and seeking justice, is as old as humanity. It mirrors the archetypal myth of the orphan/adoptee/hero, who overcomes impossible odds to complete a perilous quest.

The hero’s journey is also the larger story of millions of adoptees in the United States, like me. Through my own story, I also tell the larger tale of the U.S. adoption experience in the decades after World War II.

My book, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, is a perfect gift to show others this hidden world and how it impacts those who are forced to travel through it, throughout their lifetime. My memoir about my adoptee journey, from my birth in one of the largest maternity hospitals that promoted adoption to finding justice more than five decades later, is accessible to all, even readers who know little about this uniquely America system.

Buy the book online on Amazon, in paperback and as an e-book for your Kindle reader.

Please consider sharing my book website with a friend, and tell them about this story addressing the universal quest for justice, truth, and living a meaningful life. Happy holidays!