The Finnish population, thanks to genetic health research, has had specific health problems identified with genetic markers, helping the country plan population measures to help all residents of Finnish heritage.
One year ago yesterday, my bio-uncle, twin brother of my bio-mom, died of heart conditions. It was not a surprise, and his mortality outcome at the end of December 2023 was entirely predictable because he was half ethnically Finnish.
Such health risks that my bio-uncle had are very well-documented among Finns at the population level and among tens and tens of thousands of Finnish-Americans because of genetic risk factors. My deceased birth mother’s slightly younger cousin, who is 100 percent Finnish, lost her father to a heart attack while he was in his 40s, and he was also 100 percent Finnish from another Finnish family line. She also just had a heart procedure for her problem heart. That is the genetic health landscape for many Finnish Americans.
Though I remain mostly healthy at my age, I still carry those risks in my genes because I’m one-quarter Finnish. My Finnish kin in Finland have shared with me there are heart issues in our genetic line we share.
Knowing such information is considered a best tool to promote individual and public health, yet U.S. public health and health professionals still refuse to help end adoption secrecy or support any adoptee rights group in state policy debates to reform harmful laws denying family health history to adoptees. These barriers deny this potentially life-saving information from literally millions of people only because of their status as adoptees in the United States.
U.S. public health and its many professionals do not care about adoptees’ wellbeing
On January 13, 2024, and shortly after my uncle’s death just before the end of 2023, I published an essay, “Adoptee rights is also a moral issue to ensure equal rights to good health, yet public health and health professionals ignore this intentionally,” about this issue and how public health and nearly all disease-focused health groups and medical professionals do nothing to help address issues for adoptees whose medical health history remains hidden from them by discriminatory state laws.
I wrote: “These groups and experts have never cared, based on facts showing no documented efforts to support adoptees, even in public relations messaging. There is no public evidence visible anywhere they will reverse course and advocate to change laws helping adoptees. Their failure is palpable.
“Collectively, this represents a complete moral and collective professional failure of these systems to improve the health of individuals and population health. Because those harmed are adoptees, this failure remains an acceptable form of collateral damage to ensure the U.S. adoption system remains a broadly accepted and beloved institution, that continues to be supported by the medical and public health professionals at all levels.”
I did a search of the American Public Health Association website on December 29, 2024 to see if it had information published about “adoptees,” and my search yielded no information.
I even wrote to the American Public Health Associations publication, in January 2024, with a letter to the editor of its flagship publication, “The Nation’s Health,” to raise this issue. I was greeted with silence after repeated follow ups for a response. After I flagged their silence on social media and wrote another essay on April 7, 2024, where I read my letter on a video, I suddenly received an email reply that amounted to a bureaucratic blow off.
In short, they found ways to ignore my letter and then blow off my submission with a hallow reply that normally one hears from indifferent and low-level bureaucrats. I decided to reply about the harm such indifference causes. I told the publication’s staffer:
“You intentionally chose the path where there was no leadership and absolutely no evidence of needed moral courage to help support overdue reform and end adoption secrecy laws.
“It is fitting that this is all now encapsulated in the memory of the death of my birth kin and the people who don’t care what this means to ordinary people denied health and basic rights.
“Congratulations for what you and your peers willingly choose to be by your chosen actions. Remember, it is always a choice. And in life, we are always remembered by our deeds, not the words.”
Nothing has changed as 2024 ends
The experiences associated with the meaning of my close biological relative’s genetically related and sad death once again come to mind as 2024 is about to end, and adoptees still do not count to public health and health professionals.
Not one thing has changed nationally since my bio-uncle died at the state level in 2024 to restore rights to adoptees, with the exception of laws passed a year earlier.
Adoptees are acceptable and—I argue—necessary collateral damage for this system that these professionals helped to grow, legitimize, and support for decades.
In short, the groups that claim to help individuals and the wider population, including all at-risk groups that adoptees clearly are, remain comfortable with their massive cognitive dissonance. Nothing has changed.
NOTE: For more history and background on denied family health history to millions of adoptees and the role of public health, medical, social work, and other professionals who created the modern American adoption system, including the legitimization of mass family separation by adoption by state public health agencies, you can order my book, “You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are,” published in 2018.
