Category Archives: Michigan Vital Records

‘Picking a target’ in 2023 for adoptee rights advocacy

It’s now 2023. A new year has begun, and for thousands of Michigan-born adoptees like me, none are any closer to having their legal rights restored to their original birth certificates.

So this year, I am going to put the spotlight on this state’s leaders, especially Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who are failing to right a massive wrong that denies basic human rights to people only because of the status at birth.

Go here to read my full article, analyzing failures in Michigan’s agency responsible for overseeing vital records and leadership by all branches of state government.

My article also analyzes the sometimes complex and even messy world associated with issue advocacy, including the mostly ignored world of adoptee rights. 

Here’s my list of tips (also found in my longer article) for adoptee rights advocates in Michigan, or their allies (all allies are welcome, too):

  • If you live in Michigan, make noise. Be that annoying tsetse fly for Gov. Whitmer and state lawmakers who cannot be ignored until your bites are so painful that you are acknowledged. To that end, here are friendly resource on tips for advocates with limited resources, from Saul Alinsky.
  • You can develop relations with lawmakers and request personal meetings if you are going to Lansing. You can also share information with your local media, if they still exist, in the form of letters to the editor or on social media calling attention to denied legal rights. Social media may be helpful if you are good in that space. With Twitter turning into a large mess, I am not sure what platform may be the most effective now.
  • If you are more of a “power broker” kind of person, who knows “the game” (meaning you have “connections to those in power), a more effective way to make change is to engage Gov. Whitmer.
  • If you are not able to engage Gov. Whitmer, the most powerful power broker of all is a governor’s chief of staff. Gov. Whitmer’s Chief of Staff is, as of Jan. 2, 2022, JoAnne Huls. Because chiefs of staff try to be invisible to public and only to speak with deal-makers, the other best possible person for real access is a governor’s communications director, who manages a governor’s “brand.” Bobby Leddy is Gov. Whitmer’s communications director, and he is active on Twitter and can be “pinged” and equally “annoyed” with persistent, fact-based activity about adoptee rights concerns.
  • In addition to copying Leddy on Twitter, consider using this account to get Gov. Whitmer’s staff’s attention: Press@Michigan.gov. They will care if you are a state voter, in the way they won’t care about someone like me, who is not a voter in the state.
  • The best way to promote reform is by telling stories of the injustices you have encountered. Make it personal and say what happened and what it means to you. Name names and make it personal. It has to be personal. This was very helpful with stunning legal reform in Vermont being implemented in 2023.
  • My personal preference is to advocate for lasting legal reform the way New York state adoptee rights advocates and Vermont adoptee rights advocates have won legislative reforms. Those are two great success stories. Use the links to learn more about their lasting victories.

Remember, lasting change, good or bad, is always won by a group of committed warriors, in the truest sense. True warriors are those go into any “conflict” with the outcomes already decided in their minds with a clear strategy for victory.

Each of us can make a difference. Choose your battles and always remain focused on the larger goal. For me that remains permanent and lasting legal reform to end the injustice of outdated, harmful adoption laws that hide a person’s truth and deny them their original records.

And for adoptees who are working for change, I appreciate everything you can do this year if you have the time, energy, and good will. Good luck and make 2023 a great one!

‘Talking Story’ with Bryan Elliott on his podcast Living in Adoptionland

Bryan Elliott, host of Living in Adoptionland, and Rudy Owens, author of You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are

Earlier this month, I sat down with fellow adoptee and now podcaster Bryan Elliott to discuss the U.S. adoption system and why I wrote my book examining that institution and my journey through it. I had no idea where our conversation would land. However, I trusted Bryan’s professionalism as a writer, director, and multimedia producer to allow our conversation to wander where it naturally wanted to go.

Bryan posted our conversation this week on his podcast channel, Living in Adoptionland. I could not be happier with the interview and the high quality of the production.

Bryan had contacted me in late spring and invited me to his new show, which he launched in late May. And he’s been busy, having already published nearly a dozen shows, with conversations with some fellow adoptees I know from their advocacy on Twitter and other spaces where adoptees advocate for reform to a system that has impacted millions of people.

Bryan shares this summary why he’s producing his show now. He describes it as “the podcast I wish I had before I started on my journey more than 25 years ago. It’s a mosaic of real stories from the adoption community which includes parents who gave up their children, families struggling with infertility and natural conception, and the often silent adult adoptees.”

Before we taped the podcast, with Bryan in southern California and me in Portland, we agreed to a couple of ground rules. One was that I did not want to be involved in efforts that were contrary to my larger goal in writing my book of restoring rights to adoptees, and he respected that. Another point we both agreed to was to not center ourselves in the much larger national crisis surrounding the Supreme Court’s ending of legal abortion in the United States in June with its disastrous decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. That recent, historic decision by the right-leaning court ended nearly 50 years of bedrock reproductive and legal rights secured for women.

Both of us, in our conversations before the taping, recognized this decision had tremendous impacts on women. As adult adoptees, we also both knew too well what this likely meant for the promotion of adoption by those who overturned this half-century-old legal precedent. Speaking for myself, I believe Bryan shared my own view that having two white guys talking about an issue that impacts so many women, including many brown and black women, would not be appropriate, even though as adoptees we probably would have critical perspectives to share on the national policy debate that is falsely promoting adoption as the policy alternative to abortion healthcare. In the end, we did mention this topic because one cannot talk about adoption in 2022 without talking about abortion and how that intersects with adoptees as a huge group of Americans.

With the big issues agreed upon, we could then turn to other topics he wanted to ask about and I was able to share about my now four-year-old memoir and public health analysis of this massive and still discriminatory system. Some of the themes I touched on were:

  • Understanding how adoption must be seen sociologically because of its history tied to the larger historic problem of illegitimacy;
  • How doctors played a bedrock role in the massive expansion of adoption in the United States after the 1940s and how that role ensures it remains a legitimate and acceptable “practice,” even when it separates mothers and their children;
  • How my life as an adoptee has evolved over time, providing me insights shared by writers and thinkers I admire, including Viktor Frankl;
  • Explaining to others how being adopted and being denied rights means confronting lies, discrimination, and harm that is institutionalized and continues to harm countless persons.

I would encourage those who are interested in learning more about adoption to listen to his previous interviews and to bookmark his podcast platform. And as an adoptee, I want to say how refreshing it is to talk about adoption and not have my basic human rights challenged because the interviewer did not do their homework in understanding how adoption impacts millions of persons denied their legal rights and basic human rights to know who they are.

Thanks again, Bryan. Keep up the great work. I will be tuning in again to more conversations on Living in Adoptionland.

To learn more about Bryan, visit his website here. You can reach out to Bryan here.

You can continue to reach me on my website. My hope is this conversation inspired some listeners to want to learn more and buy my book. 

What adoption taught me about bureaucracy

I have spent decades of my life fighting a large bureaucracy in Michigan, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. The massive state agency, which oversees all vital records and all birth records of adoptees born in Michigan, denied me my original birth records for nearly three decades. It did this even after I had met my birth mother who signed a consent form in 1989 that should have forced the agency to give me my original birth certificate. It took a court battle to secure my birth certificate’s release in 2016.

The long dance I had with that ossified bureaucracy provided wisdom I continue to use in how I do my work professionally today in a large government agency and how I deal with other bureaucracies that intentionally choose to do wrong as opposed to good. In nearly every sense, being an adoptee denied basic legal rights was my advanced training how I respond to immoral, inflexible systems and institutions to this day.

This week, I found myself locking horns with two intractable systems that are among the least accountable and most unbending in the United States. One is a nursing home in St. Louis, Missouri, that cares for a family member of mine, which in its operation is not that different than the more than 15,000 licensed facilities nationally. The other is a medical clinic in metro Portland, Oregon, where I visited a doctor in September this year. Each represents a part of the much larger systems of for-profit healthcare and nursing home care, and their structure and management are likely representative of their thousands of counterparts throughout the country.

Both of these institutions that provide medical and health services are, theoretically, there to serve others and provide services that are essential and also something most persons see as “morally right.” These two facilities are not related in any way. Yet both are much alike in how they function as bureaucracies that are mostly intractable in their actions and inflexible when asked to be accountable.

Because of my long decades of dealing with bureaucratic systems, I have learned important lessons. The most important of those lessons is to never accept “no,” which is the reflex response of organizations that do not take ownership for their actions that can cause harm and can be morally wrong. You can read my essay about that here. The knowledge gained from prolonged struggles, I have found, can be used for doing what is both good and morally just. I choose to fight for what I know to be right and not to submit in these seemingly losing battles. In the simple conflicts we all face in life, I have long-decided that I would be the lion and not the lamb.

‘Can you help me with my search?’

Because my website for my book on the U.S. adoption experience is one of the few online resources exploring the history of the adoption system in Michigan in the post-World War II era, I am frequently contacted by strangers impacted by adoption in my birth state. 

The contacts include those who were placed for adoption like me looking for help finding their biological kin. I get emails from birth mothers who may have given up their child at my birthplace, Crittenton General Hospital, perhaps one of the largest maternity hospitals in the country that promoted the separation of mothers and their infants from the 1930s through its closing in 1975. I also have been contacted by adoptees seeking help petitioning Michigan courts for their records—a topic I address with online fact sheets that provide detailed steps how to do a court petition, with links to all documents that I have been able to find.

For nearly all requests, there literally is nothing I can do to help people with their searches. What I have already published, and update as I get more information, is the information that I can share.

I recently replied to an adoptee and a financial investor in Florida who wanted me to provide tips about doing a court petition. Because I am not a lawyer, I cannot provide legal advice. In his case, I sent him links to my two FAQs, which give as much information and guidance that I am able to provide.

I provided those materials because the state of Michigan and the courts in Michigan refuse to provide this information for adoptees, when they have a legal and moral obligation to assist the tens of thousands of adoptees separated by the state’s discriminatory laws denying all adoptees their legal, human, and equal rights to their vital records and their biological, medical, and family histories.

My birthplace, Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, taken in 1965, the year of my birth

No, this is not fair

When I provide replies that do not offer the assistance people want, I usually never get a follow up or even a courtesy appreciatory comment that the materials published provide some people a small measure of information not given by the state. While that is a bit disappointing, my reasons for publishing my resources have never been about money or even gratitude. My focus remains on changing laws that deny rights to many that are decades in need of overhaul. If the material I share provides some small measure of assistance to the public, particularly adoptees and their kin searching for them, then that is a nice outcome too. That is reward in itself.

Being an adoptee, with few political and media allies, is by definition a hard place to be when you are searching for answers to who you are and your kin connections. No one’s story is the only story. All of them matter, and all adoptees, on their own, have to confront their reality in a way that makes sense for them.

My view on this approach to the adoptee-lived life may not be shared by many. However, my perspective, particularly at this point in my life, is that this is the often inequitable fate many adoptees were handed. It has nothing to do with fairness. Only the individuals can confront their fate in a way that makes sense for them. That is my own view, but also one deeply informed by the writings and wisdom of Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl.

Holocaust survivor, writer, and humanist Viktor Frankl, taken two years after his liberation from the Nazi camp system

Writing shortly after the war and his internment in Nazi camps, Frankl wrote that when faced with any situation in life, we all have a freedom to choose how we confront life’s obstacles. “Between stimulus and response, there is a space,” he wrote. “In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

That is not an idea that a lot of people, including adoptees, embrace for many reasons. But in my own experience, this perspective has helped me. It also continues to inform what I can and cannot do when others need help with the system that remains shrouded in inequity and legal barriers that deny equality.

A recent request

I was contacted last night by a man in his mid-70s who claimed that he was the father of a son born at my birthplace, in Detroit, who was then placed for adoption.

I do not know all of the details. I do not know why he was not involved in his purported son’s life earlier, but frequently the persons who had to deal with negative consequences of having a child out of marriage prior to the 1970s were the mother and the child. Historically and globally, women and children have borne the brunt of societies’ brutal and heartless treatment of single mothers and bastard children. This stigma fueled the system into which I was born an adoptee.

The historic reality of this treatment has never escaped me. It also was reflected in my own experience, with a father-by-sperm only, who never acknowledged I was his biological offspring by the time he died 15 years after I first met him. That is hardly a new story. It is part of the larger and universal story of illegitimacy.

When this main who claimed he was the father of an adoptee asked me to help give him assistance in finding his son, I literally had no advice for him because I do not provide that assistance or do searches for others. As someone who has now studied the history of illegitimacy and the U.S. adoption system’s historic treatment of infants and mothers, I did not feel greatly compelled to know why at the end of his life, he felt a need to make this connection. I do wonder why he was not there when his son started his life and needed to be with his biological kin.

Here is what I shared. I would like to think he might care enough about other children relinquished because of societal stigma, because of fathers who refused to accept paternity as history has documented as the norm now for centuries, and because of concerns for equality. If this man did take action to help other adoptees, and not just his own son he claimed to have sired, that would be great. But I am also a realist and know that we are often motivated by our own needs foremost. One of those needs is to know our family relations, as adoptees know best of all.

“I’m not in a position to provide people assistance with their personal searches,” I wrote the purported father of a fellow Detroit-born adoptee. “However, one way you can help adoptees is to consider helping all of them. You can do that by supporting legislation that would open records to them at the state legislative level, in Michigan and nationally, given you are involved in this system directly by fathering a son who was was placed for adoption. You can write a letter to the editor of your paper saying that’s needed. You can contact a TV station saying, if Michigan provided adoptees access to their records, I might have contact with my kin. These are all options you can take now. The information I have provided to adoptees is on my website to help any of them who are seeking justice and their past.”

I never heard back from him.

Webinar recording available on petitioning courts for original birth records

Nearly 60 people joined a recent webinar on March 21, 2021, hosted by the adoptee advocacy group Adoptees United. I presented with fellow adoptees Greg Luce of Minnesota and Courtney Humbaugh of Georgia. Each of us highlighted our experience as adoptees denied basic legal and equal rights in accessing our adoption and vital records.

  • My introductory comments can be found at the start of the recording.
  • My comments about my court petition begin here (17:00 into the recording).
  • A copy of my presentation that I shared with attendees can be found here.

As a presenter, I wanted to provide a roadmap for others who face nearly insurmountable barriers in getting what should be provided to all persons as a basic human right. My memoir and critical study of the U.S. adoption system describes why the state-level denial of these records must be understood historically and sociologically as part of the historic mistreatment of adoptees and illegitimately born persons, like me.

In addition, I provided what I consider to be a strategic approach for channeling defiance to an unjust system that had impacted my life greatly. At the very least I hoped my words and example helped to motivate a few others. Many of my decisions in my life were profoundly influenced by words I heard from someone else, sharing a story about why they took action to do good things.

As I had shared earlier, access to vital records by adoptees is intrinsically an issue rooted in power relationships. Those relationships are communicated through symbols that are invested with far more meaning than what they appear to have on the surface. And anything invested with this much magical and symbolic power, such as one’s original birth record, is worth a lifelong fight, which I have had to undertake only because I was born as an adoptee.

It is also critical to remember that an original birth certificate is a document that continues to be withheld from millions of U.S. adoptees. This denial of equal treatment by law has and remains in violation the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and equally the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

My book also explains this struggle as a hero’s journey that too few adoptees can do for reasons too long to explain in one post. You can order my book on that issue, which describes how the state of Michigan denied me my birth record for decades until I finally took the state’s adoption bureaucracy to court and won my right to what was always mine as a human right.

“The state never had the legal and moral right to hold my past from me or the right to prevent my birth families from knowing about me,” I wrote in my memoir. “My true birth certificate shows the world that I exist as someone with a past. It shows I have an identity that I alone own. This document is and always has been mine by birthright.”

I would encourage adoptees, policy-makers, and journalists to visit the website of Adoptees United. The organization continues to host events that focus on issues it works on supporting the rights of adoptees in the United states as it works on changing laws and policies that deny rights to adopted persons.