Category Archives: Michigan Vital Records

Press release: Michigan media invited to webinar on adoptees’ court petitions for birth records

Members of the Michigan media and the general public are invited to an online conversation about what it means and what it looks like when an adopted person seeks a court order to get his or her own birth and adoption records.

Nineteen states, including Michigan, and the District of Columbia require a court order for an adopted person to obtain his or her own original birth record — or any record. How is it done? Who has been successful and what difficulties did they encounter? What was the cost in time, emotion, and money? And what exactly did they get?

When: Sunday, March 21, 1 p.m. PST/4 p.m. EST
Who: The event is open to everyone, including adoptees, the media, and legal professionals
Cost: Free
How: Register here

The event will be hosted by Adoptees United and features three adult adoptees: Detroit native Rudy Owens, Georgia native Courtney Humbaugh, and D.C. native Gregory Luce, who runs the Adoptee Rights Law Center. Each went through the courts to win access to records withheld from them because they were relinquished from their birth families as adoptees.

Michigan is one of 19 states that currently denies rights to Michigan born adoptees to their true vital records entirely because of the status of their birth, denying thousands equal treatment by law. Owens, as an adoptee, was denied his birth records and family history, but was able to find all sides of his biological family in 1989, despite the state’s policies denying him information given to all non-adoptees born in Michigan. In 2018 he published a memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, about his decades-long experience seeking his records, including his successful court petition in June 2016 that forced the state to give him a copy of his original birth certificate 27 years after his biological mother had signed a state consent form allowing the state to release all of his long-sealed records.

Luce, a Minneapolis-based adoptee rights attorney and adoptee rights advocate, will moderate an exploration of what we mean by “records,” including which records are easier or harder to get — whether birth records, court records, adoption agency records, or any others. Luce will also talk about his own five-year effort in the District of Columbia as well as court cases he handles today on behalf of Minnesota-born adopted people.

Questions will be taken from the audience throughout the talk, and links to available court forms in various states will also be provided during the online chat.

Owens will highlight his experience in Michigan, where it took him 27 years to secure the release of his original birth certificate, even after he had met my birth families and legally changed his name that incorporated his original birth name.

In his book examining the U.S. adoption system and how it continues to discriminate against millions of U.S. adoptees by limiting their legal access to their birth records, Owens writes: “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. 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.”

You are invited to a webinar on petitioning courts for original birth records

First, please add this event to your calendar. Great. Thanks for doing that!

Everyone is invited, because this is an issue that is about what many of us care about deeply: equality, fairness, and the right to know who we are.

This webinar will focus on something bigger than vital records and court processes.

This discussion will be about 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 is worth the fight.

The symbol I’m talking about is perhaps the single most important document any human can possess: their original birth certificate.

For decades, this document has been withheld from U.S. adoptees, through discriminatory state laws that still deny millions of persons equal treatment by law, in violation the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and equally the 14^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Right now the people working to change these harmful laws are those denied the right to know who they are, where they came from, and who they can call their blood kin.

One way that many states provide the most slender means for an adult adoptee to get their basic vital record created at birth is through the courts.

Getting to that point is nothing short of a hero’s journey too few adoptees can do for reasons too long to explain in this post. I wrote a book on that issue, which details 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.

I hope you join my fellow adoptees and advocates Greg Luce, Courtney Humbaugh, and me for our webinar on March 21, 2021 (1 p.m. PST) about petitioning courts to release adoptees’ original birth records.

For my part in this special event, I’ll be highlighting my experience in Michigan, where it took me 27 years to secure the release of my original birth certificate, even after I had met my birth families.

In my book on this experience, I wrote: “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. 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.”

Learn why adoptees will invest years if not decades fighting for their legal and human rights, including in the courts. I look forward to seeing you there.

State of Michigan refuses to waive excessive fees, in defiance of the state’s FOIA law

On Nov. 17, 2020, I received a reply to my request that the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) waive its wildly excessive fee for requesting public records that, by court precedent and statute, should be released at the lowest charge or without cost when done in the public’s interest.

The unsigned communication by the agency, which oversees Michigan’s adoption system and manages its vital records, ignored my reasonable request.

The reply stated: “MDHHS does not provide for fee appeals in it’s [SIC] publicly available procedures and guidelines. MCL 14.240a(1)(a).”

The state’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) law as written does not prevent any state agency in Michigan from negotiating an appeal.

The legal office of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services did not sign its communication to me, in which it rejected my lawful appeal that the agency waive its exorbitant fees it wrongfully charged for a FOIA request. The reply was sent on Nov. 17, 2020.

The law states: “If a public body charges a labor fee, it is supposed to limit the charge to the hourly rate of the lowest paid employee capable of doing the work. So, for example, a public body isn’t allowed to charge a lawyer’s hourly rate for copying work that can be done by a clerk at a lower rate.” What’s more, the law further states: “A public body may not charge a fee for the cost of its search, examination, review and the deletion and separation of exempt from nonexempt information, unless failure to charge a fee would result in unreasonably high costs to the public body.”

On Nov. 6, 2020, I filed an appeal to MDHHS that it’s charge of $1,168.44 for preparing copies of public records referencing my writings, book, and other communications examining the state’s adoption laws and discriminatory practices against adoptees born in Michigan. I had originally filed my FOIA request, in compliance with the sate’s FOIA statute, on Oct. 12, 2020.

In my appeal, I again documented my request was made in the public interest, and I even referenced how I have shared findings of a previous FOIA request by publishing my book on public policy issues surrounding adoption decision-making by state officials, whose records are by law and by multiple court precedents open to inspection by the public in Michigan.

Requested public records must be released without fees when their release is in the public interest. The statute is clear on this matter. My original request clearly met that test, which I outlined in my appeal again.

My appeal documented in detail that the agency’s arbitrary and capricious charge of the records preparation fee was not consistent with the state’s law and even with legal guidance provided in 1996 to the state by the state’s Attorney General’s office. I even included with my appeal a copy of that legal guidance.

In a clearly worded statement on the interpretation of fee charges within the state’s FOIA statute, former Michigan Attorney General Frank Kelley clearly told the state in 1996 that costs for any means of reproduction, if they were charged, were to be applied at the most cost-effective means possible for the petitioner. He noted: “Section 4 of the FOIA is very specific in authorizing charges, regulating those charges and permitting deposits.” Attorney General Kelley stated: “In calculating the costs under subsection (1), a public body may not attribute more than the hourly wage of the lowest paid, full time, permanent clerical employee of the employing public body to the cost of labor incurred in duplication and mailing and to the cost of examination, review, separation, and deletion. 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. A public body shall establish and publish procedures and guidelines to implement this subsection. [ Emphasis added.]”

Facts, legal guidance from the state’s top law officer, and Michigan state law as written have been discarded with the same degree of regard that the agency has demonstrated to me over my more than three decades engaging it and its staff in seeking my original identity documents. MDHHS has little interest in demonstrating that it respects the rights of ordinary people to whom it is legally accountable or the basic rights of people whose public records it hold.

As someone who does not have the money, time, and resources to fight in an appeals court what is so clearly an incorrect legal interpretation and intentionally calculated effort to avoid releasing public records, I have really two choices. I can pay this unjust fee to get what should be released without a fee by law or abandon a request to make public what already are by statute public documents. Both are bad options.

In the end, MDHHS remains what it has always been: an agency that is driven by institutional interests that frequently ignores the rights of those born in Michigan.

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.