Category Archives: Public Health

‘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.

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.”

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. 

 

 

 

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.