Category Archives: Rudy Owens

Mission accomplished for my first step seeking residency in Finland, my ancestral homeland

After nearly eight months of costly and tedious work, I finally completed the first phase of a project that holds great personal and emotional importance to me.

I submitted my formal application to the Government of Finland, specifically Finnish Immigration Services, known as Maahanmuuttovirasto, for Finnish residency, based on being a descendant of a Finnish citizen by birth status—grandchild of a Finnish citizen.

For this process, I had to fly down to Los Angeles for an in-person interview at the Finnish Consulate General, in Los Angeles, located near the large Veterans Administration medical complex off of Wilshire Boulevard. I took a 6 a.m. flight from Portland to LAX, had my interview at 11:30 a.m., and then headed by cab straight back to LAX for my flight back to Portland by 4:20 p.m.

I made this video right after my interview and paying my application fee of $620 on March 12, 2025.

Click on the image to open the video or copy and paste this URL to a new browser: https://youtu.be/ap_SGq3Arow.

The immigration service, known to Finns as “Migri,” makes clear that residency is possible based on family relations, being a descendant of a Finnish citizen. Migri’s summary of this residency process notes:

You may get a residence permit if at least one of your parents or grandparents is or has been a Finnish citizen by birth.
It does not matter if your grandparent or parent has later lost his or her Finnish citizenship, for example by becoming a citizen of some other country.
You do not need to give a statement on your means of support, although other residence permit applicants usually need to do so.

In my case, my maternal grandmother is the daughter of my great grandparents, who were Finnish citizens by birth. Both of my maternal great grandparents were born in Finland. They emigrated to the United States, where they married in the State of Michigan in 1903. My job was to show Migri that I meet this legal standard based on my relatives’ nationality status and my relation to my grandmother, the daughter of two Finnish citizens, of whom I am their direct, biological family descendant.

This is even more complex because I am an adoptee, who was severed from my Finnish American and Finnish kin by the U.S. adoption system in 1965. I have since found my kin and biological families in 1989, and in 2023, I found and established a strong and growing relationship with my wonderful Finnish relatives in Finland.

I felt even more connected to my relatives during this long, costly, and maddening process. Three of my Finnish relatives sent letters that I submitted with my application, along with my extensive vital records documentation that included my family’s vital records going as far back as the 1880s, to a small village in South Ostrobothnia, Finland, where my great grandmother was born. I even got her birth record, an original copy, from the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church, to document her Finnish citizenship.

This process was nearly derailed because of state-sanctioned discrimination against Michigan born adoptees, like me. This ongoing prejudice practiced by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), which holds tens of thousands of Michigan adoptees’ vital records, forced my application to be delayed by nearly three months. MDHHS illegally forced me to get a court order to release two more copies of my original birth certificate, in violation of state law. I won, but it was time I will never get back, and it cost me money I never should have had to spend.

Regardless of the outcome, this has been worth it.

I feel more connected to my Finnish family than before. I feel grounded knowing precisely who I am and where I came from. More importantly, I feel stronger bonds to my Finnish relatives who immediately and strongly supported my efforts.

Being adopted, for countless adoptees like me, means living your life unconnected to roots and to kin. My roots feel even stronger now. I am so glad I did this. I feel blessed I got so lucky that I have people—my family—across the world who care about me and my desire to establish a formal and lasting relationship with the country of my ancestors.

I should hear back in about eight months. Toivotan onnea!

Countless adoptees could have slowly ticking health issues and are intentionally robbed of life-saving information

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.

On Christmas Day 2025 I celebrate the moms and infants separated at my birthplace

A shot take of Crittenton General Hospital in 1965 shows future adoptees in the care of nurses. Note, the cut line information has some inaccuracies from the source (photo courtesy of Patricia Ibbotson’s Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers, and the collection from the Detroit Public Library).

It is Christmas Day, December 25, 2024. The day, as most of us know, celebrates the birth of Jesus, who Christians say is the “son of God.”

I’m listening to Christmas carols, celebrating the “messiah’s” birth in a manger. The words praise the holy mother and child.

For me, I cannot help but think of vulnerable mothers and their babies, who in the United States have experienced the “miracle” of a child’s birth far differently from the joyful moments I was raised to celebrate growing up as the adopted son of a failed minister and a very devout Christian mom, who eventually raised me as a single parent.

Those vulnerable young moms, unlike the “blessed virgin Mary,” were coerced for decades to surrender their newborn infants to the U.S. adoption system.

I’m just one small statistical blip among millions of us who lost our families shortly after birth to feed a system of family separation that needs to be massively reformed.

So, today, I honor those mothers and children, whose stories are hidden, from my birthplace, Detroit’s now long-demolished Crittenton General Hospital, one of the largest maternity hospitals ever in the United Stated that saw thousands of infants separated from their mothers shortly after birth.

For all of you, and your families, I wish you the spirit of the holidays. May you find grace and acceptance.

Know that your stories and your denied justice are remembered and will never be forgotten by those of us who know the true history of our births.

Will legacy media ever dare invite adoptee authors and researchers as guests to discuss adoption?

Promotion for an episode on U.S. adoption by the show “It’s Been a Minute,” aired on Nov. 26, 2024; image provided for purposes of editorial comment and criticism only.

Once again we have a show in the public radio universe, “It’s Been a Minute,” on Nov. 26, 2024, centering the voice of someone who, while being a worthy academic author, is not an adoptee and will never fully have the critical perspective of lived experience.

For the record there are dozens and dozens of adoptee authors who have contributed significant research to policy debates on the harm of this system to millions of separated families. They continue to be boxed out, denied any access, and ignored by legacy media who could care less about their expertise to actual policy proposals for restoring legal rights and assisting those harmed, including intercountry adoptees now in legal limbo with the incoming Trump administration promising unprecedented mass deportations of people.

And I personally object to this framing—”coming out of the fog” (a term other adoptees use, and that is always their right to describe their experience any way they want).

The promotion notes: “But adoptees and birth parents are opening up online about ‘coming out of the fog’—a term for becoming more openly critical of adoption, or facing the grief within their adoption stories.” I don’t use or even acknowledge that term as relevant to having an honest discussion of the history of mass family separation of millions of families, in the United States and abroad. For millions of us, this is a critical issue of denied legal and human rights, and such terms that don’t center the root legal inequality, promoted by the foundation of lies and deception to this system, prevent us from talking about solutions. I’ve never had fog. What I’ve had are denied basic human rights—that exist on the books to this day.

Finally, where the hell were Brittany Luse or NPR when, for instance, there were real policy debates going on in Michigan between November 2023 and February 2024, on bills that could have restored legal rights to tens of thousands of people denied their vital records only because they are adopted.

Do better public radio, NPR, and your many hosts. Talk to the experts and talk about real solutions.

Update to FAQs for Michigan adoptees seeking court orders for original birth records

I have updated my frequently visited “FAQS for court order requests in Michigan for original birth certificates” webpage.* I created this in 2018 for all Michigan-born adoptees and adoptee rights advocates, lawmakers, policymakers, and the media, explaining the process for securing an original birth certificate for adoptees, especially those born between 1945 and 1980. I hope these resources are helpful and provide information that the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) will not share with tens of thousands of adoptees, as part of their concerted efforts to discriminate against this class of thousands of persons who were separated from their birth mothers and kin by this inequitable system.

In addition to updating links to MDHHS’s intentionally unhelpful web resources for adoptees, I added this:

Will MDHHS ignore court orders to release an adoptee’s original birth certificate? [UPDATED NOV. 15, 2024]: Yes, MDHHS will ignore state law and will ignore court orders, based on my experiences requesting two additional copies of my original birth certificate in mid-August 2024. In my case, MDHHS took 80 days to release two copies of my original birth certificate after getting my order for rush service on Aug. 16, 2024. The process, as it occurred with denials and delays, violated not one but two court orders requiring MDHHS to release my vital record, as required by state law. I had to get a state court to intervene after I received a denial letter. The two birth certificates arrived on Nov. 4, 2024. (Note, I already had a standing court order from 2016 when I first won my legal fight for my vital record.) See my essay, video, and links to four other stories and videos documenting MDHHS’s actions that did not comply with state law and defied a Michigan state court and judge.

*Note, I have never made a penny from providing this resource to the public, outside of the incredibly modest sales I have of my book documenting the history of the U.S. adoption with a public health lens and how my story being separated from my biological family helps explain that system and the legal discrimination rooted in law harming millions of adoptees to this day.