Category Archives: Rudy Owens Memoir

Will Michigan comply with state law and release additional copies of an adoptee’s original birth certificate?

On August 13, 2024, I submitted a request to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), with a $62 check, to obtain duplicate copies of my original birth record.

I had to wait 27 years for the vital record to be provided to me in July 2016, after I had provided a signed consent form by my birth mother to release my vital records in 1989. The state and MDHHS only released it after a protracted legal battle that ended with a circuit court in Detroit ordering the state to release my original record of birth.

I am very aware of how this historically anti-adoptee state public health and health agency will likely respond to me as an adoptee. I am simply requesting records provided to all persons but adoptees as a matter of courteous government service with minimal state fees. But I expect this will not be courteous or in compliance with statute. MDHHS has a record of hostile behavior to Michigan-born adoptees, which I have documented now for years.

So I am documenting the process by video and other means to provide a public record of my activity. My goal is to highlight issues of denied legal rights to all adoptees and the discriminatory treatment millions of them face through basic civil processes that should be fulfilled as a basic government service: providing a vital record.

MDHHS provides no public information stating only one copy of a record can be released.
www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/faq/adoption/can-the-adult-adoptee-obtain-a-copy-of-the-original-birth-certificate
www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/adult-child-serv/adoption/adoption-faqs

There are several relevant Michigan statutes that set out adoption laws relevant to issues facing adoptees of my generation: 710, 333, 368. None establishes any conditions to deny the release of more than one original birth certificate to someone such as myself who provided a court order already. In fact, the statute states here, § 333.2882 does simply state, the original birth certificate is accessible “upon a court order.” I met this condition with the order already sent to MDHHS in June 2016, forcing it to send me a copy of my original birth certificate. I re-sent MDHHS on August 13, 2024, what I sent earlier in June 2016 and a copy of my vital record it sent me in July 2016 to prove it has already released the record before.

I have already learned from one of my trusted public contacts familiar with state adoption processes that I can expect MDHHS to reject my request, even though there is no law that would allow that.

I will provide additional videos later to document the outcome of what could be another useless fight that only signals that adoptees remain second-class humans subjected to decades-long legal discrimination entirely because of their adoptee status.

See my website for more details about Michigan’s nearly impossible barriers for adoptees to access their original vital records.

Remembering my alcoholic adoptive father on Father’s Day

I am hiding, intentionally, the identities of my adoptive father, left, and his two younger brothers, and their father. (Date and location of photo unknown; mid-1940s or a bit later?)

The past week and a half saw different stories of my adoptive life joining together.

The first was the death of the last surviving brother of my adoptive father at the end of May 2024, and news of his death reaching me in early June 2024.

The other story is what this man hid and shared with me about my adoptive father, his older brother.

My adoptive father died in 1985 after long bouts of health problems, including the impacts from decades of alcoholism. Ultimately his addiction took his life, cruelly even, after barely six decades alive. He died separated from many who knew him early in his life. It was a bad ending.

I remember him still, to this day, as a very unhappy but smart man. I also cannot calculate the incalculable harm he dealt to my adoptive mom, my adoptive sister, and me. Alcohol was his demon, and those ensnared in his cage of self-destruction were us.

My adoptive father had three brothers. They were raised in a very strict German-American family in the Cleveland suburbs, when it was a bustling city with many thriving industries. The oldest died a ruptured appendix when he was 13 years old. This likely led to an enormous burden of German family pressure thrown on my adoptive father’s shoulders, as the next oldest son. My adoptive grandfather was big and domineering, and I can barely remember him. He likely pushed my adoptive into the Lutheran seminary, at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, when my adoptive father was right out of his Lutheran boarding school.

There were also two other brothers. The youngest of the four died in 2017 at the age of 86. The brother between them, who peacefully passed away in late May 2024, died at the age of 97.

As I was writing my book on my adoption story between 2015 and 2018, this last dying brother agreed to provide some background to my adoptive father’s life. I had to push him for this information. After receiving my request and knowing that he had stories to tell hidden inside, he sent me two well-written, but carefully framed pages describing my adoptive father’s extremely troubled life.

At last the dark secrets
I learned things never shared with me before, held from me for more than five decades.

Many might say a “dirty secret,” especially from an undeserving adoptee who should just be grateful for being taken into a “loving family,” is best kept hidden.

I shared that dark secret in my book. In my book, I describe how my adoptive uncle told me my adoptive father was already an alcoholic before I was placed for adoption. In fact, my adoptive father had been in a treatment program before I was placed with him and my adoptive mother.

As to whether the social workers who did the home study visits of my adoptive parents’ west Detroit house knew about his treatment remains unknown.

That two-page summary I still have finally revealed this long-hidden chapter in my adoptive father’s life with other revelations I won’t share. He likely should never have been given charge of children because of his substance abuse problem. (My adoptive sister had been placed with them two years before me.)

Within eight years of me being placed with my adoptive parents, and after years of my adoptive father’s physical abuse of my adoptive mother and other events I won’t share, they divorced. I also was obligated to see him for about four more years or more, which exposed me and my sister to nearly being killed when he was driving us in a drunken stupor with us as passengers.

None of these tales are new. I have shared them very publicly.

My book explored my father’s troubled past, only slightly
In fact, in the introduction to my book, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, made clear the reality of what my youth was like living in the shadow of a violent, alcoholic father and failed adoptive parent: “At times, when he was drunk, he could have killed my sister and me on more than a dozen occasions—when he would drive us in a total stupor. My adoptive family’s struggles were not pleasant, but they are also things no one could have predicted, and their meaning and purpose may still not even be clear to me. However, the way I confronted these challenges was uniquely my own, and I own how I addressed my reality and the conditions of my life. No one else is responsible for that.”

I am glad my adoptive uncle who just passed away lived a long, healthy life, with many children and some biological grandchildren of this own.

But I will never know why he chose to keep my adoptive father’s dark secrets hidden from the people most harmed, for half a century.

I think he may have felt the “past was the past” and that my father’s early death was punishment enough.

But I also think that he simply was incapable to genuinely considering me and my sister as being worthy about the truth of what happened to us, changing our lives forever, in very painful ways for my adoptive sister and my adoptive mother. I was resilient, but at a high cost. 

We were never my adoptive uncle’s biological kin. We were “relinquished” babies, and perhaps he thought we should just be grateful our entire lives and accept our fate, including the violence and chaos that came our way. I don’t really know.

In my book, I also describe forgiving my adoptive father. I decided to do that when I was 18 years old and started my life living away from home, forever. It represented one of the most mature and smartest things I ever did. I had the power to act with forgiveness. In that sense, I became the master of my destiny, not bound by the harm of the past.

When the past comes back, like it does now with my adoptive uncle’s death, it’s a good time to recount the story. We need to be honest about what adoption truly is and who is impacted by it.

As for the holiday celebrating “dads,” you’ll forgive me for not pausing to acknowledge the day as something meaningful.

This corporate marketing day has a different meaning for many who have stories like me. On this so-called “Father’s Day,” we’ll also give most of you celebrating this day a free pass too, for not recognizing the many in our camp with a “father” like my own.

Maybe one day you’ll care enough to truly acknowledge us too.

Death finally takes my birth mother, did you come to gawk at the photo?

Rudy Owens took this photograph of his birth mother in 2009; what do you see and why are you looking at it now?

The entire time I have communicated about my history as an adoptee and the widespread denial of basic human and legal rights to all adoptees, I held a line.

That demarcation point, for me, represented a conscious act of power and an act of defiance.

Until today, April 27, 2024, I have never publicly published a photograph of my closest biological family relative that showed their face.

Here it is. Are you amused? Do you care?

On a few occasions I published very old pictures of my biological grandparents, on my maternal and paternal family sides. These are so buried in my archive, they are likely impossible to find. These photos are also old, and they are more like museum artifacts than documentation of blood lineage.

But now I have arrived at a new destination, because the Angel of Death arrived late this week.

In fact, I started writing this essay when my birth mother* was among the living, a day before her passing. Now she is among the dead, having died in a Michigan hospital this week after a long declining trajectory to death’s final clutches.

SEE COMPLETE ESSAY ON THIS WEBPAGE.

When the sirens call, you must respond

This week, I thought more deeply about mythology and finding magic. I realized both will be topics in a book I have decided I need to publish about an amazing year of exploration, discovery, and finding “my home” in one of my ancestral countries, Finland. All told, I’ve published nearly 20 essays since early 2023 on my connections to this Nordic country, as well as hundreds of photographs.

In my essay I wrote this past week about what I learned during this time, I reflected on the role of myth in my life and this latest, happy chapter. I described how knowing the power of myth gave me a power to overcome the nation’s discriminatory legal system that denied me my legal rights to know my identity and kin.

“In fact, understanding myth and my adoption story gave me what I consider to be a tactical advantage compared to other adoptees who start their journeys for self-awareness far later in life. I was in a totally different place because I already had deep knowledge of myth’s meaning to the human experience because I read countless books on myths as a young person and learned the stories of the Bible in church every Sunday.”

I had a lot of great conversations with some friends, and I came up with a working title for now of this new book: “When the Sirens Call: Finding ‘my Home’ in Finland.” I wanted to make a public statement, by video, to keep the fire under my feet to honor this promise. I also quote the great thinker and author of a book exploring myth, Joseph Campbell, who also talks about “finding one’s bliss.” It’s has nothing to do with cheap, New Age gimmicks from guru hucksters. It’s akin to wisdom shared by other wise thinkers, like Viktor Frankl.  

Campbell noted: “If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you’re living somehow. And when you can see it, you begin to deal with people who are in your field of your bliss, and they open doors to you.”

This was perfectly true for me on my journey “home” to Finland. More will be coming later. Remember, when you hear the sirens, you must listen and you must respond. That is life calling you!

Why won’t the American Public Health Association even publish a letter supporting adoptees?

By Rudy Owens, MA, MPH
Published April 7, 2024

On Jan. 15, 2024, I sent a “letter to the editor” to a national publication called The Nation’s Health, a public health newsletter published by the American Public Health Association (APHA). My letter was about 300 words and focused on clearly documented public health practices promoted by the country’s national public health organization.

In my letter, I noted, “Today, most health and public health experts, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), encourage all Americans to know their family health history to share with their medical providers to promote better health.”

I read the entire letter in my video here.

I pointed out in my letter that “no medical health group or public health groups have publicly supported changing state adoption laws that deny birth records and family medical history to millions of U.S.-born adoptees.”

I ended my letter with a call to action, for what the public health field commonly calls evidence-based, upstream public health interventions. That is precisely what adoptee rights advocates have been calling for, for more than 50 years, asking for reforms to state laws to unseal original birth records that would provide millions of people better health by allowing them to better know their health history.

I ended my letter noting: “This year, public health practitioners can join with adoptees in legislative advocacy to improve the health of millions by changing these laws.” My note even highlighted my own family’s story about being a Finnish-American and having lost a close birth relative to heart disease very tragically on Dec. 29, 2023.

Even with the death of a close family member and the clearly documented evidence regarding what all health and public health experts say is a best practice, to know one’s family health history, I never heard back from the editorial staff of The Nation’s Health.

I respectfully resubmitted my letter three more times, a total of four times, since Jan. 15, 2024. I have never received confirmation if my letter would be accepted or if it was rejected.

I am assuming now that the letter has been rejected. I believe my letter was not accepted because of the tension such a letter raises.

In my view this tension may even cause internal denial and reveal professional and national patterns of cognitive dissonance by a field that proclaims to promote public health but has embraced national practices on millions of adoptees that harm their health and the nation’s public health.

In my 2018 book examining adoption from a public health perspective and on my website, I’ve long called upon health and public health groups to support adoptees.

“Both have a moral obligation to advocate for the well-being of all adopted Americans as a population,” I write. “Both also have a responsibility to correct their past historic roles creating a system that denies adoptees rights and also health information that could potentially be life-saving for some.”

This field has long supported U.S. adoption practices, particularly in the erasure of millions of U.S-born adoptees’ identities and by creating new and “not truthful” amended birth certificates bearing names of adoptive parents as the legal parents of adopted children and the sealing of original birth records (vital records) in most states, as part of the system’s wide expansion by the 1950s. (This is documented in many books, which I provide links to on my website.)

If you work in public health and want to support adoptee rights in legislative policy debates, I welcome your support. Contact me, and I can help guide your involvement where and when it can count.

Finally, in the time since I first reached out to APHA’s publication, adoptee rights bills in 2024 have stalled in Michigan and Georgia, delaying health and justice to countless tens of thousands of adoptees who needed “experts” to advocate on their behalf. These outcomes could have been different had health and public health experts provided supportive testimony.

Adoptees are, to date, collateral damage to outdated public health practices and laws that no longer serve any purpose when commercial DNA testing has virtually eliminated absurd notions of “secrecy.”

It’s time to fix this where it counts—in policy debates to change state laws and restore rights to adoptees by law.

(Also see my article published Jan. 13, 2024:  “Adoptee rights is also a moral issue to ensure equal rights to good health, yet public health and health professionals ignore this intentionally.”)