Category Archives: Rudy Owens Memoir

The ups and downs of ‘adoptee Twitter’

Rudy Owens Memoir Twitter Account Banner

The Twitter account banner for Rudy Owens’ memoir on the U.S. adoption system.

I created my adoptee memoir Twitter account in 2017 as a way to help promote my memoir and book, which provides a critical look at the U.S. adoption system after World War II and my place in that larger story. Since I launched the account, I have used it to stay engaged on adoptee rights issues and issues related to domestic and inter-country adoption.

Twitter has many downsides. I find it can be a swirling pool of misinformation and emotion, which has been weaponized by autocrats like former president Donald Trump and state actors like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and many other nations that have exploited its glaring vulnerabilities. It also has been a major source of misinformation during the pandemic, and that likely will remain.

On the positive side, Twitter still remains a place that gives space to alternative points of view that is empowering. It has own subcultures, like “Black twitter,” “feminist twitter,” “Asian-American Twitter,” “adoptee Twitter,” and many, many more.

In these leaderless but visible groups, participants express views that challenge coverage in legacy and mainstream media on issues relevant to their affected groups. This has long been documented.

One study dating from 2016 by the Knight Foundation on this form of expression quoted a self-defined participant of feminist Twitter, who said, “The reason I often don’t trust mainstream pieces or outlets is because they very rarely go talk to the people affected by the issue. They don’t consider people in a community experts in their lives, like we living it aren’t experts in our own experiences.”

This is an idea very common among those who reference the term “adoptee twitter” and who use Twitter to address issues relevant to their lives, policy discussions, media bias, racism, hate speech, legislative debates, harm to those adopted, and more.

Like any group without a corporate or government moderator controlling opinion, views will vary. Twitter, by its nature, rewards emotion, anger, rage, and also views that elicit strong responses. This is not a place for thoughtful contemplation. That said, insights and wisdom can be found here.

I continue to use this space to share facts and media coverage relevant to policy issues, media bias that incorrectly describes adoption, legislative issues relevant to impacted adopted persons, and insights that I have from disciplines and ideas that matter to those who work to educate the public and reshape outdated views.

This weekend I shared a Tweet for those who use Twitter in this world of adoptees who communicate in this space. I said this was my perspective using Twitter as an adoptee:

Your experience is your expertise. Your story matters!
You don’t need to quote “experts.” In time others notice your value.
Align with folks who are positive and who lead by example.
#Facts still always matter!

I also see my Twitter communications as a responsibility to help millions of others. Mostly because of my Twitter communications, I have reached an audience for my book on this system. Some possible readers and even my followers may never like this approach to this system, but that’s OK. Telling one’s story requires having faith in one’s truth. And for me, my story remains firmly grounded in historic, scientific, and public health research, not my “feelings.”

For now, I am planning to continue using my Twitter account to promote my book, because I think my work has great relevancy for understanding adoption as an overlooked and important public health issue requiring immediate legislative action now to address injustices and documented harm to millions.

I also want to keep using Twitter as a place to engage the public and share facts being overlooked. I did this most recently to support ongoing efforts underway now in Vermont, led by adult adoptees born there, to restore rights to adoptees to access their birth records without discrimination and as a right protected by law.

I can also see the day when one day I will say, that’s enough. I am done.

I am not quite there, but ultimately, the way Twitter is constructed does not align with how I prefer to approach the world, because Twitter is driven by impulse, immediacy, and emotional responses. We have seen the downsides of this, and stepping back may be the best solution for me later.

Why adoptee rights advocacy should use a public health lens

When I wrote my memoir and critical study of the U.S. adoption experience, I deleted a chapter where I highlighted divisions among many of the millions of adoptees, notably those who want to focus mainly on their personal feelings about this experience and those who focus more on making systemic changes to end inequities to many.

This is a long debate, and I strategically dropped this section because I thought it would become a distraction. There are many ways this plays out, and I am choosing not to amplify works and ideas that I do not think will lead to change. Nor do I want to tell others how to navigate meaning in their lives. Those decisions remain with the individual, and no one but the person has the ability to confront those realities.

Making systemic change requires a focus on upstream advocacy, to fix the root issues and problems.

Since publishing my book, I have had some modest successes, including calling attention to how the United States fails to even count adoptees, which would be one step forward. This ongoing and intentional failure by the U.S. Census reveals larger issues of bias to adoptees and how the power dynamics of the interconnected institutions and interests co-mingle with sustaining modern adoption while not reforming it.

I would love to see more fellow adoptees, especially among those who advocate for systemic changes—what public health folks call upstream advocacy—talk about the intersection of public health, adoption, and adoptee rights issues.

Adoption is and will remain a public health concern, since the public health systems at the local, state and federal level in this country helped build this system and sustain it, for domestic and inter-country adoptions.

I am fortunate that I have a background in public health, so I can make these connections much more easily. As I wrote in what I call my first of its kind public health memoir on adoption: “I use public health concepts that focus on laws and systems that have an impact on large groups of people. A public health lens lets one look at outcomes, including the health of adoptees and those born illegitimately. This approach points out flaws that can be fixed, particularly if we look at evidence and science as well as how adoption systems work best.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provide this model to explain how a public health approach addresses problems and promotes population health.

Unfortunately, I have found few adoptees with this formal education, and that may be one reason why this method and lens have not been widely shared by them as a means to highlight the root issues and show a path to change with institutions that wield unhealthy power over the lives of millions of adoptees because of laws and policies.

As I have written before, health and public health groups have a moral obligation to advocate for the wellbeing of all adopted Americans as a population. 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.

I am still confident that the approach I outlined in my book will gain traction, among journalists who continue to ignore root issues and also among adoptees themselves.

I also know this journey will be long. I have not given up hope because the goal remains to fix the larger problems, and changing laws and systems will help the greatest number of people who continue to be denied basic legal rights and knowledge of who they are.

The right season for a new book-reading adventure

It is that time of year where I live when the rains fall, the sun sets early, and getting cozy with a good book makes for a perfect indoor adventure.

For those not familiar with my writing, may I recommend my first-of-its-kind, public-health-centered adoptee memoir. My work, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, provides insights into my own journey and those of nearly 3 million others like me born in United States the boom adoption years after World War II, through the late 1970s.

I intentionally wrote my story to provide as many facts as possible, and a detailed bibliography, to challenge the all-powerful myth that post-1940s U.S. adoption has become. My untangling of that venerated myth reveals how poorly understood the U.S. adoption experience remains, even as adoptees globally continue to publish personal accounts that remain largely dismissed and ignored by the public, by lawmakers, and by the media from all political spectrums.

If you are a reader who enjoys a challenge, who may not be afraid of the truths that are carefully concealed by powerful systems of myth-making and even our own natural desires to prefer myth to the complexity of truth, you may be ready for joining me on my adventure.

Here is how Gonda Van Steen, Kings College professor and writer who exposed the shameful chapter of the Greek overseas adoption experience, described my work in her review on Goodreads: “This is a one-of-a-kind adoption book written by an American born in Michigan in 1965. With clinical precision, the author, Rudy Owens, walks the reader through the 1960s mentalities, systems, laws, and networks that keep the adoptee apart from his or her early life history. The author does not mince words and speaks with precision and without sentimentality about what needs to be done–and urgently– to abolish the discriminatory place in society in which the adoptee who does not have access to birth and adoption records is still held. This book lays out a method for how to search, how to ask for documents, how to process setbacks, and how to come out stronger–for the collective, not just for oneself. Very warmly recommended!”

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 14^th 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.”