Category Archives: Rudy Owens

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.”

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.

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.

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.