Category Archives: Rudy Owens

Finding kindred spirits in the quest for equal rights

This past week, I made some good connections online. Both happened through my Twitter profile.

Unlike some adoptees, I refuse to identify myself on that platform through my status as being adopted. I do call myself a Detroit native and photographer. That said, I find Twitter to be a great tool to share news leads on progress promoting equality for adoptees who seek to change discriminatory laws that deny adoptees in the United States equal treatment under the U.S. Constitution (14th Amendment) and state laws.

The first connection came with a Minnesota-based attorney named Gregory Luce, who recently launched a website for his Adoptee Rights Law Center. In his own words, Luce writes, “Nationally, however, we will work with lawyers and activists to develop legal strategies to advance adoptee rights, whether through legal briefs and research, support to lawyers on the ground, pro bono representation for adoptees, or coordination of state-by-state legal efforts.”

Luce has published a detailed state-by-state analysis of the state-level and mostly restrictive adoption laws. Anyone who is interested in the larger policy framework that continues to deny civil rights to adoptees should bookmark this page.

It was fun to connect with Darryl McDaniels, fellow adoptee and internationally known rapper, over Twitter about something we both care about.

Luce is not in the business of framing adoption as a wonderful “gift” or trying to be part of the larger and international adoption industrial complex. (That is what I call it in my forthcoming book, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are.) We exchanged a couple of emails. I shared with him my research findings on practices in Michigan, which I have published on my website. I’m glad to know there is an advocate who is using his legal expertise in this overlooked area of discrimination.

My second Twitter connection occurred when I sent a thank-you Tweet to Darryl McDaniels, one of the founders of the path-breaking rap group Run DMC. He had Tweeted support for adoption-records reform legislation in his home state, New York.

McDaniels, like me, is an adoptee. Like me, he found his family. McDaniels also created one of the best portrayals of the American adoption experience in the cover he did with fellow adoptee and singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan of Just Like Me. The video shows McDaniels’ birth and relinquishment in 1964, and what that meant to him and his birth mother.

To my pleasant surprise, McDaniels wrote me back with a nice Tweet that made me smile. That Tweet received more than 1,000 views when I last checked. It is very nice to know that there are strangers out there who are working toward the same goal, but with different tools and with great energy and commitment for the same thing—the right to what is theirs as a birthright: their original birth records.

How Prejudice Harms Millions of Adoptees

The Outcast, by Richard Redgrave, 1851, Royal Academy of the Arts, London, documents the treatment of bastardy and birth mothers in England in the 1800s.

Today I  published a detailed essay entitled “Discrimination Against Adoptees Rooted in Fears of Illegitimacy.” In it I explore one of the themes that will be discussed at length in my forthcoming memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. 

My essay documents how the issue of prejudicial treatment of adoptees by states, courts, the media, and adoption agencies is almost never discussed in the long-simmering debate over adoptees’ legal right to their original birth records. As I show, discrimination can be seen in how adoptees seeking their birthright to know themselves and obtain copies of their original birth records are treated. By law, they are not considered equal to others in the majority of U.S. states. Many who enforce outdated state laws treat adoptees dismissively—even as threats. (See copies of emails written by senior Michigan public health officials how they responded fearfully to my request for my original birth certificate, as just one example.)

I highlight how this prejudice demonstrates a well-documented form of sociological behavior globally and throughout history. Historic and accurate records paint a grim picture of how this human bias translates into harmful actions. Bastards, birth mothers, and illegitimate people have paid a lethal price for their status. Remnants of that prejudice are alive and well today in laws that deny equal treatment to most U.S. adoptees by law, but also in how adoptees are treated when they seek their equal legal rights.

Rudy Owens’ adoption memoir sheds light on institution impacting millions of Americans

Rudy Owens, five months old

In 2016, I finished writing my memoir on my lifelong journey navigating the world of American adoption, as an adoptee who was denied any record of his biological past. I will be publishing my memoir and public health history of adoption in 2017.

I was born in Detroit at one of the nation’s largest maternity hospitals that promoted adoption among non-related parents and infants. My single birth mother relinquished when I was three weeks old. My entire family past was erased when the State of Michigan approved my adoption to a new family in May 1965. That family remains my family to this day. However, the post-World War II adoption system that touched the lives of millions of birth mothers and infants like me created record-keeping practices and laws that ultimately withheld my family heritage from me when my name legally changed and I became another family’s child.

The medical, social work, and public health professionals who created this bold new experiment in family creation sought to remove illegitimate children from their kin. Adoptees were expected by society and their adoptive families never to know their true identity and biological relatives. I rejected this model and set out on a three-decades-long journey to find my biological relatives, my past, and ultimately justice. On the way, I overcame Michigan’s discriminatory legal barriers and found my birth family and kin on both sides of my family when I was 24. My years-long journey took me from Detroit to San Diego to a small Midwest hamlet. On the way, I learned about my past, met all branches of his families, and finally reclaimed my original birth documents state vital records keepers vowed to hide from me until the day I died.

On my hero’s quest, I overcame the discriminatory tactics of fearful records keepers and stereotypes by some  birth family relatives. I rose above those who denied me equal legal treatment because I was born a bastard and categorized by state law as an adoptee, with less rights than non-adoptees. My experience demonstrated that searching for one’s origins and asking, “Who am I,” are the most natural acts a human will ever take.

Rudy Owens launches his book website

Rudy Owens’ Forthcoming Memoir

Greetings. More information will be posted in coming weeks about my upcoming public health exploration of and memoir looking at the institution of adoption. Please follow all of my updates under the “What’s New” section of my web site for my forthcoming memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. Thanks for dropping in, and I hope to put a copy of my book in your hands soon.