Category Archives: Rudy Owens

‘Talking Story’ with Bryan Elliott on his podcast Living in Adoptionland

Bryan Elliott, host of Living in Adoptionland, and Rudy Owens, author of You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are

Earlier this month, I sat down with fellow adoptee and now podcaster Bryan Elliott to discuss the U.S. adoption system and why I wrote my book examining that institution and my journey through it. I had no idea where our conversation would land. However, I trusted Bryan’s professionalism as a writer, director, and multimedia producer to allow our conversation to wander where it naturally wanted to go.

Bryan posted our conversation this week on his podcast channel, Living in Adoptionland. I could not be happier with the interview and the high quality of the production.

Bryan had contacted me in late spring and invited me to his new show, which he launched in late May. And he’s been busy, having already published nearly a dozen shows, with conversations with some fellow adoptees I know from their advocacy on Twitter and other spaces where adoptees advocate for reform to a system that has impacted millions of people.

Bryan shares this summary why he’s producing his show now. He describes it as “the podcast I wish I had before I started on my journey more than 25 years ago. It’s a mosaic of real stories from the adoption community which includes parents who gave up their children, families struggling with infertility and natural conception, and the often silent adult adoptees.”

Before we taped the podcast, with Bryan in southern California and me in Portland, we agreed to a couple of ground rules. One was that I did not want to be involved in efforts that were contrary to my larger goal in writing my book of restoring rights to adoptees, and he respected that. Another point we both agreed to was to not center ourselves in the much larger national crisis surrounding the Supreme Court’s ending of legal abortion in the United States in June with its disastrous decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. That recent, historic decision by the right-leaning court ended nearly 50 years of bedrock reproductive and legal rights secured for women.

Both of us, in our conversations before the taping, recognized this decision had tremendous impacts on women. As adult adoptees, we also both knew too well what this likely meant for the promotion of adoption by those who overturned this half-century-old legal precedent. Speaking for myself, I believe Bryan shared my own view that having two white guys talking about an issue that impacts so many women, including many brown and black women, would not be appropriate, even though as adoptees we probably would have critical perspectives to share on the national policy debate that is falsely promoting adoption as the policy alternative to abortion healthcare. In the end, we did mention this topic because one cannot talk about adoption in 2022 without talking about abortion and how that intersects with adoptees as a huge group of Americans.

With the big issues agreed upon, we could then turn to other topics he wanted to ask about and I was able to share about my now four-year-old memoir and public health analysis of this massive and still discriminatory system. Some of the themes I touched on were:

Understanding how adoption must be seen sociologically because of its history tied to the larger historic problem of illegitimacy;
How doctors played a bedrock role in the massive expansion of adoption in the United States after the 1940s and how that role ensures it remains a legitimate and acceptable “practice,” even when it separates mothers and their children;
How my life as an adoptee has evolved over time, providing me insights shared by writers and thinkers I admire, including Viktor Frankl;
Explaining to others how being adopted and being denied rights means confronting lies, discrimination, and harm that is institutionalized and continues to harm countless persons.

I would encourage those who are interested in learning more about adoption to listen to his previous interviews and to bookmark his podcast platform. And as an adoptee, I want to say how refreshing it is to talk about adoption and not have my basic human rights challenged because the interviewer did not do their homework in understanding how adoption impacts millions of persons denied their legal rights and basic human rights to know who they are.

Thanks again, Bryan. Keep up the great work. I will be tuning in again to more conversations on Living in Adoptionland.

To learn more about Bryan, visit his website here. You can reach out to Bryan here.

You can continue to reach me on my website. My hope is this conversation inspired some listeners to want to learn more and buy my book.

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.

What adoption taught me about bureaucracy

I have spent decades of my life fighting a large bureaucracy in Michigan, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. The massive state agency, which oversees all vital records and all birth records of adoptees born in Michigan, denied me my original birth records for nearly three decades. It did this even after I had met my birth mother who signed a consent form in 1989 that should have forced the agency to give me my original birth certificate. It took a court battle to secure my birth certificate’s release in 2016.

The long dance I had with that ossified bureaucracy provided wisdom I continue to use in how I do my work professionally today in a large government agency and how I deal with other bureaucracies that intentionally choose to do wrong as opposed to good. In nearly every sense, being an adoptee denied basic legal rights was my advanced training how I respond to immoral, inflexible systems and institutions to this day.

This week, I found myself locking horns with two intractable systems that are among the least accountable and most unbending in the United States. One is a nursing home in St. Louis, Missouri, that cares for a family member of mine, which in its operation is not that different than the more than 15,000 licensed facilities nationally. The other is a medical clinic in metro Portland, Oregon, where I visited a doctor in September this year. Each represents a part of the much larger systems of for-profit healthcare and nursing home care, and their structure and management are likely representative of their thousands of counterparts throughout the country.

Both of these institutions that provide medical and health services are, theoretically, there to serve others and provide services that are essential and also something most persons see as “morally right.” These two facilities are not related in any way. Yet both are much alike in how they function as bureaucracies that are mostly intractable in their actions and inflexible when asked to be accountable.

Because of my long decades of dealing with bureaucratic systems, I have learned important lessons. The most important of those lessons is to never accept “no,” which is the reflex response of organizations that do not take ownership for their actions that can cause harm and can be morally wrong. You can read my essay about that here. The knowledge gained from prolonged struggles, I have found, can be used for doing what is both good and morally just. I choose to fight for what I know to be right and not to submit in these seemingly losing battles. In the simple conflicts we all face in life, I have long-decided that I would be the lion and not the lamb.

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!”

‘Can you help me with my search?’

Because my website for my book on the U.S. adoption experience is one of the few online resources exploring the history of the adoption system in Michigan in the post-World War II era, I am frequently contacted by strangers impacted by adoption in my birth state.

The contacts include those who were placed for adoption like me looking for help finding their biological kin. I get emails from birth mothers who may have given up their child at my birthplace, Crittenton General Hospital, perhaps one of the largest maternity hospitals in the country that promoted the separation of mothers and their infants from the 1930s through its closing in 1975. I also have been contacted by adoptees seeking help petitioning Michigan courts for their records—a topic I address with online fact sheets that provide detailed steps how to do a court petition, with links to all documents that I have been able to find.

For nearly all requests, there literally is nothing I can do to help people with their searches. What I have already published, and update as I get more information, is the information that I can share.

I recently replied to an adoptee and a financial investor in Florida who wanted me to provide tips about doing a court petition. Because I am not a lawyer, I cannot provide legal advice. In his case, I sent him links to my two FAQs, which give as much information and guidance that I am able to provide.

I provided those materials because the state of Michigan and the courts in Michigan refuse to provide this information for adoptees, when they have a legal and moral obligation to assist the tens of thousands of adoptees separated by the state’s discriminatory laws denying all adoptees their legal, human, and equal rights to their vital records and their biological, medical, and family histories.

My birthplace, Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, taken in 1965, the year of my birth

No, this is not fair

When I provide replies that do not offer the assistance people want, I usually never get a follow up or even a courtesy appreciatory comment that the materials published provide some people a small measure of information not given by the state. While that is a bit disappointing, my reasons for publishing my resources have never been about money or even gratitude. My focus remains on changing laws that deny rights to many that are decades in need of overhaul. If the material I share provides some small measure of assistance to the public, particularly adoptees and their kin searching for them, then that is a nice outcome too. That is reward in itself.

Being an adoptee, with few political and media allies, is by definition a hard place to be when you are searching for answers to who you are and your kin connections. No one’s story is the only story. All of them matter, and all adoptees, on their own, have to confront their reality in a way that makes sense for them.

My view on this approach to the adoptee-lived life may not be shared by many. However, my perspective, particularly at this point in my life, is that this is the often inequitable fate many adoptees were handed. It has nothing to do with fairness. Only the individuals can confront their fate in a way that makes sense for them. That is my own view, but also one deeply informed by the writings and wisdom of Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl.

Holocaust survivor, writer, and humanist Viktor Frankl, taken two years after his liberation from the Nazi camp system

Writing shortly after the war and his internment in Nazi camps, Frankl wrote that when faced with any situation in life, we all have a freedom to choose how we confront life’s obstacles. “Between stimulus and response, there is a space,” he wrote. “In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

That is not an idea that a lot of people, including adoptees, embrace for many reasons. But in my own experience, this perspective has helped me. It also continues to inform what I can and cannot do when others need help with the system that remains shrouded in inequity and legal barriers that deny equality.

A recent request

I was contacted last night by a man in his mid-70s who claimed that he was the father of a son born at my birthplace, in Detroit, who was then placed for adoption.

I do not know all of the details. I do not know why he was not involved in his purported son’s life earlier, but frequently the persons who had to deal with negative consequences of having a child out of marriage prior to the 1970s were the mother and the child. Historically and globally, women and children have borne the brunt of societies’ brutal and heartless treatment of single mothers and bastard children. This stigma fueled the system into which I was born an adoptee.

The historic reality of this treatment has never escaped me. It also was reflected in my own experience, with a father-by-sperm only, who never acknowledged I was his biological offspring by the time he died 15 years after I first met him. That is hardly a new story. It is part of the larger and universal story of illegitimacy.

When this main who claimed he was the father of an adoptee asked me to help give him assistance in finding his son, I literally had no advice for him because I do not provide that assistance or do searches for others. As someone who has now studied the history of illegitimacy and the U.S. adoption system’s historic treatment of infants and mothers, I did not feel greatly compelled to know why at the end of his life, he felt a need to make this connection. I do wonder why he was not there when his son started his life and needed to be with his biological kin.

Here is what I shared. I would like to think he might care enough about other children relinquished because of societal stigma, because of fathers who refused to accept paternity as history has documented as the norm now for centuries, and because of concerns for equality. If this man did take action to help other adoptees, and not just his own son he claimed to have sired, that would be great. But I am also a realist and know that we are often motivated by our own needs foremost. One of those needs is to know our family relations, as adoptees know best of all.

“I’m not in a position to provide people assistance with their personal searches,” I wrote the purported father of a fellow Detroit-born adoptee. “However, one way you can help adoptees is to consider helping all of them. You can do that by supporting legislation that would open records to them at the state legislative level, in Michigan and nationally, given you are involved in this system directly by fathering a son who was was placed for adoption. You can write a letter to the editor of your paper saying that’s needed. You can contact a TV station saying, if Michigan provided adoptees access to their records, I might have contact with my kin. These are all options you can take now. The information I have provided to adoptees is on my website to help any of them who are seeking justice and their past.”

I never heard back from him.