Rudy Owens’ memoir on the American adoption experience
© 2017 Rudy Owens. All rights reserved.
It is felt that Martin feels quite secure with his adoptive family and that they in return are quite pleased with him. . . . We are recommending that final order be entered on this child and that his name become legally Martin Rudolf Brueggemann.
—Caseworker Notes, Adoption Records of Rudy Owens, 1966
Everyone who has been involved in the American adoption system has been aware of the underlying issues of secrecy that has shrouded it from the 1940s to the present. The list of parties is far-reaching. Those most intimately aware of secrecy have been adoptive families, adoptees, and birth parents. Beyond the families, participants also included the state agencies and workers managing adoptions and records. Other participants were public health agencies, probate courts, the lawmakers who passed legislation restricting records for adoptees and birth parents, the homes for pregnant birth mothers, and the hospitals and health professionals who delivered and cared for hundreds of thousands of young children.
This is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room that to this day is largely ignored, except by those trying to reform regressive state adoption laws. Adoption historian E. Wayne Carp describes how secrecy creates tensions in every stage of adoption. “Everyone involved in adoption must confront at one time or another questions about secrecy and disclosure,” he writes.
The story of how I was changed from one person with a past, to one without legal access to any records of my family origins, begins in a specific location. In my case, as with many other adoptees, my birthplace represents an important piece in the story of how American adoption created a new person, wiped clean of one’s history.
Return to Chapter 3: A Place for Unwed Mothers
Read More: Chapter 5: Knowing You Are Adopted: Just Look in the Mirror