Rudy Owens’ memoir on the American adoption experience
© 2017 Rudy Owens. All rights reserved.
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.
—Article 7, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
For more than six decades, millions of adopted Americans have faced legalized discrimination. No one set out to do intentional harm to adoptees. Yet the institution of adoption that grew after World War II singled out adoptees for differential treatment. Persons surrendered at birth inherited this system as a birthright with no meaningful role in the national dialogue deciding their fate.
Today, the policies, laws, and culture that have grown over the last sixty years collectively deny adoptees equal status under the law. For adoptees, this outcome is particularly ironic. The movement to make adoption records more secretive from adoptees, depriving them of basic rights, came when social movements at all levels of society were demanding change and succeeding in expanding legal rights for all Americans from the 1950s onward.
In the United States, adoptee-rights groups have unsuccessfully challenged laws that discriminate against classes of people as unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. The amendment, interpreted by the courts to end discrimination against African Americans and other minorities by states in civil rights court challenges up through the 1960s, states, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Return to Chapter 6: Blood Is Thicker Than Water
Read More: Chapter 8: Who Am I?