Rudy Owens’ memoir on the American adoption experience
At long last, I can see the finish line for the first major milestone of sharing my story about the U.S. adoption system with readers. In April, I expect to begin selling my forthcoming memoir and public-health and historic overview of the still-flawed U.S. adoption system on multiple book-selling platforms and hopefully in book and mortar stores. Promoting and marketing my work, and finding the proverbial “stage” to bring it to a wider audience, will be an ongoing effort that will continue for months afterward. For now, first things first.
I will publish my book in paperback and e-book versions. I will include a searchable index for the paperback edition. My indexer is finishing this task now. I will be including a range of keywords and subject areas that define the experience of being an adoptee in the United States, including the terms “bastard,” “illegitimate,” “illegitimacy,” and many more.
An index is a critical tool for anyone who wants to quickly find material to help understand the history of U.S. adoption and the ongoing treatment of U.S. adoptees by discriminatory laws and public-health bureaucracies in many states. Here are a few ways my index will call out my subject matter:
- My work will include original research of how groups like the esteemed American Academy of Pediatrics openly encouraged single women to relinquish their infants without any peer-reviewed or medical evidence that showed adoption relinquishment provided any benefits to the child and mother.
- I will highlight new information from the organizations (Florence Crittenton Mission and Florence Crittenton Association of America) that ran the hospital where I was born and the dozens of maternity homes nationwide where hundreds of thousands of women were put in hiding and encouraged to give up their children. That data will include a comprehensive study by the Crittenton organizations of “Crittenton moms” and their circumstances when they gave up their children.
- I will provide a detailed accounting how the state of Michigan fails to treat Michigan-born adoptees fairly and has failed to do its job managing adoptee-records requests and original birth records.
- It will support my commitment as a scholar and communications and public health professional to be trusted and strongly fact-based source of information that is rooted in evidence and unbiased analysis of data and the meaning of that data.
Please check back on my website to get the latest update on my book’s publishing date, sometime in April. Look for news about a possible Go-Fund-Me campaign too.
I also encourage followers of this website to tell your friends to bookmark my webpage, sign up for my newsletter, follow me on Twitter, and, I hope, purchase my work in the coming weeks.