The Michigan health and public health agency, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), took 80 days to release two copies of my original birth certificate after getting my order for rush service on August 16, 2024.
The two copies of the true record of my birth, and my biological kin relations provided in this critical vital record that is a human right of all persons, finally landed in my mailbox on November 4, 2024. The process, as it occurred with denials and delays, violated not one but two court orders requiring MDHHS to release my vital record, as required by state law law.
I had to get a state court to intervene. (Note, I already had a standing court order from 2016 when I first won my legal fight for my vital record.)
See my video highlighting this clearly wrongful and unlawful delay.
Even though I secured a second court order on September 19, 2024, to compel this mostly hostile agency to thousands of Michigan-born adoptees to release my original birth record, that second court order was also denied.
A section of the latest court order requiring MDHHS to release two copies of Rudy Owens’ original birth certificate
MDHHS received that second court order on October 4, 2024 (I have a legal record confirming its delivery) and then sent a denial by letter on October 7, 2024.
In MDHHS’s signed letter, which did not provide any statutory reference—because there was no law allowing this—State Registrar Jeffrey D. Duncan noted, in all capital letters, “YOU MUST HAVE A CURRENT ORDER TO GET SEALED RECORDS.” (Note, this is false, and no such statutory provision in any law exists.)
As I shared already in my update and video published in mid-August 2024, there are several relevant Michigan statutes that set out adoption laws relevant to issues facing adoptees of my generation: § 710, 333, 368.
None establishes any conditions to deny the release of more than one original birth certificate to a Michigan-born such as myself who provided a court order already.
In fact, the statute § 333.2882 does state, the original birth certificate is accessible “upon a court order.” I met this condition with the court order already sent to MDHHS in June 2016, forcing it to send me a copy of my original birth certificate. I re-sent MDHHS on August 13, 2024, what I sent earlier in June 2016, and a copy of my vital record it sent me in July 2016 to prove it has already released the record before.
It’s important to highlight for lawmakers, the media, and any group that advocates for state agency compliance of state laws the harm and insanity of what denied and delayed justice means to myself and to tens of thousands of adoptees who may never even find their kin or get their original vital records.
I met my birth kin and my mother had sent in a signed consent form to release my birth certificate in April 1989—that was more than 35 years ago!
The court sided with me in late June 2016 to compel MDHSS to unseal my original birth certificate 27 years after I found my birth parents. I’m not a secret, but I continue to be treated like a bastard who is not a person protected by state law and the state constitution.
Lastly, throughout this entire process of obtaining what is mine as a human and legal right, my original birth certificate, the only government office that ever did anything to provide fair and balanced basic service involving what is ultimately a matter of law was the Third Circuit Court in Detroit and the personnel who worked there.
The state of Michigan intentionally chooses to be an adversary to a group denied basic legal rights bestowed on millions of other Michiganders, and its personnel all the way to its senior leadership, Director Elizabeth Hertel, appears committed to harming those who were severed from their biological families by the inequitable system of adoption for decades.
Multiple generations of people in Michigan have now suffered because of this, and no one seems to care about solving the problem outside some courageous lawmakers who unsuccessfully tried do that that in fall 2023 and winter 2024.
See my other stories and videos documenting my lawful request for my original birth certificate, and the delays and denials by MDHHS:
- Michigan Department of Health and Human Services ignores two court orders to release adoptee’s original birth record
- Filing second request for my original birth certificate being illegally withheld by Michigan
- Michigan Vital Records likely violates state adoption laws forcing extra court orders
- Will Michigan comply with state law and release additional copies of an adoptee’s original birth certificate?