Tag Archives: Adoptee Rights

Update to FAQs for Michigan adoptees seeking court orders for original birth records

I have updated my frequently visited “FAQS for court order requests in Michigan for original birth certificates” webpage.* I created this in 2018 for all Michigan-born adoptees and adoptee rights advocates, lawmakers, policymakers, and the media, explaining the process for securing an original birth certificate for adoptees, especially those born between 1945 and 1980. I hope these resources are helpful and provide information that the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) will not share with tens of thousands of adoptees, as part of their concerted efforts to discriminate against this class of thousands of persons who were separated from their birth mothers and kin by this inequitable system.

In addition to updating links to MDHHS’s intentionally unhelpful web resources for adoptees, I  added this:

Will MDHHS ignore court orders to release an adoptee’s original birth certificate? [UPDATED NOV. 15, 2024]: Yes, MDHHS will ignore state law and will ignore court orders, based on my experiences requesting two additional copies of my original birth certificate in mid-August 2024. In my case, MDHHS took 80 days to release two copies of my original birth certificate after getting my order for rush service on Aug. 16, 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. I had to get a state court to intervene after I received a denial letter. The two birth certificates arrived on Nov. 4, 2024. (Note, I already had a standing court order from 2016 when I first won my legal fight for my vital record.) See my essay, video, and links to four other stories and videos documenting MDHHS’s actions that did not comply with state law and defied a Michigan state court and judge.

*Note, I have never made a penny from providing this resource to the public, outside of the incredibly modest sales I have of my book documenting the history of the U.S. adoption with a public health lens and how my story being separated from my biological family helps explain that system and the legal discrimination rooted in law harming millions of adoptees to this day.

Talking way too much with ‘Adoption: The Making of Me,’ and it was fun!

When I was invited to be guest on the adoptee-centered podcast Adoption: The Making of Me, produced and published by podcasters and producers Louise Browne and Sarah Reinhardt, I expected this to be something new for me.

Outside of what I have published in my adoptee memoir, I refrain publicly from talking about my backstory with my biological mother, my family life before I left home at the age 18, and issues that I don’t share when discussing adoption legislative reform and adoptee rights advocacy.

This time, I knew it would be different, and it seemed OK.

(If you prefer, you can listen to the podcast here, on Apple Podcasts.)

Browne and Reinhardt asked me to talk about topics I mostly keep private. So I did. I highlighted issues such the very bad domestic abuse in my adoptive family, which I have written about before. I also discussed other issues growing up I mostly keep private, as I focus more on legislative and upstream reforms to end the inequities of this system. 

Hopefully this conversation may help some others, which is why it seemed right to do this. Within hours of it being published I received a comment from a fellow adoptee using words to describe my experience that I never use to this day describing my life as an adoptee or my life story. That is fine, because each of us can experience a story with our own points of view.

Some of the other issues we covered include the denial of equal legal rights to domestic adoptees in my birth state Michigan and other states. I also talked about the history of my birthplace, the long-closed adoption mill and maternity hospital in Detroit called Crittenton General Hospital. I even was able to discuss my Finnish heritage and provide comparisons of the United States to Finland, homeland to my maternal great grandparents on my mother’s family side. As we closed, I managed to sneak in a few quick facts–because I love facts!–that the Finnish government and its national health service supports mothers and kids, making adoption in Finland rare and almost nonexistent.

As we nearly completed our hour-long conversation, I painfully realized I did too much of the talking without enough time for conversation, and they graciously forgave this sin.

I really appreciated the wonderful talk and these two podcasters, who are doing a brilliant job allowing adopted persons to tell stories to help others understand the adoption experience, from the point of view by those who lived it and who are the experts. You can also catch copies of their podcasts on their YouTube channel. Visit their past interviews to listen and learn from the voices of those who know this issue in the marrow of their bones.

Thanks again, ladies!

Restoring rights to adoptees in Michigan ultimately is about power, so let’s use it

I am continuing to create short videos focusing on the injustice experienced by thousands of adoptees born in Michigan who are denied equal treatment by law to access their vital records only because of their status at birth.

For 2023, I will continue to focus on Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Ultimately she will drive any agenda if there is true legislative reform. Her team can and should be coordinating legislative proposals based on measures now recently passed in other legislatures in the past two years.

However, Gov. Whitmer really will not care unless there is a cost. I outline that calculus in my video here.

For adoptees born in Michigan who are still denied legal access to their vital records, I would encourage you to learn how other states got it right, like New York, and propose that Michigan’s legislature adopt similar reform, without delay.

Focus on the law and its denied rights to thousands.

Tell your story, but focus on injustice and equity, and hold lawmakers to account who claim to champion both.

Remember, one cannot champion the status quo and claim to be an advocate for equity and equality at the same time. By logic alone, that is impossible.

As I have noted before, adoption is a uniquely adored American institution by both parties, Democrat and Republican.

Therefore, in getting a leader like Gov. Whitmer to take action, the logical path is to create a real political cost for inaction and for failure to fix a massive wrong. This matters because she is making moves nationally for her next political chapter. Politics is an often bruising gladiatorial arena and a choreographed stage at the same time. Those on that stage carefully measure the costs.

As long as Gov. Whitmer sees no cost to her continued inaction, we will not see any progress on reform.

You can read a longer essay I wrote about this approach at the start of 2023.

Thanks for your work to advocate for reform. It’s decades overdue.

My sister will die never knowing her past

On Jan. 3, 2020, The Detroit Free Press published my guest column on Michigan’s discriminatory and restrictive adoption records law that denies Michigan’s adoptees legal access to their original birth records, except by overcoming restrictive barriers.

In my adoptive sister’s case, she falls in the 35-year period, between 1945 and 1980, for which the state statutes have almost impossible barriers for an adoptee to overcome to get what is theirs as a legal and human right. My sister, who is seriously ill and bedridden in a skilled nursing home, will likely die in the near future without knowing her biological kin, her biological parents, and her ancestral past.

This unfortunate outcome is intentional. In fact, this scenario was the design of those who created Michigan’s biased law that is zealously enforced by Michigan’s vital records guardians at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

My sister and I both were born in these post-World War II boom years of adoption, that saw nearly 3 million adoptees separated from their biological kin through the U.S. adoption system.

It is no coincidence that Michigan’s lawmakers adopted the most restrictive rules for adoptees in this cohort, because records secrecy continues to hide from the public how widespread and systemic that system was in the United States, impacting literally millions of Americans.

My book on my own experience challenging this discriminatory records-keeping system details how adoption history has been hidden, preventing adoptees from knowing themselves and their past and the public from knowing the truth about the many players who promoted this system for decades.

Author note: The guest column published by The Detroit Free Press has slight changes from the original I submitted, without changing the substance of the submitted column.

The Detroit Adoptee Manifesto: Time to change the battlefield

As the year 2017 comes to a close, millions of American adoptees are no closer to receiving equal treatment under U.S. laws than they were decades earlier. In 1975, the United Kingdom long moved on from this issue, giving all adoptees full access to their records once they turned 18. In fact, the issue of adoptee equal rights is not even a concern in most developed nations. Not so in the United States, the country with the greatest number of adoptees than any developed country in the world.

Robert Greene’s The 33 Strategies of War

From a strategic perspective, most U.S. adoptees have not organized cohesively or embraced successful strategies that have altered this battlefield. This includes the all-critical inner battle of the mind that must occur first before any change and tactical advance occurs on the messy, fluid field of combat in the real world. I believe its time to reset the chessboard and start anew, starting first with each individual adoptee.

I recommend that adoptees read author Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, Mastery, The 33 Strategies of War, and more. His treatise on war offers a cool, hard look at human conflict and offers wisdom demonstrated by historic greats from Sun Tzu to Napoleon Bonaparte to Muhammad Ali. He provides a set of ideas how to grab victory from whatever conflict and foes you face.

I just published The Detroit Adoptee Manifesto. In it, I draw from key concepts explained by Greene in The 33 Strategies of War, which I think adoptees should consider as they choose how they want to live their lives and then change the world around them, including the adoption system that denies millions of Americans basic human rights. Most of these ideas are explained in greater detail in my forthcoming memoir on the American adoption experience, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are: An Adoptee’s Journey Through the American Adoption Experience. The strategies I describe in my essay are:

Author Robert Greene

  • Projecting Strength, Not Vulnerability
  • Learning from the Masters and Applying that Wisdom
  • Having a Grand Strategic Vision
  • Learning from Defeat
  • Defining your Opponents and Exposing Them and Their Weaknesses
  • Becoming a Fighter, Not a Victim
  • Defining The Battlefield
  • Knowing Your Enemies
  • Launching a Revolution of Thinking

Greene notes that all persons can benefit from thinking strategically, to achieve critical life goals: “To have the power that only strategy can bring, you must be able to elevate yourself above the battlefield, to focus on your long-term objectives, to craft an entire campaign, to get out of the reactive mode that so many battles in life lock you into. Keeping your overall goals in mind, it becomes much easier to decide when to fight and when to walk away.”