Tag Archives: Adoptee Rights Advocacy

Why won’t the American Public Health Association even publish a letter supporting adoptees?

By Rudy Owens, MA, MPH
Published April 7, 2024

On Jan. 15, 2024, I sent a “letter to the editor” to a national publication called The Nation’s Health, a public health newsletter published by the American Public Health Association (APHA). My letter was about 300 words and focused on clearly documented public health practices promoted by the country’s national public health organization.

In my letter, I noted, “Today, most health and public health experts, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), encourage all Americans to know their family health history to share with their medical providers to promote better health.”

I read the entire letter in my video here.

I pointed out in my letter that “no medical health group or public health groups have publicly supported changing state adoption laws that deny birth records and family medical history to millions of U.S.-born adoptees.”

I ended my letter with a call to action, for what the public health field commonly calls evidence-based, upstream public health interventions. That is precisely what adoptee rights advocates have been calling for, for more than 50 years, asking for reforms to state laws to unseal original birth records that would provide millions of people better health by allowing them to better know their health history.

I ended my letter noting: “This year, public health practitioners can join with adoptees in legislative advocacy to improve the health of millions by changing these laws.” My note even highlighted my own family’s story about being a Finnish-American and having lost a close birth relative to heart disease very tragically on Dec. 29, 2023.

Even with the death of a close family member and the clearly documented evidence regarding what all health and public health experts say is a best practice, to know one’s family health history, I never heard back from the editorial staff of The Nation’s Health.

I respectfully resubmitted my letter three more times, a total of four times, since Jan. 15, 2024. I have never received confirmation if my letter would be accepted or if it was rejected.

I am assuming now that the letter has been rejected. I believe my letter was not accepted because of the tension such a letter raises.

In my view this tension may even cause internal denial and reveal professional and national patterns of cognitive dissonance by a field that proclaims to promote public health but has embraced national practices on millions of adoptees that harm their health and the nation’s public health.

In my 2018 book examining adoption from a public health perspective and on my website, I’ve long called upon health and public health groups to support adoptees.

“Both have a moral obligation to advocate for the well-being of all adopted Americans as a population,” I write. “Both also have a responsibility to correct their past historic roles creating a system that denies adoptees rights and also health information that could potentially be life-saving for some.”

This field has long supported U.S. adoption practices, particularly in the erasure of millions of U.S-born adoptees’ identities and by creating new and “not truthful” amended birth certificates bearing names of adoptive parents as the legal parents of adopted children and the sealing of original birth records (vital records) in most states, as part of the system’s wide expansion by the 1950s. (This is documented in many books, which I provide links to on my website.)

If you work in public health and want to support adoptee rights in legislative policy debates, I welcome your support. Contact me, and I can help guide your involvement where and when it can count.

Finally, in the time since I first reached out to APHA’s publication, adoptee rights bills in 2024 have stalled in Michigan and Georgia, delaying health and justice to countless tens of thousands of adoptees who needed “experts” to advocate on their behalf. These outcomes could have been different had health and public health experts provided supportive testimony.

Adoptees are, to date, collateral damage to outdated public health practices and laws that no longer serve any purpose when commercial DNA testing has virtually eliminated absurd notions of “secrecy.”

It’s time to fix this where it counts—in policy debates to change state laws and restore rights to adoptees by law.

(Also see my article published Jan. 13, 2024:  “Adoptee rights is also a moral issue to ensure equal rights to good health, yet public health and health professionals ignore this intentionally.”)

 

Letter supporting restoration of legal and human rights to all Michigan-born adoptees

Senator Stephanie Chang, Michigan Legislature, shown making closing remarks during a hearing on February 29, 2024, on two adoptee rights bills.

I submitted a letter on February 28, 2024, in support of two bills in the Michigan Legislature that would restore basic legal and human rights to tens of thousands of Michigan-born adoptees like myself and my adoptive sister. 

You can read a good summary of those bills on this page published by the Michigan Adoptee Rights Coalition, which has worked with lawmakers to advance the much needed and overdue reform.

None of the seven senators on the Civil Rights, Judiciary, and Public Safety Committee of the Michigan State Senate acknowledged they received my supportive letter and evidence on adoptee rights issues in Michigan. Nor did the committee staff during a hearing on February 29, 2024, in the committee on HB 5148 and HB 5149, say my letter was received, even though other individual persons writing for themselves were mentioned by name.

I made clear in my letter I was an author and issue expert on the history of adoption in Michigan, especially Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, one of the largest adoption hubs ever to operate in the United States.

The hearing itself was a lopsided affair, tilted to favor foes of adoptee rights: The Michigan Catholic Conference, an advocacy group affiliated with the Catholic Church, a historic promoter of massive family separation efforts at its Catholic Charity-run maternity homes;  and Right to Life Michigan. Adoptees and their allies were not given agency in a meaningful way. There were just two voices allowed to present in support of measures. No clear adoptee voice from someone who has endured decades of discriminatory treatment by the state and its health bureaucracy, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), was provided any platform to state facts how thousands of adoptees are treated continually by state bureaucrats who consider them to be second-place persons.

Here are some of my take aways from today’s legislative kabuki:

  • The horrific harm adoptees have suffered from this state, especially by its public health bureaucrats at MDHHS, was never raised. We’re dirt to them.
  • In this mostly fact-free session largely turned over to adoption promoters failed to let any adoptees share basic facts on the the shocking history of adoption in the state. In fact, this issue has not come up yet by any presenter in any hearing in the Capitol. No facts on decades of harm and lies to adoptees have been allowed to be shared publicly in this tightly scripted political theater.
  • To lawmakers running this process, it appears that adoptees, who number in the tens of thousands, are still just scary bastards to kick around.

I’m still waiting to see if the legislative statement I provided (see below) will be officially entered into the legislative record. At this point I do not have confidence that the chair of this committee, Sen. Stephanie Chang, views adoptees as human and even worthy of basic equality. You can view it here. Scroll to the end to see and hear for yourself. For me, I got this message: If you’re adopted, you don’t count.

What I don’t know is if the format for today’s hearing was at the whim of the chair or a shared consensus among members of the committee and other parties who negotiated outside of this setting. No lawmaker voiced strong support for adoptee rights today. That is a clear fact.

Letter is as follows: 

Dear Esteemed Senators: 

I’m a very proud Finnish-American Michigander and equally proud Detroit native.

I also am a Michigan adoptee still denied equal treatment by law because of the state’s inequitable laws denying Michigan adoptees the same treatment, by law, as non-adoptees in the state. This ongoing treatment remains in violation of the state’s constitution.

My humble request is this: VOTE YES/DUE PASS FOR HB 5148 and HB 5149. 

I was born at one of country’s largest adoption-promotion facilities, Detroit’s Crittenton General Hospital, in 1965. (It was torn down in 1975.)

I have written a public health examination of that facility: You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. The book came out in 2018, and I alerted every lawmaker in Michigan about the book then.

My book documents the history of Michigan’s adoption system that allowed for likely tens of thousands of family separations through adoption. I also examine how the state’s health system, the MDHHS, has promoted inequitable treatment of Michigan-born adoptees for decades. That treatment continues daily, especially to aging adoptees born between 1945-1980, the boom years of adoption when the state had the greatest number of families severed by this system. 

In my case, I was denied my original birth record for years by the state. Despite the poor treatment by the state’s vital records keepers, I found my biological kin in 1989. This happened in the face of nearly impossible odds and repeated efforts to hide information from me by my adoption agency and state vital records keepers.

It took another 27 years until I received an original copy of my birth certificate in 2016, through a court order, even after I had found my birth kin on my father and mother’s sides of the family back in 1989. Even having known my birth families, MDHHS denied me a copy of my birth certificate. It took countless demands and finally a court order to force the state to surrender my own records. 

This is one example of the ongoing discrimination and harm done by the state’s adoption laws and its state health system to thousands of adoptees like me and my adopted sister (born in Saginaw, born in 1963).

We now have a chance to restore decades of wrong to thousands of people with legislation before you. Many adoptees are now aging, and many have already lost birth family members they may never know because of decades of failures to restore legal rights to adoptees to be treated equally by law.

I’ve worked for years, engaging lawmakers directly, contacting the media, and publishing articles on harm that denies basic legal rights to Michiganders–all in violation of the state constitution.

I can speak to you, your staff, and members of your legislative policy team on my expertise on this issue and the research I have documented in my published work. 

Lastly, I also have published a long form story about my trip to Finland in September 2023 meeting distant Finnish relatives I never knew I had. My story explores the importance of family kinship and how Michigan’s current adoption secrecy laws sever such kin connections, when families separated by time and even oceans have a natural desire to connect. When I was in Finland in 2023, my relatives gave me a stack of letters my great grandmother sent to Finland during World War II, and even pictures after the war that include photos of my birth mother and other Finnish American relatives in my family. The Michigan/Finnish connections were very strong. I just visited my Finnish family members in Finland, again, in February 2024, and they treated me as family because we are family.

Resources to support restoration of basic legal rights to Michigan-born adoptees; please share with colleagues as needed:

News Year’s Day 2024 reflections on adoptee rights and possible reform in Michigan

One of my annual traditions is to start the new year with a healthy outdoor activity. I did that taking a lovely hike in the green hills around Portland, Oregon. Being outdoors and in nature gave me a nice clean head and opportunity to reflect on adoptee rights in my birth state, Michigan, and on larger issues of being an adoptee at this stage in my life. This stage means people are passing away, and these inevitable losses have perhaps sharper meaning for countless tens of thousands of adoptees born in the USA, and also in other countries, who may never, ever know their family origins or be able to answer life’s great and most important question: “Who am I?”

The year 2023 ended with family loss. The year 2024 begins with awareness of who I am, how adoptee rights advocacy works in the messy world of U.S. legislative sausage making, and also how I need to focus on things I can authentically control. It is OK to be in the wilderness, as I have long known. But I am also glad my network has expanded to kin in Finland, where new beginnings with kin mean roads to places I never could have dreamed in 1989. That year I found my biological family and I first violated Michigan’s discriminatory and still current laws denying me my human right to know myself and from whence and where I come.

Update on new legislation to end discrimination against Michigan-born adoptees

A coalition of adoptee rights groups in Michigan called the Michigan Adoptee Rights Coalition is working with a bipartisan group of Michigan state lawmakers to advance two adoptee rights reform bills in Michigan. The measures have cleared the state House of Representatives and were moved over to the state Senate just before the Michigan Legislature adjourned in mid-November 2023.

These legislative efforts, now being pushed by the coalition’s three partners (the Minneapolis-based Adoptee Rights Law Center and Michigan-based Adoptee Advocates of Michigan and Michigan Adoptee Collaborative), follow years of advocacy by countless Michigan-born adoptees, on behalf of probably tens of thousands of persons born and relinquished to adoption there in the years before and since World War II.

Committee hearing testimony on November 8, 2023, on HB 5148 and HB 5149 (snip of public video coverage)

The bills, House Bill 5148, sponsored by Rep. Kristian Grant (D-Grand Rapids), and House Bill 5149, sponsored by Rep. Pat Outman (R-Six Lakes), were introduced in the Legislature in late October 2023. The coalition working with the two lawmakers explains that the introduced legislation would, if not amended further, restore long-denied legal rights for adult adoptees to access their original birth records like all non-adopted Michiganders. 

I encourage people to read the bills themselves (HB 5148 and HB 5149) to see how legislation would change current laws. Currently, it is nearly impossible for any adoptee in Michigan to secure a copy (in redacted form) of their original birth certificate (see my FAQs on that topic).

Most importantly, the legislation, if approved and then signed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer–a Democrat who has not spoken publicly in any statement I can find in favor of adoptee rights–would end outdated laws in Michigan that deny tens of thousands of Michigan born adoptees equal treatment by law. I would be a beneficiary of this legislation, as would my sister, along with uncounted thousands of others separated from their families and kin by the state’s harmful, cruel adoption secrecy laws.

Committee hearing highlights human rights and new and worrisome anti-adoptee messaging

The House Families, Children, and Seniors Committee held its hearing on the bills on Nov. 8, 2023. The hearing is videotaped, and it can be seen by anyone with access to the internet. Testimony and discussion begin at minute 21:00. (Note: the video takes a long time to download; you will need to be patient.)

I was particularly impressed by one supporter of the bill, Ned Andree, a Michigan resident and a bi-racial and transracial adoptee. 

Adoptee Ned Andree speaking in support of the two bills to restore adoptee rights on Nov. 8, 2023

Andree spoke eloquently to the committee in support of the bills. He testified about being adopted and being raised by white parents and seeking his truth for years. He told the committee he was born and relinquished in 1968, from a white mother and an African-born father, originally from Nigeria. Andre spoke of his costly effort find his birth parents, including spending $20,000 to fly to Nigeria to find his birth father, “only to have no success.” Andre also spoke of being denied his truth by the almost impossible barriers created by Michigan’s discriminatory laws denying him his truth. “The current law denies adult adoptees … a fundamental human right granted to non-adoptees.”

Filmmaker and Michigan-born adoptee spoke in support, and a birth mother who also testified in favor of the legislation and told her story of the harm of relinquishment.

Opponents also received prominent time before lawmakers.

Committee hearing testimony of Michigan Catholic Conference (MCC) lobbyist Rebecca Mastee who opposed the two bills on Nov. 8, 2023

Michigan Catholic Conference (MCC) lobbyist Rebecca Mastee came out against the bills with talking points heard in past legislative settings in other states, where opponents seek to enforce legal inequality to millions of persons by supporting outdated adoption secrecy laws. Mastee repeated unprovable talking points and outright lies regarding promised secrecy to birth mothers, when no such legal promises were ever made. Mastee concluded that such non-existing secrecy claims, that have never been documented by written documentation in legislative settings, require that the state continue to deny adult adopted persons equal treatment by law in accessing their birth records, as is the case in Michigan today. These talking points have been used repeatedly in most state legislative hearings I have seen by adoption industry promoters—and Catholic Charities in Michigan and other states were among the biggest adoption “businesses” that separated kin for decades.

Mastee, on behalf of the MCC, also used another false taking point of the alleged “stalking” of birth parents by adoptees as a rationale to deny tens of thousands of adoptees unobstructed access their birth certificate. She offered no facts or any credible evidence such harm can be proven by documented facts. In even more frightening language that is a foreshadowing of pro-adoption rhetoric to come likely for years, Mastee claimed that the bills would harm the flow of newborn infants to the now-expanding baby box supply chain in post-Roe America. (We learned during the hearing that the two bills do not prevent the erasure of new adoptees’ identities who are surrendered in metal dumpsters in Michigan, as allowed by current law, and without any regard to their basic human rights.)

Though grotesque as a basic statement of denied equal rights to current and future adoptees, adoptee rights advocates must confront the new harmful normal that this is now an active talking point. We will likely hear again that adoptees can’t get their birth certificates because it would disrupt the medically harmful practice of newborn infant separation from vulnerable moms through these dangerous baby dumpsters. Luckily this malarky did not convince the state lawmakers the day of the hearing.

Another anti-adoptee rights opponent, lawyer Heath Lowry, of the Michigan Coalition to End Domestic and Sexual violence, testified to oppose the bills. He used the canard of “sexual violence and rape” that has been shared repeatedly in adoptee rights discussions before lawmakers to claim victims of sexual violence would be traumatized to have contact with their child. The scare tactics were given without any evidence. He provided not one fact, no data, not even an anecdote. He claimed that the “consent of birth parents” had to be protected by the continued denial of vital records to thousands of adoptees born in Michigan. His testimony was forcefully tossed aside as baseless by a supporter of the bills who testified in support of the two measures (you can watch the testimonies here).

Fortunately, the committee strongly approved both bills (substitutes) before sending the bills to the full House for a vote.

The new substitute bills are here:

The House of Representatives on Nov. 9, 2023 voted on the substitute bills as follows:

  • HB 5148: Yeas 99, Nays 8, Excused 0, Not Voting 3
  • HB 5149: Yeas 99, Nays 8, Excused 0 Not Voting 3

All of the submitted testimony from adoptees, adoptee rights groups, birth mother groups, and other champions of equality urged lawmakers to support the legislation. All told, supporters provided 45 pages worth of materials in support. That was very impressive to read. You can find a downloadable copy of the testimony for the legislation on the Michigan Legislature’s website. A short hearing summary for Nov. 8, 2023 is here.

Final comments as a Michigan-born adoptee rights advocate

For the record, I have no affiliation with the groups in the coalition who are working with lawmakers, as I explained in this blog post from June 2023.

I have been advocating for adoptee rights in Michigan, my birth state, since the mid-1980s. I published a book on adoptee rights and the public health impacts of the U.S. adoption system in 2018, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. It highlights the history of U.S. adoption and a major adoption mill in Michigan that was likely the country’s second biggest adoption promotion center in terms of babies separated from their mothers. It also highlights my experience being denied my vital records, for decades, and the harmful practices of the state’s health system managing vital records, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. 

The elegance and simplicity of equality in Vermont

Vermont Department of Health application for an adult adoptee to obtain their true birth records (page 1 of 2).

Today is the first day that adult adoptees born in Vermont, who are at least 18 years old, can access their original birth/vital record and not face legalized inequality by discriminatory statutes that single out adoptees as second-class people who do not receive equal treatment by law.

Well done to everyone who made this happen there. I salute all you did for adoptee rights and adoptees everywhere.

It is important to remember, even in the absence of any “landmark court case,” this inequality in most U.S. states violates the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, Article VII.

I also appreciate what the public health employees in Vermont did in communicating this legal reform, passed in the 2022 legislative session.

This is how the Vermont Department of Health communicates equality by law to adoptees born in the state of Vermont, as of July 1, 2023.

What I see on the updated website for the Vermont Department of Health today is the simple elegance of equality for adoptees without harmful conditions, obstructions, discrimination, bias, and public health and human health harm. It is only today, July 1, 2023, that an adult adopted person born in Vermont who is 18 years old can access a document all non-adopted persons born in the USA can access without any discrimination.

Just think about that. And there are anywhere from 5 to 8 million adoptees in the United States, most of whom are still denied this legal right.

This was the result of concerted advocacy, and, again, I applaud all who led the efforts for long-denied reform. It’s important to remember that this law change restoring rights that were taken away, also by law, will not and does not erase decades of past harm.

The New England Adoptee Rights Coalition has noted, “Vermont was among the first 20 states to revoke an adopted person’s right to request and obtain a copy of their own unaltered, original birth certificate in 1946.”

However, the decades-overdue restoration of basic legal rights is a path that other states can follow.

Will Michigan follow Vermont?

The state I remain focused on is my birth state, Michigan, which denies the simplicity of basic legal equality to thousands and thousands of adoptees.

As of July 1, 2023, this is how one of a few Michigan adoption-related statutes looks like, creating a maze of confusion and nearly impossible barriers for any adoptee born in Michigan to ever obtain their original birth record, as a matter of law.

The so-called “progressive” governor, Gretchen Whitmer, continues to promote her chops supporting those who need a helping hand—except of course thousands of adoptees.

She has done nothing about this issue, and she is already in her fifth year in office, with no gesture, statement, or visible communication she cares about thousands of persons, many who are now aging and even dying, or that they will ever know their truth or even kin.

For comparison to Vermont’s reform, here is how inequality looks in Michigan. It is an absolute cluster.

I will keep trying to point out these issues in Michigan, which Vermont’s reform makes all the more glaring.

Vermont’s law gives me hope, when often what I feel is loneliness on the mountain top. And sometimes hope truly can be a wonderful thing.