Tag Archives: Adoption Laws

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.

Resources for adoptee rights advocates, researchers, and policy-makers

Recommended Resources on U.S. Adoption History, Adoptee Rights, the Role of Kinship in Family Relations, and Research on Adoption as a Public Health and Health Issue:

Adoptees are entitled to their original birth certificates as a human right. Mine was withheld from me for decades, and likely illegally, by the State of Michigan, even after I found my biological kin. (I have intentionally hidden information in this copy.)

Today I published a list of resources to help inform adoptees, the media, and anyone working in adoption policy, health, and public health understand the U.S. adoption system and its impacts on millions of adopted persons and also their families.

Thoughtful historic studies of American adoption and the social engineering experience surrounding adoption in the three decades after World War II can be found in most public libraries and on Amazon.com. My forthcoming memoir focuses on this era. I also provide links for groups that provide accurate information about legal issues surrounding adoption laws, discrimination against adoptees and illegitimately born Americans, and articles on adoptee rights as human rights. These are the best place to get the big picture.

My resources also include respected sources that examine adoption as a public health issue and sociological phenomenon, rooted in historic human prejudice against those who are deemed unwanted and illegitimate. One cannot understand American adoption without first grasping the significance of how illegitimacy functions in human society and how bias and prejudice have shaped and still impact adoption policy and law in the United States.

Follow the links to each page, where I have provided links with summary information. 

Finding kindred spirits in the quest for equal rights

This past week, I made some good connections online. Both happened through my Twitter profile.

Unlike some adoptees, I refuse to identify myself on that platform through my status as being adopted. I do call myself a Detroit native and photographer. That said, I find Twitter to be a great tool to share news leads on progress promoting equality for adoptees who seek to change discriminatory laws that deny adoptees in the United States equal treatment under the U.S. Constitution (14th Amendment) and state laws.

The first connection came with a Minnesota-based attorney named Gregory Luce, who recently launched a website for his Adoptee Rights Law Center. In his own words, Luce writes, “Nationally, however, we will work with lawyers and activists to develop legal strategies to advance adoptee rights, whether through legal briefs and research, support to lawyers on the ground, pro bono representation for adoptees, or coordination of state-by-state legal efforts.”

Luce has published a detailed state-by-state analysis of the state-level and mostly restrictive adoption laws. Anyone who is interested in the larger policy framework that continues to deny civil rights to adoptees should bookmark this page.

It was fun to connect with Darryl McDaniels, fellow adoptee and internationally known rapper, over Twitter about something we both care about.

Luce is not in the business of framing adoption as a wonderful “gift” or trying to be part of the larger and international adoption industrial complex. (That is what I call it in my forthcoming book, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are.) We exchanged a couple of emails. I shared with him my research findings on practices in Michigan, which I have published on my website. I’m glad to know there is an advocate who is using his legal expertise in this overlooked area of discrimination.

My second Twitter connection occurred when I sent a thank-you Tweet to Darryl McDaniels, one of the founders of the path-breaking rap group Run DMC. He had Tweeted support for adoption-records reform legislation in his home state, New York.

McDaniels, like me, is an adoptee. Like me, he found his family. McDaniels also created one of the best portrayals of the American adoption experience in the cover he did with fellow adoptee and singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan of Just Like Me. The video shows McDaniels’ birth and relinquishment in 1964, and what that meant to him and his birth mother.

To my pleasant surprise, McDaniels wrote me back with a nice Tweet that made me smile. That Tweet received more than 1,000 views when I last checked. It is very nice to know that there are strangers out there who are working toward the same goal, but with different tools and with great energy and commitment for the same thing—the right to what is theirs as a birthright: their original birth records.