Rudy Owens’ memoir on the American adoption experience
This month, the nation’s oldest adoptee rights group, the American Adoption Congress, featured an essay I wrote on my recently released memoir. I appreciate being recognized by this national organization that is committed to promoting the rights of all U.S. adoptees. I also appreciate the group for bringing my book, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, to the adoption of adoptees nationwide.
You can find a complete copy of the post I wrote here.
Here is my introduction to my essay in the newsletter:
When I began writing my story as an American adoptee, I wrote a mission statement and committed myself to telling a different kind of story with a larger goal of changing how adoptees are treated by law.
That tale would also show how U.S. adoption became a national social-engineering experiment that today remains mired in discriminatory state laws, not equality and fairness. I mixed the stories of my experience with data and research and employed the methods of an investigative journalist and a public health advocate.
Specifically, I used a “public health lens,” examining adoption’s impacts on the people most impacted by it. I also examined the institution’s historic, social, legal, biological, and religious underpinnings, as well as the political forces that created it and still sustain it.
My resulting memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, recounts spending decades of my life seeking my family, records, and ultimately justice. On each leg of what I call a “hero’s journey,” I reveal how my tale sheds light on the adoption system that emerged in the post-World War II decades.
By focusing adoptee rights as a public health issue—which it always has been—I call out numerous ways that adoptees and the public can more clearly see underlying inequities in the U.S. adoption system. … [see more]