Tag Archives: American Public Health Association

Countless adoptees could have slowly ticking health issues and are intentionally robbed of life-saving information

The Finnish population, thanks to genetic health research, has had specific health problems identified with genetic markers, helping the country plan population measures to help all residents of Finnish heritage.

One year ago yesterday, my bio-uncle, twin brother of my bio-mom, died of heart conditions. It was not a surprise, and his mortality outcome at the end of December 2023 was entirely predictable because he was half ethnically Finnish.

Such health risks that my bio-uncle had are very well-documented among Finns at the population level and among tens and tens of thousands of Finnish-Americans because of genetic risk factors. My deceased birth mother’s slightly younger cousin, who is 100 percent Finnish, lost her father to a heart attack while he was in his 40s, and he was also 100 percent Finnish from another Finnish family line. She also just had a heart procedure for her problem heart. That is the genetic health landscape for many Finnish Americans.

Though I remain mostly healthy at my age, I still carry those risks in my genes because I’m one-quarter Finnish. My Finnish kin in Finland have shared with me there are heart issues in our genetic line we share.

Knowing such information is considered a best tool to promote individual and public health, yet U.S. public health and health professionals still refuse to help end adoption secrecy or support any adoptee rights group in state policy debates to reform harmful laws denying family health history to adoptees. These barriers deny this potentially life-saving information from literally millions of people only because of their status as adoptees in the United States.

U.S. public health and its many professionals do not care about adoptees’ wellbeing  

On January 13, 2024, and shortly after my uncle’s death just before the end of 2023, I published an essay, “Adoptee rights is also a moral issue to ensure equal rights to good health, yet public health and health professionals ignore this intentionally,” about this issue and how public health and nearly all disease-focused health groups and medical professionals do nothing to help address issues for adoptees whose medical health history remains hidden from them by discriminatory state laws.

I wrote: “These groups and experts have never cared, based on facts showing no documented efforts to support adoptees, even in public relations messaging. There is no public evidence visible anywhere they will reverse course and advocate to change laws helping adoptees. Their failure is palpable.

“Collectively, this represents a complete moral and collective professional failure of these systems to improve the health of individuals and population health. Because those harmed are adoptees, this failure remains an acceptable form of collateral damage to ensure the U.S. adoption system remains a broadly accepted and beloved institution, that continues to be supported by the medical and public health professionals at all levels.”

I did a search of the American Public Health Association website on December 29, 2024 to see if it had information published about “adoptees,” and my search yielded no information.

I even wrote to the American Public Health Associations publication, in January 2024, with a letter to the editor of its flagship publication, “The Nation’s Health,” to raise this issue. I was greeted with silence after repeated follow ups for a response. After I flagged their silence on social media and wrote another essay on April 7, 2024, where I read my letter on a video, I suddenly received an email reply that amounted to a bureaucratic blow off.

In short, they found ways to ignore my letter and then blow off my submission with a hallow reply that normally one hears from indifferent and low-level bureaucrats. I decided to reply about the harm such indifference causes. I told the publication’s staffer:

“You intentionally chose the path where there was no leadership and absolutely no evidence of needed moral courage to help support overdue reform and end adoption secrecy laws.

 “It is fitting that this is all now encapsulated in the memory of the death of my birth kin and the people who don’t care what this means to ordinary people denied health and basic rights.

 “Congratulations for what you and your peers willingly choose to be by your chosen actions. Remember, it is always a choice. And in life, we are always remembered by our deeds, not the words.”

Nothing has changed as 2024 ends

The experiences associated with the meaning of my close biological relative’s genetically related and sad death once again come to mind as 2024 is about to end, and adoptees still do not count to public health and health professionals.

Not one thing has changed nationally since my bio-uncle died at the state level in 2024 to restore rights to adoptees, with the exception of laws passed a year earlier.

Adoptees are acceptable and—I argue—necessary collateral damage for this system that these professionals helped to grow, legitimize, and support for decades.

In short, the groups that claim to help individuals and the wider population, including all at-risk groups that adoptees clearly are, remain comfortable with their massive cognitive dissonance. Nothing has changed.

NOTE: For more history and background on denied family health history to millions of adoptees and the role of public health, medical, social work, and other professionals who created the modern American adoption system, including the legitimization of mass family separation by adoption by state public health agencies, you can order my book, “You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are,” published in 2018.

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.”)