Tag Archives: Bastards

‘Can you help me with my search?’

Because my website for my book on the U.S. adoption experience is one of the few online resources exploring the history of the adoption system in Michigan in the post-World War II era, I am frequently contacted by strangers impacted by adoption in my birth state. 

The contacts include those who were placed for adoption like me looking for help finding their biological kin. I get emails from birth mothers who may have given up their child at my birthplace, Crittenton General Hospital, perhaps one of the largest maternity hospitals in the country that promoted the separation of mothers and their infants from the 1930s through its closing in 1975. I also have been contacted by adoptees seeking help petitioning Michigan courts for their records—a topic I address with online fact sheets that provide detailed steps how to do a court petition, with links to all documents that I have been able to find.

For nearly all requests, there literally is nothing I can do to help people with their searches. What I have already published, and update as I get more information, is the information that I can share.

I recently replied to an adoptee and a financial investor in Florida who wanted me to provide tips about doing a court petition. Because I am not a lawyer, I cannot provide legal advice. In his case, I sent him links to my two FAQs, which give as much information and guidance that I am able to provide.

I provided those materials because the state of Michigan and the courts in Michigan refuse to provide this information for adoptees, when they have a legal and moral obligation to assist the tens of thousands of adoptees separated by the state’s discriminatory laws denying all adoptees their legal, human, and equal rights to their vital records and their biological, medical, and family histories.

My birthplace, Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, taken in 1965, the year of my birth

No, this is not fair

When I provide replies that do not offer the assistance people want, I usually never get a follow up or even a courtesy appreciatory comment that the materials published provide some people a small measure of information not given by the state. While that is a bit disappointing, my reasons for publishing my resources have never been about money or even gratitude. My focus remains on changing laws that deny rights to many that are decades in need of overhaul. If the material I share provides some small measure of assistance to the public, particularly adoptees and their kin searching for them, then that is a nice outcome too. That is reward in itself.

Being an adoptee, with few political and media allies, is by definition a hard place to be when you are searching for answers to who you are and your kin connections. No one’s story is the only story. All of them matter, and all adoptees, on their own, have to confront their reality in a way that makes sense for them.

My view on this approach to the adoptee-lived life may not be shared by many. However, my perspective, particularly at this point in my life, is that this is the often inequitable fate many adoptees were handed. It has nothing to do with fairness. Only the individuals can confront their fate in a way that makes sense for them. That is my own view, but also one deeply informed by the writings and wisdom of Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl.

Holocaust survivor, writer, and humanist Viktor Frankl, taken two years after his liberation from the Nazi camp system

Writing shortly after the war and his internment in Nazi camps, Frankl wrote that when faced with any situation in life, we all have a freedom to choose how we confront life’s obstacles. “Between stimulus and response, there is a space,” he wrote. “In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

That is not an idea that a lot of people, including adoptees, embrace for many reasons. But in my own experience, this perspective has helped me. It also continues to inform what I can and cannot do when others need help with the system that remains shrouded in inequity and legal barriers that deny equality.

A recent request

I was contacted last night by a man in his mid-70s who claimed that he was the father of a son born at my birthplace, in Detroit, who was then placed for adoption.

I do not know all of the details. I do not know why he was not involved in his purported son’s life earlier, but frequently the persons who had to deal with negative consequences of having a child out of marriage prior to the 1970s were the mother and the child. Historically and globally, women and children have borne the brunt of societies’ brutal and heartless treatment of single mothers and bastard children. This stigma fueled the system into which I was born an adoptee.

The historic reality of this treatment has never escaped me. It also was reflected in my own experience, with a father-by-sperm only, who never acknowledged I was his biological offspring by the time he died 15 years after I first met him. That is hardly a new story. It is part of the larger and universal story of illegitimacy.

When this main who claimed he was the father of an adoptee asked me to help give him assistance in finding his son, I literally had no advice for him because I do not provide that assistance or do searches for others. As someone who has now studied the history of illegitimacy and the U.S. adoption system’s historic treatment of infants and mothers, I did not feel greatly compelled to know why at the end of his life, he felt a need to make this connection. I do wonder why he was not there when his son started his life and needed to be with his biological kin.

Here is what I shared. I would like to think he might care enough about other children relinquished because of societal stigma, because of fathers who refused to accept paternity as history has documented as the norm now for centuries, and because of concerns for equality. If this man did take action to help other adoptees, and not just his own son he claimed to have sired, that would be great. But I am also a realist and know that we are often motivated by our own needs foremost. One of those needs is to know our family relations, as adoptees know best of all.

“I’m not in a position to provide people assistance with their personal searches,” I wrote the purported father of a fellow Detroit-born adoptee. “However, one way you can help adoptees is to consider helping all of them. You can do that by supporting legislation that would open records to them at the state legislative level, in Michigan and nationally, given you are involved in this system directly by fathering a son who was was placed for adoption. You can write a letter to the editor of your paper saying that’s needed. You can contact a TV station saying, if Michigan provided adoptees access to their records, I might have contact with my kin. These are all options you can take now. The information I have provided to adoptees is on my website to help any of them who are seeking justice and their past.”

I never heard back from him.

Being disavowed in the official record: the adoptee’s mission inevitable

Rudy Owens and his paternal birth aunt, 2007

Last week I learned two of my three paternal biological aunts passed away, along with another aunt, who had married the younger brother of my adoptive father.

That means I counted three family losses of elderly family members in one week. It also meant I had to run through a lot of mixed feelings about the meaning these deaths as an adoptee.

I never met one of my two deceased paternal aunts. She, like her sister, apparently died peacefully in her 80s. However, I am fairly certain she had known about me since 1989, when I first found my biological father. Since that fateful meeting, neither she nor her immediately family made a single effort to contact me, and she died without ever speaking to me or communicating with me. Though I knew her name, and determined from online records where she lived, I decided not to reach out to her. 

That same day I learned of this aunt’s death, further internet searching revealed I also had lost another of the two sisters, the one I had met. Both had passed away in 2013, and there was never any communication about these deaths that reached me from any family member or contact. That means half a decade had passed since my paternal aunts had died and at least two members of this clan who knew how to reach me did not bother to inform me. For an adoptee, I call that situational utterly normal.

I had met one of the aunts, and along with her daughter, my paternal cousin, in 2007 at their home in a Midwest state. I wrote about that meeting and its meaning in my memoir on the adoption experience called You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. It was a memorable day for all of us, but in the end, even in the years after we met, I was still the official bastard, the filius nullius, or no one’s son. 

Illegitimate offspring are not counted in the record

I read the official obituaries of both women online and made copies for my files of the strangers who are my kin. Like most obituaries, the columns listed all of the surviving kin, including the surviving sister, offspring (alive and dead), grandchildren, and more. But I, a member of this clan by blood and DNA, was not acknowledged. I am the whited-out person who is not “legitimate,” and thus not a part of the “official story.”

In my aunts’ deaths, I would remain forever “illegitimate” to this family, never to be acknowledged. This is not the case in the obituaries of my maternal grandparents. My name and family status were recognized in their obituaries. I was real kin in their eyes and hearts.

These outcomes for adoptees of my generation provide important lessons we learn after we find our kin, if we are lucky to do that with the system stacked against us to prevent most family reunions. In my case, my bastard status was confirmed, yet again, by the truths that these facts reveal about my place in the world and my meaning to my paternal kin and to others.

I can only guess, still, what my deceased and unknown aunt may have known of me, beyond the meeting I had with her sister in 2007. I do not know if my story ever reached the surviving relatives’ ears. I learned there are surviving grandkids of the aunt I did not meet. So, am I unknown, or am I still that dirty family secret that is hidden in the not-so-benevolent cloak of adoption secrecy that is meant to keep kin like us forever apart?

Another death in the families

At the end of the week, I also learned about the death of one of my adoptive aunts. She was married into my adoptive father’s kin, as the wife of my adoptive father’s youngest brother. We had barely known each other over the decades, except through regular holiday correspondences we kept up for decades. On that count, we connected.

Adoptees, like the IMF team in the Mission Impossible franchise, shown in this publicity still, will be disavowed in life, and their existence will mostly be erased from the official family records.

Along with her departed husband, who died last year, we had a lot of unspoken issues that we never talked about, particularly my adoptive father and his alcoholism and what that meant for him to be taking care of me and my adoptive sister part of the year when he had custodial rights. I describe these awkward skeletons in the closet in my memoir. 

I last saw this aunt in 2015, when I was completing research for my book and revisiting places I had spent part of my childhood in West Virginia and Ohio. Those were perhaps the darkest days of my life. When I met my aunt and my uncle in 2015, they were frail and both suffering from health problems. I felt kindness to them and no ill feelings. In the end, we never spoke about my adoptive father’s terrible drug problems as an alcoholic and his tragic demise or my status as the adopted son. We let the sleeping elephants lie.

By week’s end, I felt exhausted. I was processing the loss of three family members. Yet, in the end, two of them were still strangers, and one was estranged by family ghosts. I felt loss and also I felt emotional distance.

This complicated emotional space that I have navigated my whole life is not new to many adoptees. One reason I wrote my book was to share how hard it is for non-adopted persons to understand this lifelong experience and journey. I explain this complex dance at length in my memoir.

In the end, when the records of our lives are written, the official record will still disavow the illegitimate offspring who were lost to the U.S. adoption system. We are like the IMF team in Mission Impossible, or some CIA team. In many ways we are very similar: We have dual identities, and because of discriminatory legal systems in most states, our records must remain top-secret documents that are never shared with the majority of those separated from their families after they were born.

It is a mission I never I had choice to accept or decline. It was my fate at birth.

Rudy Owens’ book reading will shed light on systemic inequities of the U.S. adoption experience

Rudy Owens holding his completed memoir.

Rudy Owens holds his completed memoir.

I am proud to announce my first book reading, and lecture, on my newly released memoir on the U.S. adoption experience, which examines the personal and public health impacts of this widespread American institution. 

If you are in the Portland area, please mark your calendar for the event:

What: Rudy Owens book reading and lecture on his memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are
Where: Tigard Public Library (13500 SW Hall Blvd., Tigard, OR 97223)
When: Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2018, 6-7:30 p.m.

The reading is free and open to the public.

The event is geared to adults, given the subject matter of unprotected sex, illegitimacy, the treatment of bastard infants historically, and the taboo topic of adoption as a system that legally discriminates against millions of U.S. adoptees solely on the basis of their status of birth. The reading will be highlighting the need for comprehensive legal and public health system reforms to restore all U.S. adoptees’ full legal and human rights to their original birth records.

Copies of my memoir will be available for sale at the event. Copies may also be purchased in advance online from several online booksellers. 

Please share this event listing with friends, coworkers, and family members who are impacted by the U.S. institution of adoption or who have an interest in human rights, civil rights, family separation, and women’s and reproductive rights. 

I have created a Facebook event page you are welcome to share as well. I hope to see you all there.

Find a press release for the book reading here.

Does bias influence how publications choose to tell stories about adoptees and adoption history?

This historic photo of a Crittenton mission from the late 1950s or 1960s shows how expecting mothers who stayed at Crittenton homes and hospitals were given maternal health instructions. Almost all of those mothers gave up their infants for adoption at the encouragement of doctors, social workers, and staff at Crittenton and other maternity homes in the decades after World War II. (Photo courtesy of the National Crittenton Foundation.)

This week I was informed by a Michigan historical publication that its editorial committee rejected my proposed article on the historical significance of my birthplace, Crittenton General Hospital. “While the committee appreciates the article you submitted, it unfortunately does not meet our magazine’s editorial needs and we will be unable to accept it for publication,” the editor wrote. 

This means that an article I proposed to tell the story of thousands of single Michigan mothers who gave up their children for adoption in the decades after World War II in Detroit will not reach a wider audience in Michigan. For that, I am disappointed. 

I respectfully asked for feedback how I did not meet their needs, and did not get a reply. I do not expect a response, and to date have not received one.

[Author’s update, 9/15/2017, 1:05 p.m.: Hours after publishing this article, I received a reply from the publication I had contacted that its editorial committee thought my article was a “personal opinion piece,” which they do not accept in their publications. That reply arrived only after I had provided the publication a courtesy email to let them know I had published this article.]

No publication is obligated to tell any writer why they are rejected. Rejection is the norm in the world of writing and publishing. It also inspires good writers.

However, this outcome, which I have experienced when reaching out to many different publications to engage them on the history and problems in the U.S. adoption system, likely has other issues beyond my storytelling abilities or even the merits of the stories I am trying to tell.

The outcome falls into a trend of editorial bias by people who likely do not recognize how their decisions about covering the story of the U.S. adoption system and its history are influenced by their own subconscious views. My forthcoming book on the U.S. adoption experience investigates how bias influences individuals’ and society’s views about illegitimately born people (bastards like me), including adoptees. I also have published an essay on that topic on my blog.

Is it Bad Writing/Research, Bias, or a ‘Suspect’ Writer/Researcher?

Source: Pannucci, Christopher J., and Edwin G. Wilkins. “Identifying and Avoiding Bias in Research.” Plastic and reconstructive surgery 126.2 (2010): 619–625. PMC. Web. 15 Sept. 2017.

The larger issue of research bias is well documented in human-subjects research. That field boasts a staggering list of biases that impact the research outcomes, before, during, and after clinical trials. It also is a well-documented issue in communications.

The open-source scientific publication PLoS noted in a 2009 editorial, “A large and growing literature details the many ways by which research and the subsequent published record can be inappropriately influenced, including publication bias, outcome reporting bias, financial and non-financial, competing interests, sponsors’ control of study data and publication, and restrictions on access to data and materials. But it can be difficult for an editor, reading a submitted manuscript, to disentangle these many influences and to understand whether the work ultimately represents valid science.”

When a writer or researcher is rejected, they have almost no chance of persuading a potential publisher to change its views. If you push your case, you also are further discounted as too “attached” or “engaged.”

In the world of investigative journalism, you are even considered dangerous, and your own publications may turn against you if you fail to accept outcomes that can squash controversial stories. This is a common experience to anyone who has mattered in the world of journalism. 

The celebrated investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in 1993 that telling stories that some people do not want to read but should be told is often a thankless, even dangerous task.

Author and investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, courtesy of Wikipedia.

“Reporters write a story once, and then there’s no response and they stop,” says Hersh. “Somehow the object [is] to keep on pushing. The problem is, what do you do when you make yourself a pain in the ass and you become suspect? Because as everybody knows, for some mysterious reasons, if you have a point of view in a newspaper room you are suspect. Or if you’re a true believer you’re dangerous, you’re political. That’s really crazy. Because it seems to me the only good stories that come out of anything come from people who have a passion about right and wrong, and good and bad. It’s a terrible tragedy. It’s very tough.”

I always turn to Hersh’s quote that I jotted down when I first became a journalist, when I need to remember that telling important stories, including ones that challenge orthodoxy and prejudice, will never be an easy road to travel. That is why I wrote my book about the American adoption experience, knowing it would not be an easy story to tell or to sell.

But anything that matters, really and truly matters, requires overcoming such obstacles. That is how you find personal meaning and how you make positive and meaningful change that may take years to achieve.