Bryan Elliott, host of Living in Adoptionland, and Rudy Owens, author of You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are
Earlier this month, I sat down with fellow adoptee and now podcaster Bryan Elliott to discuss the U.S. adoption system and why I wrote my book examining that institution and my journey through it. I had no idea where our conversation would land. However, I trusted Bryan’s professionalism as a writer, director, and multimedia producer to allow our conversation to wander where it naturally wanted to go.
Bryan posted our conversation this week on his podcast channel, Living in Adoptionland. I could not be happier with the interview and the high quality of the production.
Bryan had contacted me in late spring and invited me to his new show, which he launched in late May. And he’s been busy, having already published nearly a dozen shows, with conversations with some fellow adoptees I know from their advocacy on Twitter and other spaces where adoptees advocate for reform to a system that has impacted millions of people.
Bryan shares this summary why he’s producing his show now. He describes it as “the podcast I wish I had before I started on my journey more than 25 years ago. It’s a mosaic of real stories from the adoption community which includes parents who gave up their children, families struggling with infertility and natural conception, and the often silent adult adoptees.”
Before we taped the podcast, with Bryan in southern California and me in Portland, we agreed to a couple of ground rules. One was that I did not want to be involved in efforts that were contrary to my larger goal in writing my book of restoring rights to adoptees, and he respected that. Another point we both agreed to was to not center ourselves in the much larger national crisis surrounding the Supreme Court’s ending of legal abortion in the United States in June with its disastrous decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. That recent, historic decision by the right-leaning court ended nearly 50 years of bedrock reproductive and legal rights secured for women.
Both of us, in our conversations before the taping, recognized this decision had tremendous impacts on women. As adult adoptees, we also both knew too well what this likely meant for the promotion of adoption by those who overturned this half-century-old legal precedent. Speaking for myself, I believe Bryan shared my own view that having two white guys talking about an issue that impacts so many women, including many brown and black women, would not be appropriate, even though as adoptees we probably would have critical perspectives to share on the national policy debate that is falsely promoting adoption as the policy alternative to abortion healthcare. In the end, we did mention this topic because one cannot talk about adoption in 2022 without talking about abortion and how that intersects with adoptees as a huge group of Americans.
With the big issues agreed upon, we could then turn to other topics he wanted to ask about and I was able to share about my now four-year-old memoir and public health analysis of this massive and still discriminatory system. Some of the themes I touched on were:
- Understanding how adoption must be seen sociologically because of its history tied to the larger historic problem of illegitimacy;
- How doctors played a bedrock role in the massive expansion of adoption in the United States after the 1940s and how that role ensures it remains a legitimate and acceptable “practice,” even when it separates mothers and their children;
- How my life as an adoptee has evolved over time, providing me insights shared by writers and thinkers I admire, including Viktor Frankl;
- Explaining to others how being adopted and being denied rights means confronting lies, discrimination, and harm that is institutionalized and continues to harm countless persons.
I would encourage those who are interested in learning more about adoption to listen to his previous interviews and to bookmark his podcast platform. And as an adoptee, I want to say how refreshing it is to talk about adoption and not have my basic human rights challenged because the interviewer did not do their homework in understanding how adoption impacts millions of persons denied their legal rights and basic human rights to know who they are.
Thanks again, Bryan. Keep up the great work. I will be tuning in again to more conversations on Living in Adoptionland.
To learn more about Bryan, visit his website here. You can reach out to Bryan here.
You can continue to reach me on my website. My hope is this conversation inspired some listeners to want to learn more and buy my book.