Tag Archives: Governor Gretchen Whitmer

Coming home to my Finnish ancestral villages, in defiance of Michigan’s adoption secrecy laws

During my trip to Finland in September 2023, I visited two ancestral villages of my Finnish kin, Kortesjärvi and Alahärmä, in a rural farming area of South Ostrobothnia.

The region is located inland from the Baltic Sea, east of Vaasa. I went there with my Finnish relative and her husband on September 7, 2023.

On that life-changing trip, I felt a visceral connection to my ancestral home, where a quarter of my biological family traces its historical roots. These are very peasant farming roots. It’s hard to describe the joy I felt. I tried to capture some of that on this video. It only does those feelings partial justice. The feeling was one of utter and total joy. (I will be publishing a story soon about this amazing trip.)

By sharing this video here that is filled with elation, I am not gloating.

I am pointing out a brutal reality of contemporary politics that marginalizes tens of thousands of adoptees born in Michigan, like me. I’ve been raising this issue consistently since 2015, and published my adoption history/memoir documenting these wrongs in detail.

By law in the state of Michigan, I am also denied the information about my ancestral and living kin, like tens of thousands of other born and then relinquished there.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), supposedly a progressive, and the Democrats who control the Michigan Legislature, have done nothing to fix decades of this injustice denying people the right to know their kin/past.

It remains deeply painful to me to know that this joy I had, finding my past, my kin, my ancestral villages in Finland, is denied to tens of thousands of Michigan adoptees, still, by law.

As I continue to share, Gov. Whitmer ultimately owns this failure. She can lead and fix it. To date, she has done nothing and has never communicated publicly she will do a thing to correct a historic injustice. Without a cost to her politically, nothing will change. That is up to those of us who seek reform to exact the leverage to move reform.

We all have a right to know our origins

Finding myself and my kin in beautiful Finland

This month, I had the good fortune to have one of the most memorable trips I have ever had.

I visited Finland, or Suomi, in Finnish.

It is the ancestral home of my maternal great grandmother and great grandfather. I am a proud Finnish-American by birthright.

Using information shared with me by my biological family, along with the help of strangers as well as just good luck, I found my biological relatives before I Ieft for the country of some of my ancestral kin. We share a common ancestry to small villages in South Ostrobothnia, about 75 kilometers from the city of Vaasa. We are bound and connected by blood.

Over several days, I met many of my kin in different cities. I will be sharing more on that later. Those encounters reaffirmed for me, again, the basic human truth of the critical importance of kin relationships and biological family to our place in the universe. Deprived of that knowledge, we will forever feel adrift. With that knowledge, we feel a connection.

Many thousands of Michigan-born adoptees, like me, are denied this soul-enriching information by discriminatory state laws.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, has done nothing to try and fix this grave injustice after nearly six years in office, though her and her staff are well aware of his legal inequality to thousands of people. There is also indifference visible by public silence to this systemic denial of basic rights by the Democratically controlled state legislature as well.

The only solution to this problem is the passage of lasting legislative reform.

I have been working on this for years, and I’ve reached out repeatedly to lawmakers, the state vital records keepers, and to Gov. Whitmer’s senior staff. They know about the issue, and they will do nothing unless they are forced to do something by residents in Michigan impacted by these laws.

Here are some suggestions I shared earlier this year for lobbying for reform to end this harm. I hope you will support these efforts, even if you are not a Michigan-born adoptee. As my Finnish relatives would say, “Kiitos!”

Adoptee rights reform in Michigan, a new development

Home page of the Michigan Adoptee Rights Coalition

This week I learned that a new adoptee rights group had launched in my birth state of Michigan. The group is called Michigan Adoptee Rights Coalition.

You can learn more about that group here.

The group describes itself this way:

Who We Are: We are adoptee rights organizations working together to secure equality for all Michigan-born adopted people.

What We’re Doing: We work with advocates, legislators, and allies to build and sustain a strong coalition focused on Michigan and adoptee rights legislation.

I had done a presentation earlier this spring to some adoptees based in Michigan, and I am not currently affiliated with this group as a member.

As a Michigan-born adoptee, and like likely tens of thousands of other adoptees born there, I warmly and enthusiastically welcome anyone and any group who will support restoring basic legal rights, secured in legislation, to all adoptees born in my home state to access their original vital records without any obstruction.

I have advocated for this larger goal in my book and on my website for years.

As someone who lives nearly 2,000 miles away from my birth state, I have found myself hamstrung to lobby lawmakers directly. So having people in Michigan doing the heavy lifting means a great deal to me.

Many adoptees like me are no longer living in our home states. It poses a frustrating and costly barrier to so many who would like to advocate in person for reform. I continue to applaud the hard work everyone is doing collectively, in every state, even if they cannot do that in person in state capitols.

I set up a table outside of the Michigan Capitol in June 2018 as part of my advocacy for legislative reform for adoptee rights.

For my part, I did one-on-one advocacy in Lansing in 2018, but I have not had the time and resources to commit myself to doing face-to-face advocacy, which is critical for all legislative reform work. The pandemic and life and all of its many twists and turns has forced me to prioritize other things. Today, I know I cannot do what I would like to do as a citizen for in-person work with elected lawmakers in Michigan.

Michigan and adoptee rights:

Today, Michigan is a state with a Democratic super majority. The Democrats control the state house, state senate, and governor’s office.

Yet as of today, I have seen no signal from emerging national Democratic darling, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, that she will do anything to address the historic injustice of denying basic legal rights to thousands of Michigan natives.

I have encouraged people to get involved, to work with their lawmakers, and to step up the pressure. Without heat, there will be harmful indifference, and right now Whitmer’s silence has signaled that all adoptees born in Michigan are a non-issue for her, even as older adoptees and their biological kin die out with their truth hidden by harmful laws.

That needs to change.

As we look ahead, I am anxious to read about developments of the new coalition in Michigan, including what legislative proposals may come forward.

I am especially interested to learn about developments on a terribly written and conceived bill, HB 4529, introduced May 9, 2023, by Rep. Patrick Outman (R-Six Lakes) that could expand discriminatory practices to even more adoptees born in Michigan.

To keep current on legislation in Michigan, one can sign up for committee legislative email updates from the Michigan Legislature here. You may wish to sign up for multiple committees that may address adoption-related legislation. You may wish to consider following these committees:

House:

Health Policy
Families, Children, and Seniors

Senate:

Health Policy

Warning: expect a nasty fight with state bureaucrats:

For what it is worth, I would like to warn all adoptee rights advocates that they will likely face tremendous resistance to any legislative reform in Michigan by the state’s large health agency called the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS).

In its coverage of the Flint drinking water crisis, The Intercept featured this image of protesters holding a container of the city’s lead-tainted drinking water that caused harm to infants and children who consumed the drinking water in Flint. See The Intercept’s story here: https://theintercept.com/2021/07/21/flint-water-crisis-rick-snyder/.

The agency has a culture of withholding information and denying even basic service to likely thousands of Michigan-born adoptees. More worrisome is MDHHS’s willingness to withhold information that led to lasting and permanent medical harm to children in Flint during the lead and drinking water crisis starting in 2014.

As the Intercept reported in 2021 regarding the systemic failures at MDHHS: “Patricia McKane, an epidemiologist with MDHHS who testified that she was pressured to lie by [Dr. Eden] Wells about elevated blood-lead levels in Flint’s children, was found to have only had four text messages on her phone from 2015 and seven total messages. (Wells denied pressuring her to lie.) Fellow MDHHS epidemiologist Sarah Lyon-Callo, director of the state Bureau of Epidemiology and Population Health, who Wells copied in an email responding to accusations by a Wayne State University professor that she was trying to conceal the link between the Flint River switch and the Legionella outbreak, had no messages prior to June 2016.”

MDHHS’s bureaucratic actions speaks volumes to its internal culture leading to horrific and intentional harm, and how it would take steps that would prioritize taking actions to protect its narrow interests.

If one does not read this writing on the wall here regarding bureaucratic harm and indifference to marginalized persons, one will never be able to plan a legislative strategy on adoption reform in Michigan.

In short, one cannot expect MDHHS to sit quietly on an issue it has signaled at every instance for decades to uncounted number of adoptees that it will fight to the bitter end to win.

In my view, this will be a bruising fight because it remains the imperative of any large system to prove that it has power over weak groups of historically marginalized people by being able to deny and control basic legal rights. Power matters, especially to bureaucracies. Adoptees will forever be one of the easiest groups to use for these ends.

My great worry is that MDHHS will work behind the scenes against Michiganders who were adopted, and no one will ever see their actions unless they are revealed with a public records request. And don’t expect any records to be released either—the agency has a record of flagrantly preventing public records requests from being completed too.

Restoring rights to adoptees in Michigan ultimately is about power, so let’s use it

I am continuing to create short videos focusing on the injustice experienced by thousands of adoptees born in Michigan who are denied equal treatment by law to access their vital records only because of their status at birth.

For 2023, I will continue to focus on Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Ultimately she will drive any agenda if there is true legislative reform. Her team can and should be coordinating legislative proposals based on measures now recently passed in other legislatures in the past two years.

However, Gov. Whitmer really will not care unless there is a cost. I outline that calculus in my video here.

For adoptees born in Michigan who are still denied legal access to their vital records, I would encourage you to learn how other states got it right, like New York, and propose that Michigan’s legislature adopt similar reform, without delay.

Focus on the law and its denied rights to thousands.

Tell your story, but focus on injustice and equity, and hold lawmakers to account who claim to champion both.

Remember, one cannot champion the status quo and claim to be an advocate for equity and equality at the same time. By logic alone, that is impossible.

As I have noted before, adoption is a uniquely adored American institution by both parties, Democrat and Republican.

Therefore, in getting a leader like Gov. Whitmer to take action, the logical path is to create a real political cost for inaction and for failure to fix a massive wrong. This matters because she is making moves nationally for her next political chapter. Politics is an often bruising gladiatorial arena and a choreographed stage at the same time. Those on that stage carefully measure the costs.

As long as Gov. Whitmer sees no cost to her continued inaction, we will not see any progress on reform.

You can read a longer essay I wrote about this approach at the start of 2023.

Thanks for your work to advocate for reform. It’s decades overdue.