Tag Archives: Illegitimacy

Webinar recording available on petitioning courts for original birth records

Nearly 60 people joined a recent webinar on March 21, 2021, hosted by the adoptee advocacy group Adoptees United. I presented with fellow adoptees Greg Luce of Minnesota and Courtney Humbaugh of Georgia. Each of us highlighted our experience as adoptees denied basic legal and equal rights in accessing our adoption and vital records.

My introductory comments can be found at the start of the recording.
My comments about my court petition begin here (17:00 into the recording).
A copy of my presentation that I shared with attendees can be found here.

As a presenter, I wanted to provide a roadmap for others who face nearly insurmountable barriers in getting what should be provided to all persons as a basic human right. My memoir and critical study of the U.S. adoption system describes why the state-level denial of these records must be understood historically and sociologically as part of the historic mistreatment of adoptees and illegitimately born persons, like me.

In addition, I provided what I consider to be a strategic approach for channeling defiance to an unjust system that had impacted my life greatly. At the very least I hoped my words and example helped to motivate a few others. Many of my decisions in my life were profoundly influenced by words I heard from someone else, sharing a story about why they took action to do good things.

As I had shared earlier, access to vital records by adoptees is intrinsically an issue rooted in power relationships. Those relationships are communicated through symbols that are invested with far more meaning than what they appear to have on the surface. And anything invested with this much magical and symbolic power, such as one’s original birth record, is worth a lifelong fight, which I have had to undertake only because I was born as an adoptee.

It is also critical to remember that an original birth certificate is a document that continues to be withheld from millions of U.S. adoptees. This denial of equal treatment by law has and remains in violation the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and equally the 14^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

My book also explains this struggle as a hero’s journey that too few adoptees can do for reasons too long to explain in one post. You can order my book on that issue, which describes how the state of Michigan denied me my birth record for decades until I finally took the state’s adoption bureaucracy to court and won my right to what was always mine as a human right.

“The state never had the legal and moral right to hold my past from me or the right to prevent my birth families from knowing about me,” I wrote in my memoir. “My true birth certificate shows the world that I exist as someone with a past. It shows I have an identity that I alone own. This document is and always has been mine by birthright.”

I would encourage adoptees, policy-makers, and journalists to visit the website of Adoptees United. The organization continues to host events that focus on issues it works on supporting the rights of adoptees in the United states as it works on changing laws and policies that deny rights to adopted persons.

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.

Memoir release set for April

Rudy Owens’ memoir on the American adoption experience

At long last, I can see the finish line for the first major milestone of sharing my story about the U.S. adoption system with readers. In April, I expect to begin selling my forthcoming memoir and public-health and historic overview of the still-flawed U.S. adoption system on multiple book-selling platforms and hopefully in book and mortar stores. Promoting and marketing my work, and finding the proverbial “stage” to bring it to a wider audience, will be an ongoing effort that will continue for months afterward. For now, first things first.

I will publish my book in paperback and e-book versions. I will include a searchable index for the paperback edition. My indexer is finishing this task now. I will be including a range of keywords and subject areas that define the experience of being an adoptee in the United States, including the terms “bastard,” “illegitimate,” “illegitimacy,” and many more.

An index is a critical tool for anyone who wants to quickly find material to help understand the history of U.S. adoption and the ongoing treatment of U.S. adoptees by discriminatory laws and public-health bureaucracies in many states. Here are a few ways my index will call out my subject matter:

My work will include original research of how groups like the esteemed American Academy of Pediatrics openly encouraged single women to relinquish their infants without any peer-reviewed or medical evidence that showed adoption relinquishment provided any benefits to the child and mother.
I will highlight new information from the organizations (Florence Crittenton Mission and Florence Crittenton Association of America) that ran the hospital where I was born and the dozens of maternity homes nationwide where hundreds of thousands of women were put in hiding and encouraged to give up their children. That data will include a comprehensive study by the Crittenton organizations of “Crittenton moms” and their circumstances when they gave up their children.
I will provide a detailed accounting how the state of Michigan fails to treat Michigan-born adoptees fairly and has failed to do its job managing adoptee-records requests and original birth records.
It will support my commitment as a scholar and communications and public health professional to be trusted and strongly fact-based source of information that is rooted in evidence and unbiased analysis of data and the meaning of that data.

Please check back on my website to get the latest update on my book’s publishing date, sometime in April. Look for news about a possible Go-Fund-Me campaign too.

I also encourage followers of this website to tell your friends to bookmark my webpage, sign up for my newsletter, follow me on Twitter, and, I hope, purchase my work in the coming weeks.

Why adoption and the rights of adoptees must be seen as public health issues

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provide this model to explain how a public health approach addresses problems and promotes population health.

My memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are: An Adoptee’s Journey Through the American Adoption Experience, stands apart from most books and memoirs that focus on adoption and adoptees’ stories.

Unlike other works in this field, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are describes the American adoption experience through a public health lens, and it is written as a “public health memoir.” Please see the CDC Foundation’s definition of public health if you are not sure what public health means or how it approaches health issues.

In terms of policy, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are shows how the institution—past and present—and the status of being adopted both constitute legitimate public health areas of interest that can be improved by changing outdated and discriminatory laws and policies. This will require the active collaboration of health and public health groups. Both have a moral obligation to advocate for the well-being of all adopted Americans as a population. 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.

These are some of the public health issues my memoir addresses:

It shows that being adopted can be measured in long-term health impacts (there are anywhere from 5 million to 9 million U.S. adoptees, and that imprecision is part of the larger problem of counting them, and thus ensuring they count in all public-health decision-making).
It shows how and why health and public health professionals need to be involved in policy changes that improve the health for this diverse but large group of Americans, including advocating for legal changes to harmful adoption-records-secrecy laws now used in most U.S. states. Giving more adoptees access to their records will allow them to know their health and family ancestry—something recommended by nearly every leading health and scientific expert.
It shows how public health professionals today, namely in state vital records offices, contribute to legal inequality in the treatment of adopted persons seeking equal treatment by law and their family ancestry and medical history.
It shows how implicit bias against illegitimately born people—adoptees are viewed that way, even if that is not acknowledged—is seen in longitudinal health outcomes. There are tragic and meticulous historic and current data on mortality and morbidity of those born outside of marriage, which should be of interest to anyone in public health and health who thinks that bias matters in the treatment of people/groups.
It shows how doctors and social work professionals from the late 1940s through the 1970s promoted practices that separated infants and their birth families without any peer-reviewed or demonstrable evidence documenting how this would provide a long-term benefit to millions of Americans, namely the relinquished infants and their mothers/birth families. Those impacted were usually vulnerable, young, and powerless women who had few advocates for maintaining family relationships.
It shows how the United States’ state-level adoption records laws promoting records secrecy are out of alignment with most developed nations that allow adoptees to access birth records, and all without any evidence of harm. This discussion also highlights how this represents another form of “American exceptionalism” in health issues, such as the United States’ lack universal health care, and how the GOP in promoting adoption as a Christian/moral “alternative to abortion” has promoted this exceptionalism that harms adoptees as a population.

(Published Jan. 16, 2018; updated July 27, 2019)