Tag Archives: Michigan Legislature

‘Stateside’ interviews focus on Finland, adoptee rights, and our right to know our origins

Rudy Owens and his newly found Finnish relatives from September 2023

I want to thank Michigan Radio, “Stateside” host April Baer, producer Mercedes Mejia, and all of the Michigan Radio crew who help inform Michiganders about important issues.

I am especially appreciative of their news reporting and also generous consideration to host two interviews this past week on: adoptee rights legislative proposals in the Michigan Legislature, and another with me, as an author and advocate for adoptee rights as a Michigan-born adoptee.

As always, patience and professional persistence opened these doors (I started in November 2023), along with the timing of the legislative debates on this important policy issue for thousands of Michigan-born adoptees.

My March 20, 2024 interview with “Stateside” host April Baer broadly explored my recent two visits to Finland in September 2023 and in February 2024, to meet my biological family I only recently connected with last summer. I shared why such a visit to an ancestral home country, to meet long-lost biological kin, matters for adoptees, who are denied rights to their original birth certificates and family information like ethnicity by state law. (If you want to quickly find my interview segment, jump to the last 20 minutes of the podcast–you can get there quickly by dragging the mouse on the podcast recording player.)

“Stateside’s” March 19, 2024 interview on adoptee rights legislation before lawmakers included three members of the Michigan coalition that has been working to pass legislative reform in Michigan to restore rights to tens of thousands of Michigan-born adoptees. That interview featured Michigan Adoptee Rights Coalition members Valerie Lemieux, Erica Curry Van Ee, and Greg Luce. All are adoptees. The interview can heard found here.

Not every radio news magazine would provide more than 15 minutes of valuable airtime for each interview to discuss issues of adoption secrecy in Michigan, legislative reform efforts that were launched last fall, and the importance to all of us to know who we are and where we come from, all secured for all persons by law. But “Stateside” decided this issue merited time for a meaningful dialogue that examined many aspects of this human rights issue, including discussing arguments used by adoptee rights opponents.

Thank you, “Stateside”/Kiitos, “Stateside”!

See my stories about my visits to Finland to meet with my biological kin and what these stories mean to those denied our ancestry and birth records by law:

Letter supporting restoration of legal and human rights to all Michigan-born adoptees

Senator Stephanie Chang, Michigan Legislature, shown making closing remarks during a hearing on February 29, 2024, on two adoptee rights bills.

I submitted a letter on February 28, 2024, in support of two bills in the Michigan Legislature that would restore basic legal and human rights to tens of thousands of Michigan-born adoptees like myself and my adoptive sister. 

You can read a good summary of those bills on this page published by the Michigan Adoptee Rights Coalition, which has worked with lawmakers to advance the much needed and overdue reform.

None of the seven senators on the Civil Rights, Judiciary, and Public Safety Committee of the Michigan State Senate acknowledged they received my supportive letter and evidence on adoptee rights issues in Michigan. Nor did the committee staff during a hearing on February 29, 2024, in the committee on HB 5148 and HB 5149, say my letter was received, even though other individual persons writing for themselves were mentioned by name.

I made clear in my letter I was an author and issue expert on the history of adoption in Michigan, especially Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, one of the largest adoption hubs ever to operate in the United States.

The hearing itself was a lopsided affair, tilted to favor foes of adoptee rights: The Michigan Catholic Conference, an advocacy group affiliated with the Catholic Church, a historic promoter of massive family separation efforts at its Catholic Charity-run maternity homes;  and Right to Life Michigan. Adoptees and their allies were not given agency in a meaningful way. There were just two voices allowed to present in support of measures. No clear adoptee voice from someone who has endured decades of discriminatory treatment by the state and its health bureaucracy, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), was provided any platform to state facts how thousands of adoptees are treated continually by state bureaucrats who consider them to be second-place persons.

Here are some of my take aways from today’s legislative kabuki:

  • The horrific harm adoptees have suffered from this state, especially by its public health bureaucrats at MDHHS, was never raised. We’re dirt to them.
  • In this mostly fact-free session largely turned over to adoption promoters failed to let any adoptees share basic facts on the the shocking history of adoption in the state. In fact, this issue has not come up yet by any presenter in any hearing in the Capitol. No facts on decades of harm and lies to adoptees have been allowed to be shared publicly in this tightly scripted political theater.
  • To lawmakers running this process, it appears that adoptees, who number in the tens of thousands, are still just scary bastards to kick around.

I’m still waiting to see if the legislative statement I provided (see below) will be officially entered into the legislative record. At this point I do not have confidence that the chair of this committee, Sen. Stephanie Chang, views adoptees as human and even worthy of basic equality. You can view it here. Scroll to the end to see and hear for yourself. For me, I got this message: If you’re adopted, you don’t count.

What I don’t know is if the format for today’s hearing was at the whim of the chair or a shared consensus among members of the committee and other parties who negotiated outside of this setting. No lawmaker voiced strong support for adoptee rights today. That is a clear fact.

Letter is as follows: 

Dear Esteemed Senators: 

I’m a very proud Finnish-American Michigander and equally proud Detroit native.

I also am a Michigan adoptee still denied equal treatment by law because of the state’s inequitable laws denying Michigan adoptees the same treatment, by law, as non-adoptees in the state. This ongoing treatment remains in violation of the state’s constitution.

My humble request is this: VOTE YES/DUE PASS FOR HB 5148 and HB 5149. 

I was born at one of country’s largest adoption-promotion facilities, Detroit’s Crittenton General Hospital, in 1965. (It was torn down in 1975.)

I have written a public health examination of that facility: You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. The book came out in 2018, and I alerted every lawmaker in Michigan about the book then.

My book documents the history of Michigan’s adoption system that allowed for likely tens of thousands of family separations through adoption. I also examine how the state’s health system, the MDHHS, has promoted inequitable treatment of Michigan-born adoptees for decades. That treatment continues daily, especially to aging adoptees born between 1945-1980, the boom years of adoption when the state had the greatest number of families severed by this system. 

In my case, I was denied my original birth record for years by the state. Despite the poor treatment by the state’s vital records keepers, I found my biological kin in 1989. This happened in the face of nearly impossible odds and repeated efforts to hide information from me by my adoption agency and state vital records keepers.

It took another 27 years until I received an original copy of my birth certificate in 2016, through a court order, even after I had found my birth kin on my father and mother’s sides of the family back in 1989. Even having known my birth families, MDHHS denied me a copy of my birth certificate. It took countless demands and finally a court order to force the state to surrender my own records. 

This is one example of the ongoing discrimination and harm done by the state’s adoption laws and its state health system to thousands of adoptees like me and my adopted sister (born in Saginaw, born in 1963).

We now have a chance to restore decades of wrong to thousands of people with legislation before you. Many adoptees are now aging, and many have already lost birth family members they may never know because of decades of failures to restore legal rights to adoptees to be treated equally by law.

I’ve worked for years, engaging lawmakers directly, contacting the media, and publishing articles on harm that denies basic legal rights to Michiganders–all in violation of the state constitution.

I can speak to you, your staff, and members of your legislative policy team on my expertise on this issue and the research I have documented in my published work. 

Lastly, I also have published a long form story about my trip to Finland in September 2023 meeting distant Finnish relatives I never knew I had. My story explores the importance of family kinship and how Michigan’s current adoption secrecy laws sever such kin connections, when families separated by time and even oceans have a natural desire to connect. When I was in Finland in 2023, my relatives gave me a stack of letters my great grandmother sent to Finland during World War II, and even pictures after the war that include photos of my birth mother and other Finnish American relatives in my family. The Michigan/Finnish connections were very strong. I just visited my Finnish family members in Finland, again, in February 2024, and they treated me as family because we are family.

Resources to support restoration of basic legal rights to Michigan-born adoptees; please share with colleagues as needed:

Adoptee rights is also a moral issue to ensure equal rights to good health, yet public health and health professionals ignore this intentionally

Rudy Owens, the author, is shown in a shot from September 2023 during a run in Finland’s Koli National Park. Despite a life of pursuing healthy activities like running, genetic health risk factors also play a key role in my health and life expectancy.

Just before the new year started, a biological relative on the maternal side of my family died. It was both sudden but maybe not a surprise.

My relative’s passing felt painfully tragic for those closest to my biological family member, despite my relative’s age.

The cause of death was cardiovascular disease. The disease is pervasive among my Finnish-American relatives and among my Finnish relatives I recently found in Finland. Ethnically, I am a quarter Finnish, and also Welsh, English and some other ethnicities I cannot fully confirm simply because I was born as an unwanted child whose father until his death refused to accept his paternity or provable genetic relationship to me.

Unlike many adult adoptees in the United States, who number in the millions, I at least have a very solid understanding of half of my heritage, on my birth mother’s side, including now my family health and family medical history.

My four biological grandparents all play a role in my health, passing down genetic traits and also risk factors that could impact my lifelong health.

According to the almost uniform consensus of the public health and medical fields, knowledge of family health history is one of the most important ways all persons can pursue and achieve good health.

The U.S. national public health service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), tells Americans they need to be proactive in finding their family health history to achieve better health.

“Most people have a family health history of at least one chronic disease, such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes,” the CDC says in its public guidance on genomics and precision health. “If you have a close family member with a chronic disease, you may be more likely to develop that disease yourself, especially if more than one close relative has (or had) the disease or a family member got the disease at a younger age than usual.”

Such advice, from the public health and medical experts, is science based, and is meant to help save lives.

Yet no medical health group or public health groups, including the CDC or professional groups like the American Heart Association or the American Diabetes Association—each focused on illnesses with well-documented genetic risk factors—has ever taken any action to promote the ending of legal discrimination in state adoption laws that deny family medical history to literally millions of U.S.-born adoptees.

I talked about the glaring hypocrisy of such health guidance in my memoir and public health examination of the U.S. adoption system. In my book, I address past and continuing failures of the medical and public health fields. Silence from these professions translates to harm for millions of adoptees, only because they are denied basic human and legal rights granted to others, and by consequence their family medical history by the force of law.

I published this in my book in 2018, and since that time, there is still no national campaign or policy initiative by medical and public health professionals and groups to support adoptees seeking, by law, legal access to their vital records.

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.

My risks as a someone one-quarter Finnish

When I learned about the death of my biological family member just before the start of 2024, it also did not surprise me.

I had found my biological kin in 1989. Since that time and as I got older, I was able to figure out some genetic health risks that were hidden from me as an adoptee by Michigan state law that remains on the books to this day. As someone trained in public health (I have an MPH from the University of Washington School of Public Health), I was more proactive in this self-research than most adoptees I have met.

Researchers have identified 39 genetic disease within the Finnish population, many fatal. Knowing one’s family medical history, such as these risk factors, is a right for everyone, including all adoptees.

As a group, many adoptees are tragically uninformed and unaware of the risks they face. Groups who advocate for adoptee rights by and large are silent on family medical health history considerations in their advocacy for reasons that baffle me to this day.

Finnish medical researchers have long identified genetic health risks for the Finnish population from inheritable conditions, including heart disease.

In the case of the Finnish people, centuries of isolation created genetic and health characteristics that today’s genetic health researchers are able to identify. Researchers have identified 39 such genetic diseases. Many are fatal. One genetics researcher, Dr. Leena Peltonen, notes: “Genetic diseases transform the family. You know the children won’t get better.”

Some of the health risks for Finns include congenital nephrosis and heart disease. In fact, Finland has highest rate of mortality from heart attacks in the Western world.

And with the passing of my relative and newly found knowledge of heart issues with my Finnish relatives that I only meet last September, I am now more mindful of what could strike me in the future too.

Luckily, I have been mostly vegetarian since I was 18 and have made a lifelong commitment to exercise, healthy dietary habits, and self-care. What I can’t do is change my genetics. In my case, I still only know half my family health history, on my maternal side, from my biological mother’s family.

I still know little about my paternal father’s families, either his mother or father. That story is explained in my book on why I have been denied this information as a matter of Michigan state law. As someone born as a bastard and as a product of the U.S. adoption system that denied me my birth identify, birth records, and family ancestry, I have no choice but to accept this reality. I accept it by advocating to change this upstream, working to change laws that deny family medical history to people only because of their birth status as adoptees.

After the death of my family member, I spoke to a bio-relative, who told me he will now speak about risks they face from heart disease. I also spoke a friend who is a doctor. He knows my status as an adoptee who found his family and is familiar as a doctor in Denmark with genetic risk factors. I appreciated his cheerful message to me, “I wouldn’t worry too much about heart disease, if I were you. We all have that coming if we live long enough. You live a healthy life. And more importantly you know how to make the most of it.”

Family medical history and current legislative discussions to restore adoptees’ rights

As I look ahead, I feel mostly good about my health. I treasure it.

However, I feel very little confidence that there will be any sea change among medical or public health groups and professionals to suddenly emerge as allies in legislative efforts to restore legal rights to adoptees to access their original birth certificates and vital records that may be accessible, as a matter of law. There seems to be willing professional indifference in the United States to a core idea articulated by the World Health Organization that the right to health is a basic human right, requiring legal measures to ensure that right.

Not one medical or public health group provided supportive statements during legislative discussions in the Michigan House of Representatives in November 2023 where two bills were adopted to restore such rights to Michigan-born adoptees, like me and tens of thousands of others. That is no different than other legislative debates that past five years where bills have been debated and reforms have been passed.

It is beyond my power to get this group of professionals to have a change of thinking, and right now, I have mostly stopped working towards this as an advocacy goal.

What I will still continue to do is remind my fellow adoptees about some proven wisdom: remember who your friends are and who they aren’t.

Never forget this.

As for those who professionally are obligated to promote health for everyone, your silence equates to indifference. You will own this so long as you stay silent.

An open letter to adoptees who oppose human rights for all adoptees

Detroit’s Crittenton General Hospital,shortly after it opened in 1933

Because my website highlights the history of Detroit’s now demolished Crittenton General Hospital, I am contacted by those who surrendered their infants for adoption there and those severed from their families by the adoption system. It was one of the largest adoption mills in the history of U.S. adoption, and I was among the thousands who was cast into the U.S. adoption system by being born and then relinquished in this maternity hospital in the city of Detroit. It was closed in 1974 and demolished a year later.

It is a story that needs greater attention, especially now in Michigan. The more people who engage the media about this, the more they can’t continue to ignore it, which they have done for decades. Facts about that facility can be found in my book and in my article about my birthplace.

On occasion, I will hear from adoptees born at Crittenton hospital, because of my website that many have found. Just before Thanksgiving, a person also born at Crittenton hospital in the 1960s, who was then adopted, contacted me by email. They are apparently following legislative issues in Michigan.

That person wrote to me to tell they opposed the reform. I think they mistakenly thought I was involved in legislative efforts now. As I have noted, my efforts advocating to restore legal rights to Michigan born adoptees have been ongoing for years (if not decades), and I am not affiliated with a new group that emerged this year.

I don’t know why this adoptee wanted me to know they opposed equal rights for adoptees in Michigan, my birth state. Reform could happen in my birth state if the state Legislature passes two bills without further legislative amendments and have both signed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who has never shared any public statement in support of adoptee rights that I am aware of.

Many adoptees in many legislative debates in different states have opposed state legislative reform and many have also been involved in advancing legislation that created a range of conditions short of legal equality that even permanently prevent some adoptees from ever having access to their original vital records.

One of the most cringeworthy spectacles I recently saw, in April 2023 during a committee hearing before California state lawmakers, was a self-identified adoptee and full-time contract lobbyist who shilled misinformation in support of a dangerously harmful bill still currently under review by the California State Assembly. He fits the classic definition of a “Quisling,” who turns against his own group, who are harmed and are denied legal rights, for his own personal interests.

So, instead of replying to the fellow Crittenton hospital adoptee from my birth era who wrote to me, I decided to publish an open letter to those adoptees who have opposed or who currently oppose adoptee rights and who work against other adoptees who champion reform—in Michigan and other states.

Here it is:

Your story is your story. You have a right to feel what you do and share your story. Go for it, and you are welcome to do that where you want and when you want. That is actually a basic legal right in this country. I’m sure you appreciate that right too, because such rights matter.

 If you need to understand what human rights are, however, I would first suggest starting with the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. As for what anyone thinks and feels about them, those things are actually separate from actual human rights, intrinsic to all. Among those rights are equal treatment by law, for all persons. This is a human right. Period.

My book is available if you need information on the core principles of human rights. My book is fully footnoted to support individual research too. Based on what you said, you are in disagreement with millions of people to be treated equally by law. Therefore, it is not going to be a good use of my time to engage in a further dialogue with you. Finally, I also support your legal right to be treated equally by law too. And I’ve been fighting for decades to ensure you, as an adoptee, have your legal right to your original birth records restored in Michigan. Even for people who don’t want that right for me, I’ll fight for them. That’s because human rights are worth it.

Sincerely,
Rudy Owens, MA, MPH