Tag Archives: Original Birth Certificates

Will Michigan comply with state law and release additional copies of an adoptee’s original birth certificate?

On August 13, 2024, I submitted a request to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), with a $62 check, to obtain duplicate copies of my original birth record.

I had to wait 27 years for the vital record to be provided to me in July 2016, after I had provided a signed consent form by my birth mother to release my vital records in 1989. The state and MDHHS only released it after a protracted legal battle that ended with a circuit court in Detroit ordering the state to release my original record of birth.

I am very aware of how this historically anti-adoptee state public health and health agency will likely respond to me as an adoptee. I am simply requesting records provided to all persons but adoptees as a matter of courteous government service with minimal state fees. But I expect this will not be courteous or in compliance with statute. MDHHS has a record of hostile behavior to Michigan-born adoptees, which I have documented now for years.

So I am documenting the process by video and other means to provide a public record of my activity. My goal is to highlight issues of denied legal rights to all adoptees and the discriminatory treatment millions of them face through basic civil processes that should be fulfilled as a basic government service: providing a vital record.

MDHHS provides no public information stating only one copy of a record can be released.
• www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/faq/adoption/can-the-adult-adoptee-obtain-a-copy-of-the-original-birth-certificate
• www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/adult-child-serv/adoption/adoption-faqs

There are several relevant Michigan statutes that set out adoption laws relevant to issues facing adoptees of my generation: 710, 333, 368. None establishes any conditions to deny the release of more than one original birth certificate to someone such as myself who provided a court order already. In fact, the statute states here, § 333.2882 does simply state, the original birth certificate is accessible “upon a court order.” I met this condition with the order already sent to MDHHS in June 2016, forcing it to send me a copy of my original birth certificate. I re-sent MDHHS on August 13, 2024, what I sent earlier in June 2016 and a copy of my vital record it sent me in July 2016 to prove it has already released the record before.

I have already learned from one of my trusted public contacts familiar with state adoption processes that I can expect MDHHS to reject my request, even though there is no law that would allow that.

I will provide additional videos later to document the outcome of what could be another useless fight that only signals that adoptees remain second-class humans subjected to decades-long legal discrimination entirely because of their adoptee status.

See my website for more details about Michigan’s nearly impossible barriers for adoptees to access their original vital records.

The elegance and simplicity of equality in Vermont

Vermont Department of Health application for an adult adoptee to obtain their true birth records (page 1 of 2).

Today is the first day that adult adoptees born in Vermont, who are at least 18 years old, can access their original birth/vital record and not face legalized inequality by discriminatory statutes that single out adoptees as second-class people who do not receive equal treatment by law.

Well done to everyone who made this happen there. I salute all you did for adoptee rights and adoptees everywhere.

It is important to remember, even in the absence of any “landmark court case,” this inequality in most U.S. states violates the 14^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, Article VII.

I also appreciate what the public health employees in Vermont did in communicating this legal reform, passed in the 2022 legislative session.

This is how the Vermont Department of Health communicates equality by law to adoptees born in the state of Vermont, as of July 1, 2023.

What I see on the updated website for the Vermont Department of Health today is the simple elegance of equality for adoptees without harmful conditions, obstructions, discrimination, bias, and public health and human health harm. It is only today, July 1, 2023, that an adult adopted person born in Vermont who is 18 years old can access a document all non-adopted persons born in the USA can access without any discrimination.

Just think about that. And there are anywhere from 5 to 8 million adoptees in the United States, most of whom are still denied this legal right.

This was the result of concerted advocacy, and, again, I applaud all who led the efforts for long-denied reform. It’s important to remember that this law change restoring rights that were taken away, also by law, will not and does not erase decades of past harm.

The New England Adoptee Rights Coalition has noted, “Vermont was among the first 20 states to revoke an adopted person’s right to request and obtain a copy of their own unaltered, original birth certificate in 1946.”

However, the decades-overdue restoration of basic legal rights is a path that other states can follow.

Will Michigan follow Vermont?

The state I remain focused on is my birth state, Michigan, which denies the simplicity of basic legal equality to thousands and thousands of adoptees.

As of July 1, 2023, this is how one of a few Michigan adoption-related statutes looks like, creating a maze of confusion and nearly impossible barriers for any adoptee born in Michigan to ever obtain their original birth record, as a matter of law.

The so-called “progressive” governor, Gretchen Whitmer, continues to promote her chops supporting those who need a helping hand—except of course thousands of adoptees.

She has done nothing about this issue, and she is already in her fifth year in office, with no gesture, statement, or visible communication she cares about thousands of persons, many who are now aging and even dying, or that they will ever know their truth or even kin.

For comparison to Vermont’s reform, here is how inequality looks in Michigan. It is an absolute cluster.

I will keep trying to point out these issues in Michigan, which Vermont’s reform makes all the more glaring.

Vermont’s law gives me hope, when often what I feel is loneliness on the mountain top. And sometimes hope truly can be a wonderful thing.

Press release: Michigan media invited to webinar on adoptees’ court petitions for birth records

Members of the Michigan media and the general public are invited to an online conversation about what it means and what it looks like when an adopted person seeks a court order to get his or her own birth and adoption records.

Nineteen states, including Michigan, and the District of Columbia require a court order for an adopted person to obtain his or her own original birth record — or any record. How is it done? Who has been successful and what difficulties did they encounter? What was the cost in time, emotion, and money? And what exactly did they get?

When: Sunday, March 21, 1 p.m. PST/4 p.m. EST
Who: The event is open to everyone, including adoptees, the media, and legal professionals
Cost: Free
How: Register here

The event will be hosted by Adoptees United and features three adult adoptees: Detroit native Rudy Owens, Georgia native Courtney Humbaugh, and D.C. native Gregory Luce, who runs the Adoptee Rights Law Center. Each went through the courts to win access to records withheld from them because they were relinquished from their birth families as adoptees.

Michigan is one of 19 states that currently denies rights to Michigan born adoptees to their true vital records entirely because of the status of their birth, denying thousands equal treatment by law. Owens, as an adoptee, was denied his birth records and family history, but was able to find all sides of his biological family in 1989, despite the state’s policies denying him information given to all non-adoptees born in Michigan. In 2018 he published a memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, about his decades-long experience seeking his records, including his successful court petition in June 2016 that forced the state to give him a copy of his original birth certificate 27 years after his biological mother had signed a state consent form allowing the state to release all of his long-sealed records.

Luce, a Minneapolis-based adoptee rights attorney and adoptee rights advocate, will moderate an exploration of what we mean by “records,” including which records are easier or harder to get — whether birth records, court records, adoption agency records, or any others. Luce will also talk about his own five-year effort in the District of Columbia as well as court cases he handles today on behalf of Minnesota-born adopted people.

Questions will be taken from the audience throughout the talk, and links to available court forms in various states will also be provided during the online chat.

Owens will highlight his experience in Michigan, where it took him 27 years to secure the release of his original birth certificate, even after he had met my birth families and legally changed his name that incorporated his original birth name.

In his book examining the U.S. adoption system and how it continues to discriminate against millions of U.S. adoptees by limiting their legal access to their birth records, Owens writes: “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. 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.”

You are invited to a webinar on petitioning courts for original birth records

First, please add this event to your calendar. Great. Thanks for doing that!

Everyone is invited, because this is an issue that is about what many of us care about deeply: equality, fairness, and the right to know who we are.

This webinar will focus on something bigger than vital records and court processes.

This discussion will be about 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 is worth the fight.

The symbol I’m talking about is perhaps the single most important document any human can possess: their original birth certificate.

For decades, this document has been withheld from U.S. adoptees, through discriminatory state laws that still deny millions of persons equal treatment by law, in violation the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and equally the 14^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Right now the people working to change these harmful laws are those denied the right to know who they are, where they came from, and who they can call their blood kin.

One way that many states provide the most slender means for an adult adoptee to get their basic vital record created at birth is through the courts.

Getting to that point is nothing short of a hero’s journey too few adoptees can do for reasons too long to explain in this post. I wrote a book on that issue, which details 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.

I hope you join my fellow adoptees and advocates Greg Luce, Courtney Humbaugh, and me for our webinar on March 21, 2021 (1 p.m. PST) about petitioning courts to release adoptees’ original birth records.

For my part in this special event, I’ll be highlighting my experience in Michigan, where it took me 27 years to secure the release of my original birth certificate, even after I had met my birth families.

In my book on this experience, I wrote: “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. 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.”

Learn why adoptees will invest years if not decades fighting for their legal and human rights, including in the courts. I look forward to seeing you there.

My sister will die never knowing her past

On Jan. 3, 2020, The Detroit Free Press published my guest column on Michigan’s discriminatory and restrictive adoption records law that denies Michigan’s adoptees legal access to their original birth records, except by overcoming restrictive barriers.

In my adoptive sister’s case, she falls in the 35-year period, between 1945 and 1980, for which the state statutes have almost impossible barriers for an adoptee to overcome to get what is theirs as a legal and human right. My sister, who is seriously ill and bedridden in a skilled nursing home, will likely die in the near future without knowing her biological kin, her biological parents, and her ancestral past.

This unfortunate outcome is intentional. In fact, this scenario was the design of those who created Michigan’s biased law that is zealously enforced by Michigan’s vital records guardians at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

My sister and I both were born in these post-World War II boom years of adoption, that saw nearly 3 million adoptees separated from their biological kin through the U.S. adoption system.

It is no coincidence that Michigan’s lawmakers adopted the most restrictive rules for adoptees in this cohort, because records secrecy continues to hide from the public how widespread and systemic that system was in the United States, impacting literally millions of Americans.

My book on my own experience challenging this discriminatory records-keeping system details how adoption history has been hidden, preventing adoptees from knowing themselves and their past and the public from knowing the truth about the many players who promoted this system for decades.

Author note: The guest column published by The Detroit Free Press has slight changes from the original I submitted, without changing the substance of the submitted column.