Tag Archives: Petition for Original Birth Certificates

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 14th 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.

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.”