Tag Archives: Vital Records

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 14th 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.

Adoptees’ access to their original birth certificates

Adoptees are entitled to their original birth certificates as a human right. Mine was withheld from me for decades, and likely illegally, by the State of Michigan, even after I found my biological kin. (I have intentionally hidden information in this copy.)

My book on the U.S. adoption experience, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, uses my personal story as an adoptee to explore how the former rights of U.S. born adoptees have been restricted and, in many cases, annulled over decades through lawmaking at the state level. My discussion of this larger issue, as part of a wider analysis of human rights and the loss of those rights by U.S. adoptees, is mostly found in chapter 7 of my book: “Legalized Discrimination Against Adoptees: The Demon Behind the Problem.”

Some of the best published resources explaining this history can be found on my recommended reading list, which includes the works of historian E. Wayne Carp and law professor Elizabeth Samuels, among other unbiased and carefully researched works that dispel many of the false myths about adoptees and the history of adoption in the United States.  

Another trusted source I reference in my book, in my writings, and on my website is the Adoptee Rights Law Center, run by Gregory Luce, a Minneapolis-based attorney and fellow adoptee, who also shares my birth year and status as a Crittenton kid. I have never met Luce, but I have communicated with him over the years on a sporadic basis regarding shared areas of advocacy interest regarding legal reform, which he works on nationally. He has proven to be a highly trusted source of fact-based information that informs the public and key stakeholders.

Luce has just published several resources I want to recommend to the larger adoptee and research, media, and policy-making community who deal with adoption law and the restriction of rights to adoptees. Luce plans to publish more resources later on original birth certificates and other records restricted from adoptees. The more factual information can be shared, versus myths and propaganda by the pro-adoption interest groups that still dominate the public discourse on adoption issues, the more likely advocates can achieve long-overdue reform.

  • FAQ: Original Birth Certificates (published December 2020): Luce writes “this FAQ relates to original birth certificates of adopted people born in the United States. FAQs on additional issues, including those related to intercountry adoptees, are forthcoming.”
  • A video documenting the erosion and loss of human and legal rights by adoptees to access their original birth certificates (published December 2020).
  • Original Birth Certificates Map, available on the Adoptee Rights Law website (updated continually). This map explains and show what states restrict access, provide compromised access, and provide access to original birth certificates for adoptees — an invaluable way to understand how legalized discrimination still denies millions basic legal rights given to non-adoptees. 

 

 

 

If you aren’t counted, you don’t count

The upcoming 2020 Census will ask a question about some adoptees, who are younger and in a household with parents/guardians, and not count those who are older and are heads of households.

My guest column on the upcoming 2020 Census and how it will, again, fail to count all U.S. adoptees was published today (Aug. 17, 2019) in the Eugene Register-Guard newspaper. In my column I highlight how the last two national headcounts of all Americans failed to accurately count all U.S. adoptees. (You can also see a slightly different version of my column, with footnotes and references, on this page.)

I show how this failure to account for all adoptees represents part of a decades-long problem in how adoption and adoptees have been left out of official systems that should be counting them.

My book on the U.S. adoption system, You Don’t Know How Luck You Are, documents in greater detail how these glaring failures in our vital records and public-health systems are not accidental and should be seen as policy failures that should have long-provoked calls for reform, especially from the public-health community.

My piece makes one of the most basic points about politics and policy-making: If you aren’t counted, you don’t count. Unfortunately, the 2020 Census will again fail to acknowledge the presence of millions of adoptees, who still do not count by being denied equal treatment by law and by being denied unfettered access to their original vital records.

How the history of adoption in Michigan remains hidden

Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, taken shortly after its opening in 1929 (source: Fifty Years’ Work with Girls, 1883-1933: A Story of the Florence Crittenton Homes).

I have published an updated article examining the hidden history of my birthplace, Detroit’s Crittenton General hospital. In my article, I write that one of the unexpected outcomes of the American adoption experience is how the stigma of illegitimacy created a cloak of invisibility around the birth of adoptees and their presence in the general population. The failure to count adoptees officially in state and federal vital statistics such as the U.S. Census up until the year 2000 also has promoted their hidden status. The intersection of these outcomes can be seen in the story of Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, demolished in 1975 and now largely forgotten.

I was among what I estimate to be at least 20,000 infants born and placed for adoption at this major facility promoting that system during the height of the boom adoption years after World War II. My memoir on my life’s story, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, provides additional information on the history of the facility—one of the nation’s largest maternity hospitals dedicated to promoting the separation of infants from their birth mothers and kin through adoption. My book also examines how birth records of adoptions at the hospital are either kept hidden or intentionally sealed to prevent the public from knowing true scope of the adoption system in Detroit and Michigan in the decades after World War II.