Adoptee advocacy is fundamentally focused on the issue of human rights for all persons, regardless of their status at birth. There are countless articles to choose from online, as well as an insightful biography by E. Wayne Carp on adoptee rights pioneer Jean Paton. I picked these citations because they provide insights into fundamental legal and basic human rights issues, and advocacy for these rights on behalf of adoptees dates back to the 1960s with Paton and other adoptee rights champions.
Rudy Owens in the Michigan Senate office building in Lansing in June 2018, advocating for adoptee rights and human rights–they are one in the same.
Rudy Owens, adoptee rights includes a right to health as a human right (March 2023):
I wrote an article on the intersection of adoptee rights and the inherent universal right to healthcare. This issue is frequently marginalized, even by adoptees, in our advocacy work. It needs to be talked about because the right to health for millions of adoptees is denied by adoption laws and practices: “In chapter 8 of my book, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, I outlined the extensive research documenting the critical importance of knowing one’s family medical history: ‘Having access to family health history and information on other relatives—relatives who are genetically related—is considered by the nation’s foremost health experts to be necessary and beneficial for individual and population health. But as of 2018, there is no national campaign or policy initiative to promote giving hundreds of thousands of adoptees the ability to learn about their family medical health history.’ … The right to know one’s family medical history is a basic human right that is denied to most adoptees by law. This must end. And if adoptees can’t even talk about it, shame on all of us.”
Bastard Nation, What is Bastard Nation:
One of the nation’s leading adoptee rights groups since the 1990s, Bastard Nation, clearly defines adoptee rights as human rights as part of its mission statement: “Bastard Nation advocates for the civil and human rights of adult citizens who were adopted as children. Millions of North Americans are prohibited by law from accessing personal records that pertain to their historical, genetic, and legal identities. Such records are held by their governments in secret and without accountability, due solely to the fact that they were adopted. Bastard Nation campaigns for the restoration of their right to access their records.”
Lauren Sabina Kneisly, Baby Love Child (blog), “Adoptee Rights 101: Class Bastard and how to recognize a genuine adoptee rights bill,” June 2, 2010:
This is a seminal article defining adoptee rights as human rights and a political issue. Kneisly notes, “This adoptee rights work is grounded within a broader framework, internationally, of human rights, identity rights, and civil rights. Genuine adoptee rights activists are not asking mere state granted privileges, which states can give or take at whim, but demand equal treatment under law. Inherent to that is the concept that sealed records and state falsified records were a harm perpetrated against classes of people, and that this injustice of inequitable treatment under law must be rectified.”
Chapin Wright, Washington Post, “Who Am I?” Feb. 26, 1978. Interview with Rosemary Doud of Adoptees in Search:
“It also comes down to a question of blatant discrimination — of civil and human rights being violated, Rosemary [Doud] says: ‘Your birth certificate is the bottom line in defining who you are … everybody has a birth certificate, so why can’t we get ours? It is inhuman.’”
Shawna Hodgson, interview in The Texas Observer (When Your Birth Is a State Secret), June 8, 2021, on efforts to reform Texas’ statutes denying rights to Texas-born adoptees:
Hodgson is a national leader advocating for adoptee rights in Texas and nationally, and was interviewed on an bill that would have restored basic legal rights to hundreds of thousands of Texas-born adoptees, but was not allowed to move out of the Texas state Senate in the 2021 session: “It’s about equality, about being treated like any other person. Any other Texan can request their birth certificate. We’re being discriminated against because we’re adopted. Because of a choice that was made when we were children. And we were part of a contract we didn’t sign. This is simply a request by an adult adopted person to have rights to the same record that is available to every non-adopted Texan. … There is no circumstance, no matter how uncomfortable or tragic, that justifies baring a human being from knowing their origins. Adopted people having access to an original birth record does not mean a birth parent has to disclose the circumstances surrounding conception and birth. It is simply a vital statistic document in addition to a genealogical record.”