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.

News Year’s Day 2024 reflections on adoptee rights and possible reform in Michigan

One of my annual traditions is to start the new year with a healthy outdoor activity. I did that taking a lovely hike in the green hills around Portland, Oregon. Being outdoors and in nature gave me a nice clean head and opportunity to reflect on adoptee rights in my birth state, Michigan, and on larger issues of being an adoptee at this stage in my life. This stage means people are passing away, and these inevitable losses have perhaps sharper meaning for countless tens of thousands of adoptees born in the USA, and also in other countries, who may never, ever know their family origins or be able to answer life’s great and most important question: “Who am I?”

The year 2023 ended with family loss. The year 2024 begins with awareness of who I am, how adoptee rights advocacy works in the messy world of U.S. legislative sausage making, and also how I need to focus on things I can authentically control. It is OK to be in the wilderness, as I have long known. But I am also glad my network has expanded to kin in Finland, where new beginnings with kin mean roads to places I never could have dreamed in 1989. That year I found my biological family and I first violated Michigan’s discriminatory and still current laws denying me my human right to know myself and from whence and where I come.

A new tradition begins for ‘Rudy-setä’

In 2023, I immersed myself in my Finnish heritage and connected with my Finnish kin in Finland.

This marks the first Christmas in my life that I have contact with my biological relatives in Finland. This followed a wonderful trip I made in September 2023 to Finland, one of the ancestral countries of my birth mother. 

We had only known each other in the month before I flew to Helsinki, after my search combined with good fortune and the kindness of a stranger helped re-connect familial bonds that had thrived decades between relatives in my birth state of Michigan and Finland.

I published a long-form story about that in November 2023. I highlighted our shared family history and how the inequitable system of U.S. adoption and discriminatory laws in Michigan still deny such connections to likely tens of thousands of adoptees relinquished in Michigan.

In Finland, to my amazing surprising, one of my biological family relatives shared with me a stack of letters and photos sent and shared by our shared relatives in Michigan—my maternal grandmother’s extended family. That stack of documents included letters stretching over decades and family photos that showed my Michigan family—including my birth mother as a young child!

Since coming home, my relatives in Finland and I have stayed in touch. We’ve done a few video calls and have shared messages through WhatsApp, which many tech-savvy Finns love to use. It’s an easy way to reach them. It encourages communications that make me feel much closer to this land of a quarter of my biological kin and their ancestors. My search for my past also opened up a world of discovery for me about Finland, a country voted six times in a row as the world’s happiest country.

Because of Finland’s amazing successes promoting human happiness and health, population health, and the “greater good” for its people, I have also have become more than smitten by my genealogical ties to Suomi, as Finland is pronounced and spelled in its delightfully distinct Finno-Ugric language.

I received a new name this year, courtesy of my Finnish nieces I met for the first time in September 2023.

Soon after I came back from Finland, I received a delightful family video shared with me by some of my relatives. They gathered together to wish me well, calling me “Uncle Rudy.” I earned this loving moniker because I have four distant nieces in this family (and I have another niece with another distant cousin, who I met as well). I loved it.

I felt something I had felt before—a biological kinship to younger children who all shared my genes. I was their “Uncle Rudy,” which in Finnish translates to “Rudy-setä.” I have now fully embraced this title, given to me by the young ones. It turned out to be the unexpected gift of 2023 that I could never have predicted when the year started.

This Christmas card was sent by one of my U.S. biological relatives to their Finnish relatives in 1947. My extended in family in Finland returned this card, to me, when I found and met them in Finland in September 2023.

As Christmas arrived this December, I shared a photo of a Christmas card a Finnish-American relative of mine shared with relatives in Finland in 1947, written in Finnish of course, as the U.S. relatives were bilingual. I wrote: “What an amazing thing to discover that holiday greetings were shared between family through the 1940s, and later. So I wanted to renew the old tradition, one of those Christmas cards sent from U.S. family in 1947, and perhaps start a new tradition.”

My relatives in Finland replied with similar holiday wishes, family photos, and shots of their homes decked out for the Christmas holiday. It was nice to have this connection, from halfway across the world, in a place filled with snow.

It is richly empowering to everyone to know they have kin and relatives, in the United States and also in countries around the world. All of the millions of adoptees in the United States, born there and abroad, have an inherent human right to share this connection to their kin and relatives, if that is a mutually shared wish.

I received wonderful Christmas wishes from Finland on Christmas Eve this year, from my Finnish relatives in Finland (hyvää joulua).

Earlier today, on Christmas, Dec. 25, 2023, I used the special occasion to advocated with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to support the restoration of basic human rights to all Michigan-born adoptees. The best way that the fellowship and good will of the holiday can be shared, through the passage of possible legislative reform in Michigan, is to make it possible that all of us can know who our kin are and to feel the bonds of fellowship with those with whom we share a collective biological kinship. This is called being human. We all have a right to this condition by birth.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all, especially to those who may still not know their kin, their past, and their truth because of laws like those still enforced and in place in my birth state, Michigan.

A Michigan adoptee Christmas wish for Gov. Whitmer of Michigan

It’s Christmas Day 2023. While millions of Michiganders are celebrating this joyous occasion, there are still tens of thousands of Michigan-born adoptees on this day who may not be able to enjoy this family-themed holiday because they are denied basic legal rights to know who they are, from where they come, and have access to their vital records by state law. That is why I’m asking you, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, to spread the joy of this festive day to support legal equality for those denied basic rights and support two bills in 2024 (House Bills 5148 and 5149) that would give countless thousands of Michigan adoptees the basic knowledge of themselves, so that they too can feel fellowship that you are enjoying this day with your family and that countless other Michiganders are celebrating as well. Please support House Bills 5148 and 5149 in 2024 and make Christmas Day 2024 a more heartfelt and joyous time for those who still do not know their truth, their family origins and kin, and their identities because of archaic laws. Merry Christmas and happy New Year.

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