Category Archives: Public Health

Why won’t the American Public Health Association even publish a letter supporting adoptees?

By Rudy Owens, MA, MPH
Published April 7, 2024

On Jan. 15, 2024, I sent a “letter to the editor” to a national publication called The Nation’s Health, a public health newsletter published by the American Public Health Association (APHA). My letter was about 300 words and focused on clearly documented public health practices promoted by the country’s national public health organization.

In my letter, I noted, “Today, most health and public health experts, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), encourage all Americans to know their family health history to share with their medical providers to promote better health.”

I read the entire letter in my video here.

I pointed out in my letter that “no medical health group or public health groups have publicly supported changing state adoption laws that deny birth records and family medical history to millions of U.S.-born adoptees.”

I ended my letter with a call to action, for what the public health field commonly calls evidence-based, upstream public health interventions. That is precisely what adoptee rights advocates have been calling for, for more than 50 years, asking for reforms to state laws to unseal original birth records that would provide millions of people better health by allowing them to better know their health history.

I ended my letter noting: “This year, public health practitioners can join with adoptees in legislative advocacy to improve the health of millions by changing these laws.” My note even highlighted my own family’s story about being a Finnish-American and having lost a close birth relative to heart disease very tragically on Dec. 29, 2023.

Even with the death of a close family member and the clearly documented evidence regarding what all health and public health experts say is a best practice, to know one’s family health history, I never heard back from the editorial staff of The Nation’s Health.

I respectfully resubmitted my letter three more times, a total of four times, since Jan. 15, 2024. I have never received confirmation if my letter would be accepted or if it was rejected.

I am assuming now that the letter has been rejected. I believe my letter was not accepted because of the tension such a letter raises.

In my view this tension may even cause internal denial and reveal professional and national patterns of cognitive dissonance by a field that proclaims to promote public health but has embraced national practices on millions of adoptees that harm their health and the nation’s public health.

In my 2018 book examining adoption from a public health perspective and on my website, I’ve long called upon health and public health groups to support adoptees.

“Both have a moral obligation to advocate for the well-being of all adopted Americans as a population,” I write. “Both also have a responsibility to correct their past historic roles creating a system that denies adoptees rights and also health information that could potentially be life-saving for some.”

This field has long supported U.S. adoption practices, particularly in the erasure of millions of U.S-born adoptees’ identities and by creating new and “not truthful” amended birth certificates bearing names of adoptive parents as the legal parents of adopted children and the sealing of original birth records (vital records) in most states, as part of the system’s wide expansion by the 1950s. (This is documented in many books, which I provide links to on my website.)

If you work in public health and want to support adoptee rights in legislative policy debates, I welcome your support. Contact me, and I can help guide your involvement where and when it can count.

Finally, in the time since I first reached out to APHA’s publication, adoptee rights bills in 2024 have stalled in Michigan and Georgia, delaying health and justice to countless tens of thousands of adoptees who needed “experts” to advocate on their behalf. These outcomes could have been different had health and public health experts provided supportive testimony.

Adoptees are, to date, collateral damage to outdated public health practices and laws that no longer serve any purpose when commercial DNA testing has virtually eliminated absurd notions of “secrecy.”

It’s time to fix this where it counts—in policy debates to change state laws and restore rights to adoptees by law.

(Also see my article published Jan. 13, 2024:  “Adoptee rights is also a moral issue to ensure equal rights to good health, yet public health and health professionals ignore this intentionally.”)

 

Letter supporting restoration of legal and human rights to all Michigan-born adoptees

Senator Stephanie Chang, Michigan Legislature, shown making closing remarks during a hearing on February 29, 2024, on two adoptee rights bills.

I submitted a letter on February 28, 2024, in support of two bills in the Michigan Legislature that would restore basic legal and human rights to tens of thousands of Michigan-born adoptees like myself and my adoptive sister. 

You can read a good summary of those bills on this page published by the Michigan Adoptee Rights Coalition, which has worked with lawmakers to advance the much needed and overdue reform.

None of the seven senators on the Civil Rights, Judiciary, and Public Safety Committee of the Michigan State Senate acknowledged they received my supportive letter and evidence on adoptee rights issues in Michigan. Nor did the committee staff during a hearing on February 29, 2024, in the committee on HB 5148 and HB 5149, say my letter was received, even though other individual persons writing for themselves were mentioned by name.

I made clear in my letter I was an author and issue expert on the history of adoption in Michigan, especially Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, one of the largest adoption hubs ever to operate in the United States.

The hearing itself was a lopsided affair, tilted to favor foes of adoptee rights: The Michigan Catholic Conference, an advocacy group affiliated with the Catholic Church, a historic promoter of massive family separation efforts at its Catholic Charity-run maternity homes;  and Right to Life Michigan. Adoptees and their allies were not given agency in a meaningful way. There were just two voices allowed to present in support of measures. No clear adoptee voice from someone who has endured decades of discriminatory treatment by the state and its health bureaucracy, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), was provided any platform to state facts how thousands of adoptees are treated continually by state bureaucrats who consider them to be second-place persons.

Here are some of my take aways from today’s legislative kabuki:

  • The horrific harm adoptees have suffered from this state, especially by its public health bureaucrats at MDHHS, was never raised. We’re dirt to them.
  • In this mostly fact-free session largely turned over to adoption promoters failed to let any adoptees share basic facts on the the shocking history of adoption in the state. In fact, this issue has not come up yet by any presenter in any hearing in the Capitol. No facts on decades of harm and lies to adoptees have been allowed to be shared publicly in this tightly scripted political theater.
  • To lawmakers running this process, it appears that adoptees, who number in the tens of thousands, are still just scary bastards to kick around.

I’m still waiting to see if the legislative statement I provided (see below) will be officially entered into the legislative record. At this point I do not have confidence that the chair of this committee, Sen. Stephanie Chang, views adoptees as human and even worthy of basic equality. You can view it here. Scroll to the end to see and hear for yourself. For me, I got this message: If you’re adopted, you don’t count.

What I don’t know is if the format for today’s hearing was at the whim of the chair or a shared consensus among members of the committee and other parties who negotiated outside of this setting. No lawmaker voiced strong support for adoptee rights today. That is a clear fact.

Letter is as follows: 

Dear Esteemed Senators: 

I’m a very proud Finnish-American Michigander and equally proud Detroit native.

I also am a Michigan adoptee still denied equal treatment by law because of the state’s inequitable laws denying Michigan adoptees the same treatment, by law, as non-adoptees in the state. This ongoing treatment remains in violation of the state’s constitution.

My humble request is this: VOTE YES/DUE PASS FOR HB 5148 and HB 5149. 

I was born at one of country’s largest adoption-promotion facilities, Detroit’s Crittenton General Hospital, in 1965. (It was torn down in 1975.)

I have written a public health examination of that facility: You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. The book came out in 2018, and I alerted every lawmaker in Michigan about the book then.

My book documents the history of Michigan’s adoption system that allowed for likely tens of thousands of family separations through adoption. I also examine how the state’s health system, the MDHHS, has promoted inequitable treatment of Michigan-born adoptees for decades. That treatment continues daily, especially to aging adoptees born between 1945-1980, the boom years of adoption when the state had the greatest number of families severed by this system. 

In my case, I was denied my original birth record for years by the state. Despite the poor treatment by the state’s vital records keepers, I found my biological kin in 1989. This happened in the face of nearly impossible odds and repeated efforts to hide information from me by my adoption agency and state vital records keepers.

It took another 27 years until I received an original copy of my birth certificate in 2016, through a court order, even after I had found my birth kin on my father and mother’s sides of the family back in 1989. Even having known my birth families, MDHHS denied me a copy of my birth certificate. It took countless demands and finally a court order to force the state to surrender my own records. 

This is one example of the ongoing discrimination and harm done by the state’s adoption laws and its state health system to thousands of adoptees like me and my adopted sister (born in Saginaw, born in 1963).

We now have a chance to restore decades of wrong to thousands of people with legislation before you. Many adoptees are now aging, and many have already lost birth family members they may never know because of decades of failures to restore legal rights to adoptees to be treated equally by law.

I’ve worked for years, engaging lawmakers directly, contacting the media, and publishing articles on harm that denies basic legal rights to Michiganders–all in violation of the state constitution.

I can speak to you, your staff, and members of your legislative policy team on my expertise on this issue and the research I have documented in my published work. 

Lastly, I also have published a long form story about my trip to Finland in September 2023 meeting distant Finnish relatives I never knew I had. My story explores the importance of family kinship and how Michigan’s current adoption secrecy laws sever such kin connections, when families separated by time and even oceans have a natural desire to connect. When I was in Finland in 2023, my relatives gave me a stack of letters my great grandmother sent to Finland during World War II, and even pictures after the war that include photos of my birth mother and other Finnish American relatives in my family. The Michigan/Finnish connections were very strong. I just visited my Finnish family members in Finland, again, in February 2024, and they treated me as family because we are family.

Resources to support restoration of basic legal rights to Michigan-born adoptees; please share with colleagues as needed:

Thoughts on John le Carré and my life as an adoptee

The author David Cornwall, more famously known by his pen name, John le Carré. Photo is being shared for the purposes of illustration only and will be removed if requested by the owner of the original photo; this site operates as a nonprofit clearinghouse for information on policy issues related to adoption and adoptee rights.

The great British novelist David Cornwall, known to world by the pen name John le Carré, died of complications from pneumonia on Dec. 12, 2020, at the age of 89.

Throughout my entire adult life, le Carré has been a frequent visitor to my thoughts as I have reflected upon my life as an adoptee.

I thought about him again this week, when my former work colleague told me they were an adoptee. This took me like a storm, because this former work associate never betrayed any signs of that status during our two years of closely working together during the pandemic.

This revelation struck me that they were, in my view, like me—part actor, part “mole.” Le Carré popularized that term to describe those who burrow deeply into another country’s intelligence services to serve another master.

I again realized that my former coworker, like me, was an accomplished master at hiding this most important aspect of their identity as we navigated our public worlds much the ways spies do, with hidden realities and public faces that never betray our true allegiances and actual identities.

Why le Carré matters to my adoptee persona
Foremost I remain a lifelong fan of le Carré because of his great skills as a writer.

I also admire him because we share a few core things in common and because of his ability to give shape to places of ambiguity that so perfectly matches my own worldview.  

… My affection for le Carré’s writing stems from being born into a world that oddly matches the spaces he painted with words for decades.

In my case, I am an adoptee, recruited to the service of adoption as an infant, with a fake birth certificate and new name and new family. (See my guide comparing le Carré’s spy craft jargon with my own adoption jargon for a quick comparison.)

SEE COMPLETE ESSAY ON THIS WEBPAGE.

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.