Category Archives: Rudy Owens Memoir

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.

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.

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

Update on new legislation to end discrimination against Michigan-born adoptees

A coalition of adoptee rights groups in Michigan called the Michigan Adoptee Rights Coalition is working with a bipartisan group of Michigan state lawmakers to advance two adoptee rights reform bills in Michigan. The measures have cleared the state House of Representatives and were moved over to the state Senate just before the Michigan Legislature adjourned in mid-November 2023.

These legislative efforts, now being pushed by the coalition’s three partners (the Minneapolis-based Adoptee Rights Law Center and Michigan-based Adoptee Advocates of Michigan and Michigan Adoptee Collaborative), follow years of advocacy by countless Michigan-born adoptees, on behalf of probably tens of thousands of persons born and relinquished to adoption there in the years before and since World War II.

Committee hearing testimony on November 8, 2023, on HB 5148 and HB 5149 (snip of public video coverage)

The bills, House Bill 5148, sponsored by Rep. Kristian Grant (D-Grand Rapids), and House Bill 5149, sponsored by Rep. Pat Outman (R-Six Lakes), were introduced in the Legislature in late October 2023. The coalition working with the two lawmakers explains that the introduced legislation would, if not amended further, restore long-denied legal rights for adult adoptees to access their original birth records like all non-adopted Michiganders.

I encourage people to read the bills themselves (HB 5148 and HB 5149) to see how legislation would change current laws. Currently, it is nearly impossible for any adoptee in Michigan to secure a copy (in redacted form) of their original birth certificate (see my FAQs on that topic).

Most importantly, the legislation, if approved and then signed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer–a Democrat who has not spoken publicly in any statement I can find in favor of adoptee rights–would end outdated laws in Michigan that deny tens of thousands of Michigan born adoptees equal treatment by law. I would be a beneficiary of this legislation, as would my sister, along with uncounted thousands of others separated from their families and kin by the state’s harmful, cruel adoption secrecy laws.

Committee hearing highlights human rights and new and worrisome anti-adoptee messaging

The House Families, Children, and Seniors Committee held its hearing on the bills on Nov. 8, 2023. The hearing is videotaped, and it can be seen by anyone with access to the internet. Testimony and discussion begin at minute 21:00. (Note: the video takes a long time to download; you will need to be patient.)

I was particularly impressed by one supporter of the bill, Ned Andree, a Michigan resident and a bi-racial and transracial adoptee.

Adoptee Ned Andree speaking in support of the two bills to restore adoptee rights on Nov. 8, 2023

Andree spoke eloquently to the committee in support of the bills. He testified about being adopted and being raised by white parents and seeking his truth for years. He told the committee he was born and relinquished in 1968, from a white mother and an African-born father, originally from Nigeria. Andre spoke of his costly effort find his birth parents, including spending $20,000 to fly to Nigeria to find his birth father, “only to have no success.” Andre also spoke of being denied his truth by the almost impossible barriers created by Michigan’s discriminatory laws denying him his truth. “The current law denies adult adoptees … a fundamental human right granted to non-adoptees.”

Filmmaker and Michigan-born adoptee spoke in support, and a birth mother who also testified in favor of the legislation and told her story of the harm of relinquishment.

Opponents also received prominent time before lawmakers.

Committee hearing testimony of Michigan Catholic Conference (MCC) lobbyist Rebecca Mastee who opposed the two bills on Nov. 8, 2023

Michigan Catholic Conference (MCC) lobbyist Rebecca Mastee came out against the bills with talking points heard in past legislative settings in other states, where opponents seek to enforce legal inequality to millions of persons by supporting outdated adoption secrecy laws. Mastee repeated unprovable talking points and outright lies regarding promised secrecy to birth mothers, when no such legal promises were ever made. Mastee concluded that such non-existing secrecy claims, that have never been documented by written documentation in legislative settings, require that the state continue to deny adult adopted persons equal treatment by law in accessing their birth records, as is the case in Michigan today. These talking points have been used repeatedly in most state legislative hearings I have seen by adoption industry promoters—and Catholic Charities in Michigan and other states were among the biggest adoption “businesses” that separated kin for decades.

Mastee, on behalf of the MCC, also used another false taking point of the alleged “stalking” of birth parents by adoptees as a rationale to deny tens of thousands of adoptees unobstructed access their birth certificate. She offered no facts or any credible evidence such harm can be proven by documented facts. In even more frightening language that is a foreshadowing of pro-adoption rhetoric to come likely for years, Mastee claimed that the bills would harm the flow of newborn infants to the now-expanding baby box supply chain in post-Roe America. (We learned during the hearing that the two bills do not prevent the erasure of new adoptees’ identities who are surrendered in metal dumpsters in Michigan, as allowed by current law, and without any regard to their basic human rights.)

Though grotesque as a basic statement of denied equal rights to current and future adoptees, adoptee rights advocates must confront the new harmful normal that this is now an active talking point. We will likely hear again that adoptees can’t get their birth certificates because it would disrupt the medically harmful practice of newborn infant separation from vulnerable moms through these dangerous baby dumpsters. Luckily this malarky did not convince the state lawmakers the day of the hearing.

Another anti-adoptee rights opponent, lawyer Heath Lowry, of the Michigan Coalition to End Domestic and Sexual violence, testified to oppose the bills. He used the canard of “sexual violence and rape” that has been shared repeatedly in adoptee rights discussions before lawmakers to claim victims of sexual violence would be traumatized to have contact with their child. The scare tactics were given without any evidence. He provided not one fact, no data, not even an anecdote. He claimed that the “consent of birth parents” had to be protected by the continued denial of vital records to thousands of adoptees born in Michigan. His testimony was forcefully tossed aside as baseless by a supporter of the bills who testified in support of the two measures (you can watch the testimonies here).

Fortunately, the committee strongly approved both bills (substitutes) before sending the bills to the full House for a vote.

The new substitute bills are here:

The House of Representatives on Nov. 9, 2023 voted on the substitute bills as follows:

HB 5148: Yeas 99, Nays 8, Excused 0, Not Voting 3
HB 5149: Yeas 99, Nays 8, Excused 0 Not Voting 3

All of the submitted testimony from adoptees, adoptee rights groups, birth mother groups, and other champions of equality urged lawmakers to support the legislation. All told, supporters provided 45 pages worth of materials in support. That was very impressive to read. You can find a downloadable copy of the testimony for the legislation on the Michigan Legislature’s website. A short hearing summary for Nov. 8, 2023 is here.

Final comments as a Michigan-born adoptee rights advocate

For the record, I have no affiliation with the groups in the coalition who are working with lawmakers, as I explained in this blog post from June 2023.

I have been advocating for adoptee rights in Michigan, my birth state, since the mid-1980s. I published a book on adoptee rights and the public health impacts of the U.S. adoption system in 2018, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. It highlights the history of U.S. adoption and a major adoption mill in Michigan that was likely the country’s second biggest adoption promotion center in terms of babies separated from their mothers. It also highlights my experience being denied my vital records, for decades, and the harmful practices of the state’s health system managing vital records, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

Coming home to my Finnish ancestral villages, in defiance of Michigan’s adoption secrecy laws

During my trip to Finland in September 2023, I visited two ancestral villages of my Finnish kin, Kortesjärvi and Alahärmä, in a rural farming area of South Ostrobothnia.

The region is located inland from the Baltic Sea, east of Vaasa. I went there with my Finnish relative and her husband on September 7, 2023.

On that life-changing trip, I felt a visceral connection to my ancestral home, where a quarter of my biological family traces its historical roots. These are very peasant farming roots. It’s hard to describe the joy I felt. I tried to capture some of that on this video. It only does those feelings partial justice. The feeling was one of utter and total joy. (I will be publishing a story soon about this amazing trip.)

By sharing this video here that is filled with elation, I am not gloating.

I am pointing out a brutal reality of contemporary politics that marginalizes tens of thousands of adoptees born in Michigan, like me. I’ve been raising this issue consistently since 2015, and published my adoption history/memoir documenting these wrongs in detail.

By law in the state of Michigan, I am also denied the information about my ancestral and living kin, like tens of thousands of other born and then relinquished there.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), supposedly a progressive, and the Democrats who control the Michigan Legislature, have done nothing to fix decades of this injustice denying people the right to know their kin/past.

It remains deeply painful to me to know that this joy I had, finding my past, my kin, my ancestral villages in Finland, is denied to tens of thousands of Michigan adoptees, still, by law.

As I continue to share, Gov. Whitmer ultimately owns this failure. She can lead and fix it. To date, she has done nothing and has never communicated publicly she will do a thing to correct a historic injustice. Without a cost to her politically, nothing will change. That is up to those of us who seek reform to exact the leverage to move reform.