Tag Archives: Bastard Children

Webinar recording available on petitioning courts for original birth records

Nearly 60 people joined a recent webinar on March 21, 2021, hosted by the adoptee advocacy group Adoptees United. I presented with fellow adoptees Greg Luce of Minnesota and Courtney Humbaugh of Georgia. Each of us highlighted our experience as adoptees denied basic legal and equal rights in accessing our adoption and vital records.

  • My introductory comments can be found at the start of the recording.
  • My comments about my court petition begin here (17:00 into the recording).
  • A copy of my presentation that I shared with attendees can be found here.

As a presenter, I wanted to provide a roadmap for others who face nearly insurmountable barriers in getting what should be provided to all persons as a basic human right. My memoir and critical study of the U.S. adoption system describes why the state-level denial of these records must be understood historically and sociologically as part of the historic mistreatment of adoptees and illegitimately born persons, like me.

In addition, I provided what I consider to be a strategic approach for channeling defiance to an unjust system that had impacted my life greatly. At the very least I hoped my words and example helped to motivate a few others. Many of my decisions in my life were profoundly influenced by words I heard from someone else, sharing a story about why they took action to do good things.

As I had shared earlier, access to vital records by adoptees is intrinsically an issue rooted in 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, such as one’s original birth record, is worth a lifelong fight, which I have had to undertake only because I was born as an adoptee.

It is also critical to remember that an original birth certificate is a document that continues to be withheld from millions of U.S. adoptees. This denial of equal treatment by law has and remains in violation the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and equally the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

My book also explains this struggle as a hero’s journey that too few adoptees can do for reasons too long to explain in one post. You can order my book on that issue, which describes 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.

“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,” I wrote in my memoir. “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.”

I would encourage adoptees, policy-makers, and journalists to visit the website of Adoptees United. The organization continues to host events that focus on issues it works on supporting the rights of adoptees in the United states as it works on changing laws and policies that deny rights to adopted persons.

Two-year anniversary of publishing my adoptee memoir

Author Rudy Owens at a September 2019 lecture on his memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are.

It is amazing to think that two years have passed since I announced the publication of my memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are: An Adoptee’s Journey Through the American Adoption Experience.

My story remains one of the most distinct books ever written on this hidden chapter of U.S. History.

You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are details my experience being born in one of the largest maternity hospitals devoted to separating families through Adoption, Crittenton General Hospital.

It then examines my life story amid millions of other stories of U.S.-born adoptees and what we know from the long ignored facts about this institution that still denies basic legal and human rights to millions of persons.

Unlike other works on the U.S. adoption system, my book uses a wealth of facts from multiple disciplines: biology, evolutionary psychology, history, public health, sociology, and original source material to provide an overview of the public health impacts on millions of adoptees. This is because adoption cannot be understood without the research from multiple fields and because adoption has to be understood as a public health issue.

That fact matters now more than ever in our COVID-19 world, when many people can finally see the connections between systems, laws, policies, and health outcomes.

I self-published my book in May 2018, through a publishing company I created called BFD Press. You can order it here, or get a copy from Amazon, IngramSpark, or from your favorite online bookseller.

Rudy Owens holding his completed memoir.

Rudy Owens holds his completed memoir.

Since that time, I’ve heard from many readers, in the United States and abroad, who have purchased my work and have shared how much they appreciate me telling this story.

My work has been especially helpful to Michigan-born adoptees like myself, who continue to struggle with my birth state’s extremely hostile treatment of adoptees and its discriminatory laws that make it nearly impossible for uncounted tens of thousands of adoptees to know their past, their medical history, and their family history.

I want to let all of my readers to know that I remain humbled by the trust you have placed in me and my story. You, the readers, have always been my inspiration and the silent yet powerful supporters who kept me going when I wanted to put this project aside because it had no interest to traditional publishers.

Two years since I published my memoir, I can still say with certainty that adoption remains one of the few sacred institutions in this country that strangely binds the political left and the political right in terms of policy.

I can still say with certainty that adoption, as a system of practices and laws, still marginalizes an entire class of people because of their status at birth and because of hidden bias. Few admit to such prejudice that is manifest in the collective and systemic practices against so-called illegitimately born human beings.

Adoption remains an institution that is sanctioned by state laws that still discriminate against millions of Americans only because they are adoptees.

I continue to promote my book to the public and the media, including any opportunity to do book readings. I can always be contacted if you are interested in inviting me to speak to your group, including medical professionals, policy-makers, public libraries, and bookstores.

As a final note, I also can still say with absolute confidence that the underlying truth about my identity has not changed since I first published my work. I have not forgotten who I am and what motivates me to continue to supporting all adoptees in their quest for equality and human rights.

I will never shy away from calling myself the “Bastard from Detroit.” This name honors my true identity, rooted in our country’s historic discrimination against so-called “illegitimate” humans. I will continue to work on behalf of all adoptees because I strongly believe there is no such thing as an illegitimate person.

Let me give you some advice, bastard: a few lessons about records and the treatment of adult adoptees

The character Tyrion Lannister on HBO’s Game of Thrones provides expert advice for adoptees who may forget who they are in the eyes of the law (image used for editorial and commentary purposes).

Let me give you some advice, bastard: Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not.

Tyrion Lannister, Game of Thrones, Season 1

 

This week I found a very interesting discussion on case law concerning efforts by adoptees to legally annul their adoptions and reclaim their original identities that were taken from them by the states and by state law that governs adoption.

There was a back and forth discussion about the merits of the cases and if adoptees have legal rights to their original identities. I decided to weigh in on the thread, even though it was three years old. Here is the crux of what I shared:

For a good background on how the courts have made clear that adoptees have no legal inheritance rights to biological kin, I suggested reviewing articles by University of Baltimore law professor Elizabeth Samuels. Her 2001 Rutgers Law Review article, “The Idea of Adoption,” makes clear  adoption law is designed to protect all biological parents, including fathers-by-sperm only, from any legal claim to their estates and assets by illegimate children given up for adoption.

Before 1943, Samuels writes, adoptees “were usually permitted to inherit from their birth parents as well as from other birth relatives.” By 1970, 21 states expressly forbid such inheritance. This trend matched the pattern of states creating discriminatory laws that prevented adoptees from knowing their past and obtaining their records, which most could usually access before the 1950s in practice, even in states that had sealed records. For Samuels, these laws reflected a prevailing societal idea promoted by adoption supporters that families created by adoption could be the equivalent of families created by kinship and blood. I, however, see a much different set of forces at play, documented over centuries in the denial of rights, property, and even life of those born illegitimately.

This revival of legal prejudice against adoptees, almost all of whom are bastards in the full sense of the word, is not new. It is a carryover from the English and Catholic and canonical legal tradition of treating illegitimately born humans as outsiders and bastards—filius nulius (children of no one or non-people). Bastard children had no claim to land, title, or property. Many were denied basic care and treated to cruelties we cannot begin to imagine. (See the excellent book on this topic: Bastardy and Its Comparative History, edited by Peter Laslett.) Infanticide of bastard babies has been widely documented up through the mid-1800s in Europe and even colonial America, for example.

Michigan’s Treatment of Adoptees and Bastards

The stamp mark of “SEALED” is meant to show me that I am not a real person in the eyes of the state and that I am an adoptee, who must bear the burden of that status on my legal records, which I am entitled to as a human right.

In my case, the state of Michigan intentionally adulterated the original birth certificate I received in 2016, after a bruising fight and court order. It arrived 51 years after my birth, and after I had petitioned for it over three decades.

In my assessment of both the law and the action by state vital records/public health staff who were handling my court ordered petition, they sought to confirm my bastard status and to affirm I did not have legal rights as the person I was born as. The state of course offered another rationale, but the effect was to imprint my identity document with the legal equivalent of a giant scarlet “B,” as in “bastard.” It was an expression of power of the state over “bastardized” and illegitimately born people, like me.

Legalese conversations about case law and law in general overlook the root and clearly documented history of discrimination that underpins this practice. I discuss this at length in Chapter 9 of my new memoir on the U.S. adoption experience.

One cannot separate historic discrimination of illegitimate people when having any conversation about the law, courts, and treatment of U.S. adoptees. Prejudice taints the entire case record and legal system regarding adoption, and to say otherwise is to ignore the legal reality impacting millions of adoptees today. It is that simple. My memoir on this experience explores this reality and its public health implications for millions of U.S. residents.

Changing Your Name Will Not Change Who You Are

Rudy Owens birth certificate after legal name change, showing the state of Michigan did not remove my adopted name (from 2009)

Before I received my original birth certificate, I had petitioned to change my name to incorporate my original birth name that I had known of since 1989 into my new name in 2009, and I was successful, becoming “Rudolf Scott-Douglas Owens.” My new name incorporated my birth name of “Scott Douglas Owens” with my adoptive name of “Martin Rudolf Brueggemann.”

I then requested Michigan’s vital records office to give me my revised birth record. Yet Michigan denied my right to my past and my former legal identity at the time of my birth by still keeping my amended birth certificate’s adoptive name, “Martin Rudolf Brueggemann,” as the prominent name on my now legally changed birth certificate. The new record puts my new legal name in barely visible micro letters below it, even though my new name is my true legal name that the courts bestowed upon me.

So even as adoptees assert their rights to their legal birth records, names, and identities, state public health agencies like the those in Michigan will assert through the perks of bureaucracy that an adopted bastard will have been erased, even if nearly impossible legal petitions exist for only the boldest and most defiant bastards and adoptees to reclaim their true identities.

Regardless, now I will die with the kin name I was born with, and the state cannot erase that. It tried to do that for decades, and it lost. And this bastard has never forgotten how the world has treated those born into this status. 

The Detroit Adoptee Manifesto: Time to change the battlefield

As the year 2017 comes to a close, millions of American adoptees are no closer to receiving equal treatment under U.S. laws than they were decades earlier. In 1975, the United Kingdom long moved on from this issue, giving all adoptees full access to their records once they turned 18. In fact, the issue of adoptee equal rights is not even a concern in most developed nations. Not so in the United States, the country with the greatest number of adoptees than any developed country in the world.

Robert Greene’s The 33 Strategies of War

From a strategic perspective, most U.S. adoptees have not organized cohesively or embraced successful strategies that have altered this battlefield. This includes the all-critical inner battle of the mind that must occur first before any change and tactical advance occurs on the messy, fluid field of combat in the real world. I believe its time to reset the chessboard and start anew, starting first with each individual adoptee.

I recommend that adoptees read author Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, Mastery, The 33 Strategies of War, and more. His treatise on war offers a cool, hard look at human conflict and offers wisdom demonstrated by historic greats from Sun Tzu to Napoleon Bonaparte to Muhammad Ali. He provides a set of ideas how to grab victory from whatever conflict and foes you face.

I just published The Detroit Adoptee Manifesto. In it, I draw from key concepts explained by Greene in The 33 Strategies of War, which I think adoptees should consider as they choose how they want to live their lives and then change the world around them, including the adoption system that denies millions of Americans basic human rights. Most of these ideas are explained in greater detail in my forthcoming memoir on the American adoption experience, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are: An Adoptee’s Journey Through the American Adoption Experience. The strategies I describe in my essay are:

Author Robert Greene

  • Projecting Strength, Not Vulnerability
  • Learning from the Masters and Applying that Wisdom
  • Having a Grand Strategic Vision
  • Learning from Defeat
  • Defining your Opponents and Exposing Them and Their Weaknesses
  • Becoming a Fighter, Not a Victim
  • Defining The Battlefield
  • Knowing Your Enemies
  • Launching a Revolution of Thinking

Greene notes that all persons can benefit from thinking strategically, to achieve critical life goals: “To have the power that only strategy can bring, you must be able to elevate yourself above the battlefield, to focus on your long-term objectives, to craft an entire campaign, to get out of the reactive mode that so many battles in life lock you into. Keeping your overall goals in mind, it becomes much easier to decide when to fight and when to walk away.”