Category Archives: Adoptee Discrmination

Adoptee rights reform in Michigan, a new development

Home page of the Michigan Adoptee Rights Coalition

This week I learned that a new adoptee rights group had launched in my birth state of Michigan. The group is called Michigan Adoptee Rights Coalition.

You can learn more about that group here.

The group describes itself this way:

Who We Are: We are adoptee rights organizations working together to secure equality for all Michigan-born adopted people.

What We’re Doing: We work with advocates, legislators, and allies to build and sustain a strong coalition focused on Michigan and adoptee rights legislation.

I had done a presentation earlier this spring to some adoptees based in Michigan, and I am not currently affiliated with this group as a member.

As a Michigan-born adoptee, and like likely tens of thousands of other adoptees born there, I warmly and enthusiastically welcome anyone and any group who will support restoring basic legal rights, secured in legislation, to all adoptees born in my home state to access their original vital records without any obstruction.

I have advocated for this larger goal in my book and on my website for years.

As someone who lives nearly 2,000 miles away from my birth state, I have found myself hamstrung to lobby lawmakers directly. So having people in Michigan doing the heavy lifting means a great deal to me.

Many adoptees like me are no longer living in our home states. It poses a frustrating and costly barrier to so many who would like to advocate in person for reform. I continue to applaud the hard work everyone is doing collectively, in every state, even if they cannot do that in person in state capitols.

I set up a table outside of the Michigan Capitol in June 2018 as part of my advocacy for legislative reform for adoptee rights.

For my part, I did one-on-one advocacy in Lansing in 2018, but I have not had the time and resources to commit myself to doing face-to-face advocacy, which is critical for all legislative reform work. The pandemic and life and all of its many twists and turns has forced me to prioritize other things. Today, I know I cannot do what I would like to do as a citizen for in-person work with elected lawmakers in Michigan.

Michigan and adoptee rights:

Today, Michigan is a state with a Democratic super majority. The Democrats control the state house, state senate, and governor’s office.

Yet as of today, I have seen no signal from emerging national Democratic darling, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, that she will do anything to address the historic injustice of denying basic legal rights to thousands of Michigan natives.

I have encouraged people to get involved, to work with their lawmakers, and to step up the pressure. Without heat, there will be harmful indifference, and right now Whitmer’s silence has signaled that all adoptees born in Michigan are a non-issue for her, even as older adoptees and their biological kin die out with their truth hidden by harmful laws.

That needs to change.

As we look ahead, I am anxious to read about developments of the new coalition in Michigan, including what legislative proposals may come forward.

I am especially interested to learn about developments on a terribly written and conceived bill, HB 4529, introduced May 9, 2023, by Rep. Patrick Outman (R-Six Lakes) that could expand discriminatory practices to even more adoptees born in Michigan.

To keep current on legislation in Michigan, one can sign up for committee legislative email updates from the Michigan Legislature here. You may wish to sign up for multiple committees that may address adoption-related legislation. You may wish to consider following these committees:

House:

  • Health Policy
  • Families, Children, and Seniors

Senate:

  • Health Policy

Warning: expect a nasty fight with state bureaucrats:

For what it is worth, I would like to warn all adoptee rights advocates that they will likely face tremendous resistance to any legislative reform in Michigan by the state’s large health agency called the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS).

In its coverage of the Flint drinking water crisis, The Intercept featured this image of protesters holding a container of the city’s lead-tainted drinking water that caused harm to infants and children who consumed the drinking water in Flint. See The Intercept’s story here: https://theintercept.com/2021/07/21/flint-water-crisis-rick-snyder/.

The agency has a culture of withholding information and denying even basic service to likely thousands of Michigan-born adoptees. More worrisome is MDHHS’s willingness to withhold information that led to lasting and permanent medical harm to children in Flint during the lead and drinking water crisis starting in 2014.

As the Intercept reported in 2021 regarding the systemic failures at MDHHS: “Patricia McKane, an epidemiologist with MDHHS who testified that she was pressured to lie by [Dr. Eden] Wells about elevated blood-lead levels in Flint’s children, was found to have only had four text messages on her phone from 2015 and seven total messages. (Wells denied pressuring her to lie.) Fellow MDHHS epidemiologist Sarah Lyon-Callo, director of the state Bureau of Epidemiology and Population Health, who Wells copied in an email responding to accusations by a Wayne State University professor that she was trying to conceal the link between the Flint River switch and the Legionella outbreak, had no messages prior to June 2016.”

MDHHS’s bureaucratic actions speaks volumes to its internal culture leading to horrific and intentional harm, and how it would take steps that would prioritize taking actions to protect its narrow interests.

If one does not read this writing on the wall here regarding bureaucratic harm and indifference to marginalized persons, one will never be able to plan a legislative strategy on adoption reform in Michigan.

In short, one cannot expect MDHHS to sit quietly on an issue it has signaled at every instance for decades to uncounted number of adoptees that it will fight to the bitter end to win.

In my view, this will be a bruising fight because it remains the imperative of any large system to prove that it has power over weak groups of historically marginalized people by being able to deny and control basic legal rights. Power matters, especially to bureaucracies. Adoptees will forever be one of the easiest groups to use for these ends.

My great worry is that MDHHS will work behind the scenes against Michiganders who were adopted, and no one will ever see their actions unless they are revealed with a public records request. And don’t expect any records to be released either—the agency has a record of flagrantly preventing public records requests from being completed too.

Talking way too much with ‘Adoption: The Making of Me,’ and it was fun!

When I was invited to be guest on the adoptee-centered podcast Adoption: The Making of Me, produced and published by podcasters and producers Louise Browne and Sarah Reinhardt, I expected this to be something new for me.

Outside of what I have published in my adoptee memoir, I refrain publicly from talking about my backstory with my biological mother, my family life before I left home at the age 18, and issues that I don’t share when discussing adoption legislative reform and adoptee rights advocacy.

This time, I knew it would be different, and it seemed OK.

(If you prefer, you can listen to the podcast here, on Apple Podcasts.)

Browne and Reinhardt asked me to talk about topics I mostly keep private. So I did. I highlighted issues such the very bad domestic abuse in my adoptive family, which I have written about before. I also discussed other issues growing up I mostly keep private, as I focus more on legislative and upstream reforms to end the inequities of this system. 

Hopefully this conversation may help some others, which is why it seemed right to do this. Within hours of it being published I received a comment from a fellow adoptee using words to describe my experience that I never use to this day describing my life as an adoptee or my life story. That is fine, because each of us can experience a story with our own points of view.

Some of the other issues we covered include the denial of equal legal rights to domestic adoptees in my birth state Michigan and other states. I also talked about the history of my birthplace, the long-closed adoption mill and maternity hospital in Detroit called Crittenton General Hospital. I even was able to discuss my Finnish heritage and provide comparisons of the United States to Finland, homeland to my maternal great grandparents on my mother’s family side. As we closed, I managed to sneak in a few quick facts–because I love facts!–that the Finnish government and its national health service supports mothers and kids, making adoption in Finland rare and almost nonexistent.

As we nearly completed our hour-long conversation, I painfully realized I did too much of the talking without enough time for conversation, and they graciously forgave this sin.

I really appreciated the wonderful talk and these two podcasters, who are doing a brilliant job allowing adopted persons to tell stories to help others understand the adoption experience, from the point of view by those who lived it and who are the experts. You can also catch copies of their podcasts on their YouTube channel. Visit their past interviews to listen and learn from the voices of those who know this issue in the marrow of their bones.

Thanks again, ladies!

After five years, it’s time to adjust prices for inflation

Rudy Owens’ memoir on the American adoption experience

After five years, I will be slightly increasing the price of the paperback and e-book versions of my memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are: An Adoptee’s Journey through the American Adoption Experience.

This week, Amazon, the monopoly that controls the world of self-publishing, informed KDP account holders that it was changing its fee structure. Amazon told those who sell on its platform costs were going up: “During this time, we’ve kept our printing fees the same, despite increasing costs of materials and labor over the past six years. On June 20, 2023, we’re changing our fees to better align with today’s cost to print books. We have not taken this decision lightly, and have reduced printing costs where possible.”

Inflation has hit all of us, and my prices have not kept up since I first published my memoir in May 2018. My book remains an entirely self-funded effort focused on reforming discriminatory adoption secrecy laws and raising awareness about adoption as a public health issue and gross legal injustice to millions. What I make from publishing my book is used entirely to fund the publication of my website with research related to my book and resources to help adoptees, particularly adoptees denied basic legal equality in my birth state of Michigan.

Starting in late May, customers looking to buy my book will see the following prices changes:

EBook:
Former list price on Amazon: $7.99
New list price on Amazon: $8.99

Paperback:
Former list price on Amazon: $15.99
New list price on Amazon: $16.99

Other platforms where I sell my book online, such as IngramSpark and Smashwords, will also reflect the new pricing scheme as well.

Thanks again to every reader who has supported my story and my vision to reform how this nation continues to treat all adoptees inequitably solely because of their status at birth. I could not have done this without all of you!

Restoring rights to adoptees in Michigan ultimately is about power, so let’s use it

I am continuing to create short videos focusing on the injustice experienced by thousands of adoptees born in Michigan who are denied equal treatment by law to access their vital records only because of their status at birth.

For 2023, I will continue to focus on Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Ultimately she will drive any agenda if there is true legislative reform. Her team can and should be coordinating legislative proposals based on measures now recently passed in other legislatures in the past two years.

However, Gov. Whitmer really will not care unless there is a cost. I outline that calculus in my video here.

For adoptees born in Michigan who are still denied legal access to their vital records, I would encourage you to learn how other states got it right, like New York, and propose that Michigan’s legislature adopt similar reform, without delay.

Focus on the law and its denied rights to thousands.

Tell your story, but focus on injustice and equity, and hold lawmakers to account who claim to champion both.

Remember, one cannot champion the status quo and claim to be an advocate for equity and equality at the same time. By logic alone, that is impossible.

As I have noted before, adoption is a uniquely adored American institution by both parties, Democrat and Republican.

Therefore, in getting a leader like Gov. Whitmer to take action, the logical path is to create a real political cost for inaction and for failure to fix a massive wrong. This matters because she is making moves nationally for her next political chapter. Politics is an often bruising gladiatorial arena and a choreographed stage at the same time. Those on that stage carefully measure the costs.

As long as Gov. Whitmer sees no cost to her continued inaction, we will not see any progress on reform.

You can read a longer essay I wrote about this approach at the start of 2023.

Thanks for your work to advocate for reform. It’s decades overdue.

Dear Governor Whitmer, signed Michigan-born adoptee

The year is 2023. Each passing day means another day that uncounted and likely tens of thousands of adoptees separated from their families by the adoption system and current state laws are denied equal treatment by law and knowledge of their vital records.

Many in my era are now old enough to have died already from chronic disease and other health issues as we age into our older years.

That means the birth mothers of this large cohort or post-World War II era adoptees are more likely to have died or may be close to the end. This is an issue that impacts my own family personally, and I am still amazed at the lifelong, permanent harm created by secrecy and family separation.

This year, I continue to focus my advocacy for decades-overdue legislative reform on the only person who counts for ultimately moving a piece of legislation through a Democrat-controlled state legislature. That person is Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat.

My “Dear Governor” video may not ever be seen by Gov. Whitmer, or even her staff. But that is the work of other adoptees and maybe even a journalist or two to share it. On April 29, 2023, I posted this video and this message:

“The time is now, Gov. Whitmer. Thousands and thousands of Michigan-born adoptees, including me, are denied access to the original vital records by law—only because we were relinquished from our kin by adoption. Let’s change that and start the new chapter now. You can contact me any time, and I’d be happy to give you a copy of my book why legal reform is long overdue and why it’s time to right historic wrongs to people born in my birth state. For more information about Michigan’s outdated adoption secrecy laws and the need for reform, please visit the website for my book on the U.S. adoption experience and my experience seeking reform and justice in accessing records that are mine as a legal and human right. Go to: www.howluckyuare.com.”

Some of my fellow Michigan-born adoptees have shared this already, and I appreciate that. Thank you for what you are doing!

Focus on equality and nothing but equality:

The only reform that I will champion is reform that restores permanent, legal access to an adoptee’s original birth record without any obstruction and interference upon an adopted person reaching adulthood. I hope all adoptees in Michigan working toward a shared vision of legal reform will not partner with any person or organization who is not able to commit to this goal in writing and publicly. Remember, if folks don’t commit to clear communications, it’s best to take a pass and work with those who do. Serious people are clear. Hucksters spin yarns and evade. (Click on this link focusing on adoptee rights to hear a 15-minute version of a yarn promoting bad reform, rebutted by 15 minutes correcting the misinformation with facts).

In the world of adoptee rights advocacy, there are those who champion true reform and those who promote bad policy, similar to the incredibly regressive and harmful bill in California this spring—AB 1302, opposed nationally by nearly all leading adoptee rights groups.

So, unless someone who is an advocate can step forward clearly and publicly, with a published statement that can be read by everyone regarding their position statements, they are not being serious and can be discounted as not being true adoptee rights advocates.

Mark Twain, philosopher of the art of lying

Mark Twain got this part right about the hucksters and lying, long ago. “Among other common lies, we have the silent lie—the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not at all.”

I urge anyone in Michigan who shares a goal for lasting reform not work any group or persons claimed to be adoptee rights advocates who are not honest, clear, and public where they stand. In the spirit of full disclosure, my views on this topic are clear, and you can find them on my website and in my book, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are.