Category Archives: Adoptee Rights

Rudy Owens’ book reading and conversation focuses on the American adoption experience

Join Portland author Rudy Owens for a free book reading and conversation on his recently released memoir that explores the secretive world of American adoption. The Pageturners event is sponsored by the Friends of the Multnomah County Library.

What: Rudy Owens’ book book reading and conversation on his memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are
Where: Multnomah County Library, Belmont Branch (1038 SE César E. Chávez Blvd., Portland, OR 97214)
When: Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2019, 6:30-7:30 p.m.

All media are encouraged to attend. See this press release sent to Portland-area media.

Owens is available for interviews before and after the event.

Owens’ memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, offers insights on the widespread American institution of adoption, a national social engineering experiment that remains mired in discriminatory laws and partisan politics, not equality and fairness.

If you aren’t counted, you don’t count

The upcoming 2020 Census will ask a question about some adoptees, who are younger and in a household with parents/guardians, and not count those who are older and are heads of households.

My guest column on the upcoming 2020 Census and how it will, again, fail to count all U.S. adoptees was published today (Aug. 17, 2019) in the Eugene Register-Guard newspaper. In my column I highlight how the last two national headcounts of all Americans failed to accurately count all U.S. adoptees. (You can also see a slightly different version of my column, with footnotes and references, on this page.)

I show how this failure to account for all adoptees represents part of a decades-long problem in how adoption and adoptees have been left out of official systems that should be counting them.

My book on the U.S. adoption system, You Don’t Know How Luck You Are, documents in greater detail how these glaring failures in our vital records and public-health systems are not accidental and should be seen as policy failures that should have long-provoked calls for reform, especially from the public-health community.

My piece makes one of the most basic points about politics and policy-making: If you aren’t counted, you don’t count. Unfortunately, the 2020 Census will again fail to acknowledge the presence of millions of adoptees, who still do not count by being denied equal treatment by law and by being denied unfettered access to their original vital records.

How the controversial history of adoption is scrubbed from the ‘record’

A 1974 article from the Detroit Free Press on the closing of my birthplace, Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, fails to mention the thousands of adoptees who were born and relinquished here in the decades after World War II.

I have published an article that examines a widespread practice of hiding the history of the U.S. adoption system and how it operated nationally in every state in the decades after World War II. Those who promoted adoption include millions of family members, religious organizations like the Catholic Church, the Salvation Army, social service groups that served single mothers, mainstream religious leaders and churches, doctors, some medical groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics, hospitals that delivered the infants, and the profession of social work, whose practitioners managed and promoted the adoption system for decades. 

Yet the roles of adoption institutions are whitewashed and omitted in most accounts that most of the public will read from these groups’ publications and on online sources. My research that I highlight in greater detail in my book indicates this pattern of historical inaccuracy is intentional, in order to hide their complicity in promoting a system that separated families. For most of those impacted, this has been and remains a lifetime separation because of discriminatory laws sealing adoption records.

An adoptee may never be family in kin networks

This shot was taken during a visit with some of my adoptive relatives. With some, it was the last time I ever saw them, and this image is nearly four decades old.

When I wrote my memoir on the U.S. adoption experience and my family story, I knew that I would have few fans among my adoptive and biological family members.

In fact, I wrote this in the introduction to my memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are: “Some families may feel aggrieved by an adoptee sharing family tales. Some may feel deep anger. Adoptees risk harming those relations by helping others know about this experience that touches nearly all Americans through their personal, work, and community relations. Adoptees know they could disrupt their family ties forever.”

A year after I self-published my book, I learned that more people in my family network had read my book than I had thought. Some did not tell me they had until I learned by accident in unrelated communications. Of those who read it, none have genuinely reached out to me to discuss it, except two cousins, on either side of my adoptive families. I am happy for these conversations.

One likely barrier is my history with my extended adopted family. Some of us never really communicated for decades. In my book I explain how not being biologically related as distal kin is a major factor why there is this undeniable communications gap. My book makes this point, and none have reached out to explore this with me.

My adoptive father’s many failures, as a father and more, is another complicating factor. He was an alcoholic, and I only briefly touch on how that addiction forever shaped my family’s history and my life in ways I still think about on those dark, cloudy days. His very existence represents a shameful family secret, not to mention what he did as a husband and father.

From those who read my book, I did not receive any words of support about issues I addressed, such as the immorality of state laws and adoption systems that hide people’s identity. It is as if the issues I made clear at the individual and societal level did not matter, even when they had this true-life story connected to them personally. I never heard one communication that showed empathy.

By contrast, I have received many thoughtful comments from readers, who are strangers and who I have known throughout my life. Their words have been reassuring that the story I wrote touched on themes that are universal to the human experience.

In the end, the mostly cold shrug I received from my adoptive and even my biological family networks has made me all the more happy I wrote my book. And maybe my story will really only will connect with adoptees and just those who see them as equal persons in the eyes of the law. 

(Author note: My memoir does not mention any family member by first or last name, nor do I provide any clues that might reveal their identities.)

How the history of adoption in Michigan remains hidden

Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, taken shortly after its opening in 1929 (source: Fifty Years’ Work with Girls, 1883-1933: A Story of the Florence Crittenton Homes).

I have published an updated article examining the hidden history of my birthplace, Detroit’s Crittenton General hospital. In my article, I write that one of the unexpected outcomes of the American adoption experience is how the stigma of illegitimacy created a cloak of invisibility around the birth of adoptees and their presence in the general population. The failure to count adoptees officially in state and federal vital statistics such as the U.S. Census up until the year 2000 also has promoted their hidden status. The intersection of these outcomes can be seen in the story of Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, demolished in 1975 and now largely forgotten.

I was among what I estimate to be at least 20,000 infants born and placed for adoption at this major facility promoting that system during the height of the boom adoption years after World War II. My memoir on my life’s story, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, provides additional information on the history of the facility—one of the nation’s largest maternity hospitals dedicated to promoting the separation of infants from their birth mothers and kin through adoption. My book also examines how birth records of adoptions at the hospital are either kept hidden or intentionally sealed to prevent the public from knowing true scope of the adoption system in Detroit and Michigan in the decades after World War II.