Category Archives: Rudy Owens Memoir

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Whitmer–a Democrat who has not spoken publicly in any statement I can find in favor of adoptee rights–would end outdated laws in Michigan that deny tens of thousands of Michigan born adoptees equal treatment by law.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.

A hunger to know who we are and from where we have come

Alex Haley’s 1976 classic: Roots: The Saga of an American Family

When I wrote my book about the U.S. adoption system and experience, I felt I had an almost moral duty to acknowledge the profound wisdom shared by the great African American writer Alex Haley.

Haley’s two great works, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and Roots: The Saga of American Family (1976), stand out in the pantheon of American letters. I connected to both for different reasons, but I was more personally drawn to his family story in what most people today call Roots. For an entire generation of Americans and people like me who came of age when it was published, it helped to shed light on the U.S. slavery system that erased the past identities of millions.

For me, Roots is also deeply universal.

Haley’s family’s story from west Africa to the horror of the Middle Passage and chattel slavery and then to freedom is one of the most important historical and creative works in our collective American experience. It also speaks to me because he captures the essential truth of finding life’s meaning: answering the siren call to our most important question: “Who am I?”

Haley explored this life question in the boldest of fashions, weaving together a story of American violence and the history of enslaved Africans who were Haley’s ancestors, brought to what became the United States in the New World. Telling this story, however, was not easy. It nearly killed the author.

Haley described to NPR in an interview in February 1977 how he also communed with his ancestors on a cargo vessel, traveling from Liberia to the Florida. He almost committed suicide on that trip, coming close to jumping off the ship’s bridge amid a wave of depression and uncertainty. Instead he found a way to make a personal connection to the horrific Middle Passage, which describes the slave trade and its human cargo from West Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean. Haley heard the voices of his family ghosts, and he broke down in tears when he made that breakthrough.

All of us can thank those ancestors who visited with Haley that painful night in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, when he hit the pit of his own despair and cried from his soul. What he left all of us has touched generations of readers, including me.

Paying homage to Haley in my memoir

In 2018 I published my own “family” saga, searching for my hidden past, in my memoir and public health history of adoption called You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. In chapter six on my book, under the chapter title “Blood is Thicker than Water,” I wrote:

Photographer Mickey Adair, used under a CC 3.0 license

“Haley achieved international fame for documenting his long and successful family search that stretched back to his ancestral villages in Gambia, in West Africa. Haley eloquently describes why his own search mattered, particularly for many African Americans whose histories and families were cruelly severed by slavery. It was an institution that separated them from their homeland and then children from their families in the Americas. ‘In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage—to know who we are and where we have come from,’ writes Haley. “Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.’” 

I have clear and sharp memories watching the TV series Roots. It made me confront many ugly truths about my country and also my hidden past as an adoptee. I never talked publicly about my thoughts then. But the seed grew and matured. I never, ever doubted the truth of what this inner voice was saying—exactly the way Haley described it.

I am not the only one to have been touched by Haley’s work and his universal story of what it means to be a human being. Today, Roots has been published in 37 languages.

And like Haley, my journey in life as an adoptee robbed of his past and kin connections demanded that I confront that vacuum and disquieting loneliness, if it took all my life to do that.

Each chapter of my life has had different ways of confronting this feeling, and soon I will be taking a much-anticipated and long-awaited journey. It is time.

Reminders of Haley’s universal truths today

As I have drawn closer to my more than two-decades delayed trip one of my ancestral home countries, Finland, I was reminded about what Haley shared in his work and in his many interviews about his family’s story.

After some failed starts using a biological family tree of my U.S. biological relatives and good old Google, I finally connected with very distal biological kin in Finland.

It was part luck, part detective work, and part “sisu,” which means stoic determination and grit to overcome adversity in the Finnish language. With my new-found Finnish kin, our shared bloodlines and history can be traced back to small villages in the Finnish administrative regions of Ostrobothnia and South Ostrobothnia, when Finland was under the control of the Swedish Empire in the late 1700s.

My ancestors and those of my Finnish relatives trace back to the village of Kortesjärvi, in South Ostrobothnia, Finland.

Since the first “family email” arrived from Finland this month, I have connected with a couple of my distant relatives. We are now planning to meet for an impromptu gathering with other relatives spread out around the country when I arrive there. (Details are still being worked out.)

One of my relatives wrote me that I even resembled two sons they have: “This is such an exciting possibility to learn more of our family history. It is also heartwarming to think that it may be possible to see you.” Even before reading this line, some of my Finnish-American biological relatives told me that many of my biological relatives always thought I resembled my great grandmother, who was born in Finland and emigrated to the United States to northern Michigan in the early 1900s. (Two of my biological relatives told me that: a biological cousin, and only recently, as well as another more distant family relative who I just connected with for the first time ever this year.)

None of this is a surprise, and yet it is profoundly visceral. It is hard to describe this to others, except for me to repeat what Haley shared so absolutely perfectly.

After my Finnish relatives and I connected, I have been sharing regularly a line on social media that I have been sharing for years: “Blood is thicker than water.” I have never, ever doubted this truth. My trip, literally “going home” to the old ancestral villages of Finland, is nothing more than proof of this knowledge of what it means to be connected and to be human.

The elegance and simplicity of equality in Vermont

Vermont Department of Health application for an adult adoptee to obtain their true birth records (page 1 of 2).

Today is the first day that adult adoptees born in Vermont, who are at least 18 years old, can access their original birth/vital record and not face legalized inequality by discriminatory statutes that single out adoptees as second-class people who do not receive equal treatment by law.

Well done to everyone who made this happen there. I salute all you did for adoptee rights and adoptees everywhere.

It is important to remember, even in the absence of any “landmark court case,” this inequality in most U.S. states violates the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, Article VII.

I also appreciate what the public health employees in Vermont did in communicating this legal reform, passed in the 2022 legislative session.

This is how the Vermont Department of Health communicates equality by law to adoptees born in the state of Vermont, as of July 1, 2023.

What I see on the updated website for the Vermont Department of Health today is the simple elegance of equality for adoptees without harmful conditions, obstructions, discrimination, bias, and public health and human health harm. It is only today, July 1, 2023, that an adult adopted person born in Vermont who is 18 years old can access a document all non-adopted persons born in the USA can access without any discrimination.

Just think about that. And there are anywhere from 5 to 8 million adoptees in the United States, most of whom are still denied this legal right.

This was the result of concerted advocacy, and, again, I applaud all who led the efforts for long-denied reform. It’s important to remember that this law change restoring rights that were taken away, also by law, will not and does not erase decades of past harm.

The New England Adoptee Rights Coalition has noted, “Vermont was among the first 20 states to revoke an adopted person’s right to request and obtain a copy of their own unaltered, original birth certificate in 1946.”

However, the decades-overdue restoration of basic legal rights is a path that other states can follow.

Will Michigan follow Vermont?

The state I remain focused on is my birth state, Michigan, which denies the simplicity of basic legal equality to thousands and thousands of adoptees.

As of July 1, 2023, this is how one of a few Michigan adoption-related statutes looks like, creating a maze of confusion and nearly impossible barriers for any adoptee born in Michigan to ever obtain their original birth record, as a matter of law.

The so-called “progressive” governor, Gretchen Whitmer, continues to promote her chops supporting those who need a helping hand—except of course thousands of adoptees.

She has done nothing about this issue, and she is already in her fifth year in office, with no gesture, statement, or visible communication she cares about thousands of persons, many who are now aging and even dying, or that they will ever know their truth or even kin.

For comparison to Vermont’s reform, here is how inequality looks in Michigan. It is an absolute cluster.

I will keep trying to point out these issues in Michigan, which Vermont’s reform makes all the more glaring.

Vermont’s law gives me hope, when often what I feel is loneliness on the mountain top. And sometimes hope truly can be a wonderful thing.

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.