Tag Archives: Bureaucracy

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.

What adoption taught me about bureaucracy

I have spent decades of my life fighting a large bureaucracy in Michigan, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. The massive state agency, which oversees all vital records and all birth records of adoptees born in Michigan, denied me my original birth records for nearly three decades. It did this even after I had met my birth mother who signed a consent form in 1989 that should have forced the agency to give me my original birth certificate. It took a court battle to secure my birth certificate’s release in 2016.

The long dance I had with that ossified bureaucracy provided wisdom I continue to use in how I do my work professionally today in a large government agency and how I deal with other bureaucracies that intentionally choose to do wrong as opposed to good. In nearly every sense, being an adoptee denied basic legal rights was my advanced training how I respond to immoral, inflexible systems and institutions to this day.

This week, I found myself locking horns with two intractable systems that are among the least accountable and most unbending in the United States. One is a nursing home in St. Louis, Missouri, that cares for a family member of mine, which in its operation is not that different than the more than 15,000 licensed facilities nationally. The other is a medical clinic in metro Portland, Oregon, where I visited a doctor in September this year. Each represents a part of the much larger systems of for-profit healthcare and nursing home care, and their structure and management are likely representative of their thousands of counterparts throughout the country.

Both of these institutions that provide medical and health services are, theoretically, there to serve others and provide services that are essential and also something most persons see as “morally right.” These two facilities are not related in any way. Yet both are much alike in how they function as bureaucracies that are mostly intractable in their actions and inflexible when asked to be accountable.

Because of my long decades of dealing with bureaucratic systems, I have learned important lessons. The most important of those lessons is to never accept “no,” which is the reflex response of organizations that do not take ownership for their actions that can cause harm and can be morally wrong. You can read my essay about that here. The knowledge gained from prolonged struggles, I have found, can be used for doing what is both good and morally just. I choose to fight for what I know to be right and not to submit in these seemingly losing battles. In the simple conflicts we all face in life, I have long-decided that I would be the lion and not the lamb.