Tag Archives: Crittenton General Hospital

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!

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.

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.

Finding that rare picture, taken at my birthplace

photo of six nurses and six infants, Crittenton General Hospital

A photo taken at Crittenton General Hospital in 1965 shows young infants in the care of nurses (photo courtesy of Patricia Ibbotson’s Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers and the Detroit Public Library collection). Most infants born here were placed for adoption.

This week I read a wonderful photo history book on the hospitals, orphanages, and mental health facilities that were built and operated in Detroit and the surrounding area from the 1800s through the late 1900s. The slim tome, called Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers, by Patricia Ibbotson, is a great piece of storytelling. It shows how our society, in one major metropolitan area, cared for the sick, the infirmed, and the needy.

Ibbotson notes, “All of the hospitals, as well as homes for the aged and orphans, evolved from the poorhouse system.” She also notes most were founded by religious orders. Orphanages stand out for me because I am by historic reckoning a child placed in institutional care: in my case, I was given up for adoption and put into foster care for more than five weeks, making me a bastard, orphan, and foster kid all at once.

Patricia Ibbotson’s 2004 photo history book, Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers.

Ibbotson’s book documents nearly a half-dozen orphan facilities, describing the “illegitimately born” and discarded infants as “foundlings,” and their shamed mothers as women who had “fallen by the way.” In the United States, society viewed both groups as outsiders and, like most of Europe, treated them poorly, if not lethally well into the 20th century.

According to Ibbotson’s research, Detroit had more than a half-dozen orphanages for homes for “unfortunate ones”— meaning the discarded infants—before 1900. Detroit’s long history of dealing with foundlings or so-called illegitimate babies resembled approaches used in other major cities, like New York City and its New York Foundling Hospital. The treatment or maltreatment of these infants left at these facilities in big cities helped spur the creation of the U.S. Children’s Bureau and reforms to address well-documented abuses of discarded infants in the early 1900s. That organization played a key reformer role making adoption a safer system in the United States, which personally impacted my life after I was born.

Detroit, a city of fallen women and foundlings

A shot from 1912 of the Detroit Woman’s Hospital and Foundlings Home shows some of the many illegitimately born babies in its care (photo courtesy of Patricia Ibbotson’s Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers and the Wayne State University collection).

Like New York City, Detroit was home to a large hospital dedicated to women and their “foundling” kids called the Detroit Woman’s and Foundling Home, which opened in 1869, created by a religious order to care for these socially scorned outcasts. It later became Hutzel Women’s Hospital.

Detroit also had multiple Florence Crittenton maternity homes and hospitals, which first opened in 1897 and later in grander fashion with opening of the Crittenton General Hospital in 1929, north of downtown. There were five homes and hospital/homes in all. Crittenton General Hospital, with three wings and dormitory facilities that also housed single pregnant mothers, became a future epicenter of adoption promotion in Michigan in the boom adoption years after World War II.

My life story began there, and that story was hidden from me for decades until I untangled the mystery, found my birth records, and put together the pieces of a tale showing how infants like me were part of a national system that separated millions of families in every state and territory. I recount this complex, national story in my newly released memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are (purchase here).

Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit is shown in a photo, taken shortly after its opening in 1929. I was born and relinquished into adoption here.

I requested Ibbotson’s book through my local library, hoping to find an image of the maternity hospital where I was born and then given up for adoption. That facility, Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, was one of the nation’s largest maternity hospitals—it had 115 dormitory beds and two wings devoted to maternity care, according to Crittenton records. The Florence Crittenton Association of American and National Florence Crittenton Mission, which ran it and dozens of similar homes and hospitals for single pregnant women, promoted adoption in the three decades after World War II. I describe the significance of the hospital in my memoir and study of the American adoption system and experience called You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are.

A picture and its meaning

The picture included in Ibbotson’s book of Crittenton General Hospital could not have been more meaningful. It is a shot reportedly taken in 1965, the year of my birth, in front of the hospital. It shows six nurses in white outfits, each holding very young infants, all presumably being future adoptees. The cut line described the facility as a place for “’unfortunate women and girls’ and their babies.”

That same shot shown above, taken of Crittenton General Hospital in 1965, shows likely future adoptees in the care of nurses, though not every child born here was relinquished. Note, the cut line information has some inaccuracies from the source (photo courtesy of Patricia Ibbotson’s Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers and the Detroit Public Library collection).

On my computer, I zoomed in on the faces, wondering if I am in the half-dozen infants in the shot. I would have big ears, and I did not see that in two of the faces that are visible. The chances are perhaps one in several hundred I could have been captured in this unknown still, that is with the historical collection at the Detroit Public Library.

Unfortunately the picture and Ibbotson failed, like nearly every official source I have consulted, to even mention the word adoption, despite the hospital’s central role in that institution for the entire state and region.

My efforts to find the number of relinquished babies all failed, which I describe in my book in more detail. However, I peg the number of relinquished number of infants from Crittenton General at well over 20,000, mostly in the decades after the war, til the time of the hospital’s closing in 1974. It was torn down in 1975.

Based on all records I’ve found and my own original birth certificate, the cut line for this picture listed the wrong address for the photo as East Elizabeth Street, which is the address for the former Florence Crittenton Hospital, near downtown Detroit. Crittenton General Hospital was located at 1554 Tuxedo Street. Also the date of the hospital’s closure, according to the Detroit Free Press and other sources I consulted for my book, is 1974. The cut line lists 1976.

For additional information on the history of the National Florence Crittenton Mission, I can recommend a couple of sources: 

Kunzel, Regina. Fallen Women, Problem Girls. Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.

Wilson, Otto, Robert South Barrett, and National Florence Crittenton Mission. Fifty Years Work With Girls, 1883–1933: A Story of the Florence Crittenton Homes. Alexandria: The National Florence Crittenton Mission, 1933.

The hidden legacy of separating families through adoption in Detroit

The Crittenton Maternity Home (top) for single mothers, who delivered their children across the street at the former Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, opened in the 1950s. The hospital opened in 1929. Today the former maternity home houses Cass Community Social Services. Most women who stayed here between the 1950s and the mid-1970s gave their infants up for adoption.

Since May 2018, the national dialogue has swirled around the Trump administration’s official policy of separating migrant parents and their children at the U.S. southern border as a form of immigration deterrence. As of mid-June, the number of children estimated to have been separated from their parents was nearly 2,000, for the period from April 18 to May 31, 2018.

As this played out on the national stage, scores of adoptees on the margins of power have observed the political crisis and voiced dismay that the rage leveled against the current administration has never been lifted by liberals, progressives, conservatives, politicians, religious leaders, medical groups, the media, or others to support adoptees in restoring their legal and human rights that are still denied because of the U.S. adoption system.

That system led to nearly 2.7 million adoptions, and thus nearly 2.7 million family separations, between 1945 and 1975. Today there are an estimated 5 million U.S. adoptees, most of whom do not know their kin because of the policies that encouraged adoption and the state laws that still prevent kin from knowing each other.

I sent a guest column to the editorial page of the Detroit Free Press on June 2, 2018, after first pitching the story the month before about Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, where I and many thousands of other adoptees were born before the facility closed in 1974. The paper never followed up on my queries, as I had hoped they might because of the historic significance of the hospital to Detroit and Michigan’s social history and legacy of treating women and children.

Why the Untold Story of a Maternity Hospital Matters Right Now

Nearly three weeks later, I am publishing that column because of intense media and political coverage and, yes, open grandstanding surrounding the detention of young children and the breaking up of families as an official national policy.

I also find it more than ironic to read purported outrage and criticism by groups as diverse as the American Catholic Bishops and the even the American Academy of Pediatrics. For the record, both groups had supported adoption, which ending up separating—and in most cases forever—millions of mothers and their kin. (See the AAP’s statement promoting family separation and the role of the Catholic church in family separation during the boom adoption decades after World War II.)

These uncomfortable historic facts are not lost on adoptees, who have seen almost no meaningful support in their quest for equal rights by law from groups and leaders rushing to “help children.” 

Adoption was envisioned by these and many other groups as a way to address the societal shame and stain of illegitimacy of single-mother parenting while providing stigmatized, “out-of-wedlock” infants to couples unable to produce children. That was my family story and one repeated by the hundreds of thousands of other birth mothers, adoptive parents, and adoptees who moved from one family to another.

Those who bore the brunt of this calculus were the birth mothers, like my birth mother, and their kids, like me. 

My newly released memoir explores the system that promoted this many millions of individual decisions and the laws that still keep kin separated because of lingering bias and outdated ideas that deny most adoptees their rights to be treated equally by law. My book specifically focusses on Detroit, where I and literally uncounted thousands were born and than separated from our biological kin and mothers. 

Crittenton General Hospital in Detroit was one of the nation’s largest maternity hospitals, eventually becoming one of the most important maternal health centers devoted to promoting adoption to single mother patients from the 1940s through 1974.

Column Submitted to the Detroit Free Press: The Hidden Legacy of Separating Families through Adoption in Detroit

In April, national media first reported 1,475 migrant children who came to the United State alone could no longer be accounted for by federal officials. A top Department of Health and Human Services official told Congress it had lost track of the youth who were placed with sponsors. [See above how that estimate has risen since I first wrote this on June 2, 2018.]

Attorney General Jeff Sessions then fueled the controversy in early May announcing a new family separation policy, saying, “If you won’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally.” By month’s end, some press reports were linking both issues, pointing to the administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy to stem illegal immigration at the southern border.

Though these development were separate, critics protested them together and expressed outrage at the Trump administration with angry tweets and the hashtags #WhereAreTheChildren and #MissingChildren.

Meanwhile, in Detroit, 1,600 miles from where the policy is being enforced at the Mexican border, most residents remain oblivious of the city’s historic legacy of separating mothers and children through the national system of adoption. The lifelong separation of mothers and their infants took place through a national consensus of doctors, social workers, religious groups, state vital records keepers and maternity homes and hospitals.

Detroit was home to Crittenton General Hospital, one of the nation’s largest maternity hospitals for unwed young women. Though it served the health needs of likely thousands of mothers and their infants for decades, it also promoted family separation that was meant to “save” the young mothers from a life of shame and the children from the stigma of illegitimacy.

Located at Tuxedo and Woodrow Wilson, Crittenton General operated from 1929 to 1974, and was torn down in 1975. It was among the dozens of maternity homes and hospitals nationwide created by the National Florence Crittenton Mission. Founded in the 1883, the philanthropic group first sought to save prostitutes and then so-called “problem girls,” who were poor, single and pregnant.

During the 1940s, as rates of single-mother pregnancies rose dramatically, the organization’s longstanding official policy to keep mothers and children together changed. It began working with local agencies to promote adoption.

Detroit had three Crittenton homes and hospitals before 1929. Another maternity home was built next to Crittenton General and opened in 1954, keeping the women out of public view before they gave birth at the hospital. The vast majority of moms would relinquish their babies to the agencies that later placed them with other families.

Nationally, groups like the Salvation Army and the National Conference of Catholic Charities ran similar homes and facilities in the post-World War II boom years of adoption. From 1944 through 1975, an estimated 2.7 million infants were separated from their mothers and placed for adoption, according to a U.S. Children’s Bureau study from 1984. This is only an estimate, as there has never been any official system nationally that requires the tracking of all adoption placements.

Today there is still no accurate estimate of all adoptees, in Michigan or the United States, though there are official counts for intercountry adoptees since 1999. Some estimates peg the national number at 5 million. The stigma of illegitimacy and out-of-wedlock pregnancy that adoption was supposed solve also created a cloak of invisibility around the birth of adoptees and their presence in society, even as it became socially acceptable for single moms to raise kids.

On Jan. 24, 1974, the Detroit Free Press ran a story on the closing of Crittenton General just before it last months, due to financial strains, the decline in adoptions and the economic decay of Detroit. The piece referenced how it provided “maternity service” for single mothers, but not the adoptions that followed—for decades. The story fit into a long pattern of hiding adoption from the public and hiding the story of adoptees.

When I contacted Crittenton General’s successor hospital in Rochester—now called Ascension Crittenton Hospital—in 2016 while researching my book as an adoptee born at Crittenton General, its staff said they had no birth records from its Detroit predecessor.

The National Crittenton Foundation, the mission’s successor group now in Oregon, said it had no birth records to share for its former homes and hospitals. The repository of all National Florence Crittenton Mission records, at the University of Minnesota Library, said it did not have records of infants born at the Detroit facilities. The Detroit Public Library also claimed it had no birth records data for the hospital. When asked to estimate adoptee births between 1945 and 1980 statewide, a Michigan Department of Health and Human Services official spokesperson replied, “It would not be possible to determine this number.”

From a policy and public health perspective, it is unthinkable that there is no accurate record of adoptees who were relinquished in Detroit or even Michigan.

Nationally, the U.S. Census in its last two counts failed to count for all adoptees in the way it estimated adoptee and foster children. The method in 2010 missed the generations of adult adoptees who are older and do not live with parents. Not knowing how many adoptees live in each state undermines some adoptees’ efforts to change laws sealing their birth records. Original birth records remain closed in most states, including Michigan in most cases, preventing most adoptees from knowing their family origins.

As many health and public health experts say, “If you aren’t counted, you don’t count.”

About the Author: Rudy Owens (MA, MPH), is a Detroit native, adoptee and one of many thousands of infants born to a single mother at Crittenton General Hospital. He was placed in foster care and adopted five weeks after his birth at the facility in 1965. Owens is the author of a new memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. His book examines the American adoption experience and his years-long efforts to obtain his original birth records and family origins from the state of Michigan.

REFERENCES:

Adoption History Project (website). “Adoption Statistics.” Accessed September 5, 2016. http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/topics/adoptionstatistics.htm.

Harmon, Amy. New York Times. “Did the Trump Administration Separate Immigrant Children From Parents and Lose Them?” May 28, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/us/trump-immigrant-children-lost.html

Carp, E. Wayne. Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Detroit Free Press. “Silent Halls, Empty Beds at Crittenton.” January 24, 1974: 64.

Eisner, Jennifer (Press Officer, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services). Email to author. July 27, 2016. http://www.rudyowens.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/MDHHS-Statements-on-Adoption-Records-and-Policy-7-27-2016.pdf.

Fessler, Ann. The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. New York: Penguin Press, 2006.

Florence Crittenton Association of America. “Services to and Characteristics of Unwed Mothers, 1965.” August 1966. Box 67, folder 6. Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries, Florence Crittenton.

Kreider, Rose M. and Daphne Lofquist. “Adopted Children and Stepchildren: 2010, Population Characteristics.” U.S. Census Bureau, April 2014. https://www.census.gov/prod/2014pubs/p20-572.pdf.

Kunzel, Regina. Fallen Women, Problem Girls. Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.

Maza, Penelope L. “Adoption Trends: 1944–1975.” Child Welfare Research Notes, no. 9, U.S. Children’s Bureau, August 1984. Child Welfare League of America Papers. Box 65, folder: “Adoption—Research—Reprints of Articles,” Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota. (See: http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/archive/MazaAT.htm.)

National Public Radio. “Following Up On 1,500 Missing Immigrant Children In The U.S.” May 29, 2018. https://www.npr.org/2018/05/29/615079848/following-up-on-1-500-missing-immigrant-children-in-the-u-s.

Rochester Clarion. “A Salute to Crittenton Hospital (supplemental).” August 3, 1967.

University of Minnesota. National Florence Crittenton Mission Records. Accessed September 5, 2016. http://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/11/resources/736#.

Wang, Amy B. Washington Post. “The U.S. lost track of 1,475 immigrant children last year. Here’s why people are outraged now.” May 29, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/05/27/the-u-s-lost-track-of-1500-immigrant-children-last-year-heres-why-people-are-outraged-now/.

Wilson, Otto, Robert South Barrett, and National Florence Crittenton Mission. Fifty Years’ Work With Girls, 1883–1933: A Story of the Florence Crittenton Homes. Alexandria: The National Florence Crittenton Mission, 1933. (See: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000977186)