Tag Archives: Illegitimacy

‘No friends but the mountains’

The Kurds’ saying is also true for adoptees: “No friends but the mountains.”

I rarely do videos related to my book on my story as an adoptee and U.S. adoption history, or on larger adoptee rights issues.

Last week, I decided to make one. Find my video here.

I made it on the fly, in response to a now-stalled and wildly discriminatory bill against adoptees in the California Assembly, AB 1302.

I needed to express my realization and my personal and sobering assessment of the cold, hard, and inequitable reality that adoptees continue to face in the political sphere. In that place where laws, politics, power, and culture collide, adoption remains a reliably bipartisan issue championed by Democrats and Republicans in states and nationally. We saw that with this bill in a state with a rock-solid Democrat super majority in the state legislature and control of the Governor’s office.

Here is reality as I see it based on the outcomes and the events that unfolded: Adoptees have no friends but the mountains.

My video that I shared shortly after the California Judiciary approved an anti-adoptee bill with not one “no” vote and the committee controlled by Democrats by a nearly 3-1 margin.

I stand by this assessment because the facts point to this long-used Kurdish metaphor of being betrayed by all sides, which all of us can independently verify and see.

We do not have to like it, but confronting the underlying truth is critical to how one approaches solutions strategically. It is also relevant for what I see in my birth state of Michigan, where there is no effort by a Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, or its Democratically controlled legislature to even acknowledge denied human and legal rights to thousands of adoptees like me who were born there.

What happened and where is this bill in the California Legislature:

Apparently this measure is now stalled because it did not advance on the legislative calendar for this year.

However, I cannot independently confirm this based on the bill’s tracking record, but this has been reported by the Adoptee Rights Law Center. That would mean the measure is still ready to be heard in 2024 by the Assembly Health Care Committee. I think we all need to see this communicated clearly by the California Legislature too.

Assemblymember Tom Lackey (R-Palmdale) is the prime sponsor of AB 1302, which is one of the most anti-adoptee pieces of legislation proposed in a state legislature in years, based on its potential harm to likely tens of thousands of adoptees born in California.

This measure is sponsored and championed by an anti-abortion, right-leaning state lawmaker, Assemblymember Tom Lackey (R-Palmdale). He is an adoptive parent of two children, and his anti-abortion voting record aligns with the wider GOP efforts to promote adoption as the so-called “policy alternative” to abortion.

As we’ve seen since the U.S. Supreme Court’s anti-women decision the 2022 Dobbs decision, this view is gaining momentum, to the detriment of adoptees and women and their rights to bodily autonomy.

In his deliberately dishonest presentation of what the bill would do, Lackey was joined by the proverbial “anti-adoptee” Quisling. I use that term for a person who is adopted and who supports legislation that harms the collective group of millions of adoptees. In this case it was a seasoned corporate lobbyist named Lance Hastings, who fulfilled the obligatory role of a Quisling we see whenever adoptees are sold out without regard to their inherent legal and human rights. “Quisling” is the appropriate word because the facts bear it out.

Both Lackey and the Quisling presented what I call false statements and framing comments that no one called out for what they were.

Before the hearing, adoptees and adoptee rights advocates, however, provided lawmakers ample documentation to call out such falsehoods. From what I saw, no comments were uttered by lawmakers who had that information.

Afterwards, Bastard Nation, which staunchly opposed this regressive and discriminatory measure, wrote a devastating analysis of everything wrong with this harmful proposed bill. That analysis noted: “AB1302 bill would not have flown 50 years ago much less today. It goes against current adoption culture, best practice standards, and the success of the adoptee rights and justice movement/OBC access. [Fourteen] states already unseal [original birth certificates] with no restrictions or conditions for the adoptees to which they belong.” Also go here to see the nightmare that AB 1302 would lead to if passed as written; the infographic is by Adoptee Rights Law, and is brilliant. Also see Adoptee Rights Law summary here.

The legislative kabuki during the bill hearing proved the hardest to watch and internalize. I say kabuki because that best describes the bill hearing for this toxic measure and how publicly disengaged logical allies were at the bill’s hearing on April 18, 2023, with the Assembly Judiciary Committee. (See the full hearing recording here, starting at around 37:00, with the CalOpens testimony against starting at 46:00.) The logical allies, many assume, would be California’s elected Democrats on the Assembly Judiciary Committee.

This committee has eight Democrats and three Republicans.

At no time did Democrats state facts provided to them by multiple adoptee rights advocates in advance that no adoptee rights group supported the measure or were consulted. At no time did Democrats state the most basic fact of all: that this bill and existing law deny all adoptees in California equal treatment by law.

Zip.

Nothing.

Silence.

And no on in that room needed anyone to tell them millions of adoptees, including all of those born in California, are denied equality by law.

That is the 800-pound gorilla that not one of them had the cojones to confront. Even worse, this Democrat-dominated committee recorded not one “no” vote.

Worse, it’s impossible to even tell during the roll call from the legislative video what the abstaining votes said when asked to publicly cast their vote. It sounded like mumbles so they would not heard, as they apparently cowered with their muffled public votes.

This is a copy of the California Assembly Judiciary vote on April 18, 2023, when no Democrats voted against a measure that passed with eight yes votes and three abstentions, which if passed into law would further deprive basic legal rights from thousands of California-born adoptees.

Adoptees can learn from the Kurds: they have no friends but the mountains

According to the legislative record, which is published however, eight committee members voted for it, and three “abstained.”

That’s called cowardice, because it is. I believe that is a factual statement too.

In short, adoptees were abandoned again by legislative silence and performance gestures.

The worst of the lies and talking point shared repeatedly in most legislative hearings, that a birth mother was promised confidentiality, was not corrected, even after a lawyer invited to the presenter table for reasons I still don’t understand openly lied to committee members that a so-called “presumed promise” of confidentiality to women coerced into surrendering their children to adoption existed.

For the record, no such legal promise has ever been made or documented in any court or legislative setting.

Bastard Nation in its submitted response on this bill addressed this canard that never, ever dies: “There is no evidence in any state that records were sealed to ‘protect’ the reputation or ‘privacy’ of biological parents who relinquished children for adoption. In the over 60 years of the adoptee rights struggle, not one single document has been presented anywhere that shows that birthparents were promised or guaranteed anonymity by the state or anyone else. If they were made on the sly, they were made by individuals who had no legal authority to do so.”

In the end, misinformation and kabuki prevailed.

Adoptees were abandoned by their likely but no-show “friends,” and the bill advanced.

Though this bill appears to be on hold until 2024—which I still can’t verify on the Legislature’s website—adoptees will have to confront their reality in other states and with the public.

The Kurds know betrayal well having endured countless acts of harm from nations in their historic homelands, as well as from the United States.

Right now, they have no allies.

They have no “friends” willing to correct lies and misinformation when it counts and where it counts.

They are utterly on their own, as they always have been the last half-century of working tirelessly to end legal discrimination, rooted in my view in their illegitimate status.

So that is why I made my video, as a reminder of lived truth, which the historically persecuted Kurdish people have experienced since they were denied a nation state by conniving colonial powers after WWI. They have a saying, uttered at each violent, tragic betrayal by all nations, repeatedly since that time: “No friends but the mountains.”

‘Can you help me with my search?’

Because my website for my book on the U.S. adoption experience is one of the few online resources exploring the history of the adoption system in Michigan in the post-World War II era, I am frequently contacted by strangers impacted by adoption in my birth state.

The contacts include those who were placed for adoption like me looking for help finding their biological kin. I get emails from birth mothers who may have given up their child at my birthplace, Crittenton General Hospital, perhaps one of the largest maternity hospitals in the country that promoted the separation of mothers and their infants from the 1930s through its closing in 1975. I also have been contacted by adoptees seeking help petitioning Michigan courts for their records—a topic I address with online fact sheets that provide detailed steps how to do a court petition, with links to all documents that I have been able to find.

For nearly all requests, there literally is nothing I can do to help people with their searches. What I have already published, and update as I get more information, is the information that I can share.

I recently replied to an adoptee and a financial investor in Florida who wanted me to provide tips about doing a court petition. Because I am not a lawyer, I cannot provide legal advice. In his case, I sent him links to my two FAQs, which give as much information and guidance that I am able to provide.

I provided those materials because the state of Michigan and the courts in Michigan refuse to provide this information for adoptees, when they have a legal and moral obligation to assist the tens of thousands of adoptees separated by the state’s discriminatory laws denying all adoptees their legal, human, and equal rights to their vital records and their biological, medical, and family histories.

My birthplace, Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, taken in 1965, the year of my birth

No, this is not fair

When I provide replies that do not offer the assistance people want, I usually never get a follow up or even a courtesy appreciatory comment that the materials published provide some people a small measure of information not given by the state. While that is a bit disappointing, my reasons for publishing my resources have never been about money or even gratitude. My focus remains on changing laws that deny rights to many that are decades in need of overhaul. If the material I share provides some small measure of assistance to the public, particularly adoptees and their kin searching for them, then that is a nice outcome too. That is reward in itself.

Being an adoptee, with few political and media allies, is by definition a hard place to be when you are searching for answers to who you are and your kin connections. No one’s story is the only story. All of them matter, and all adoptees, on their own, have to confront their reality in a way that makes sense for them.

My view on this approach to the adoptee-lived life may not be shared by many. However, my perspective, particularly at this point in my life, is that this is the often inequitable fate many adoptees were handed. It has nothing to do with fairness. Only the individuals can confront their fate in a way that makes sense for them. That is my own view, but also one deeply informed by the writings and wisdom of Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl.

Holocaust survivor, writer, and humanist Viktor Frankl, taken two years after his liberation from the Nazi camp system

Writing shortly after the war and his internment in Nazi camps, Frankl wrote that when faced with any situation in life, we all have a freedom to choose how we confront life’s obstacles. “Between stimulus and response, there is a space,” he wrote. “In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

That is not an idea that a lot of people, including adoptees, embrace for many reasons. But in my own experience, this perspective has helped me. It also continues to inform what I can and cannot do when others need help with the system that remains shrouded in inequity and legal barriers that deny equality.

A recent request

I was contacted last night by a man in his mid-70s who claimed that he was the father of a son born at my birthplace, in Detroit, who was then placed for adoption.

I do not know all of the details. I do not know why he was not involved in his purported son’s life earlier, but frequently the persons who had to deal with negative consequences of having a child out of marriage prior to the 1970s were the mother and the child. Historically and globally, women and children have borne the brunt of societies’ brutal and heartless treatment of single mothers and bastard children. This stigma fueled the system into which I was born an adoptee.

The historic reality of this treatment has never escaped me. It also was reflected in my own experience, with a father-by-sperm only, who never acknowledged I was his biological offspring by the time he died 15 years after I first met him. That is hardly a new story. It is part of the larger and universal story of illegitimacy.

When this main who claimed he was the father of an adoptee asked me to help give him assistance in finding his son, I literally had no advice for him because I do not provide that assistance or do searches for others. As someone who has now studied the history of illegitimacy and the U.S. adoption system’s historic treatment of infants and mothers, I did not feel greatly compelled to know why at the end of his life, he felt a need to make this connection. I do wonder why he was not there when his son started his life and needed to be with his biological kin.

Here is what I shared. I would like to think he might care enough about other children relinquished because of societal stigma, because of fathers who refused to accept paternity as history has documented as the norm now for centuries, and because of concerns for equality. If this man did take action to help other adoptees, and not just his own son he claimed to have sired, that would be great. But I am also a realist and know that we are often motivated by our own needs foremost. One of those needs is to know our family relations, as adoptees know best of all.

“I’m not in a position to provide people assistance with their personal searches,” I wrote the purported father of a fellow Detroit-born adoptee. “However, one way you can help adoptees is to consider helping all of them. You can do that by supporting legislation that would open records to them at the state legislative level, in Michigan and nationally, given you are involved in this system directly by fathering a son who was was placed for adoption. You can write a letter to the editor of your paper saying that’s needed. You can contact a TV station saying, if Michigan provided adoptees access to their records, I might have contact with my kin. These are all options you can take now. The information I have provided to adoptees is on my website to help any of them who are seeking justice and their past.”

I never heard back from him.

Webinar recording available on petitioning courts for original birth records

Nearly 60 people joined a recent webinar on March 21, 2021, hosted by the adoptee advocacy group Adoptees United. I presented with fellow adoptees Greg Luce of Minnesota and Courtney Humbaugh of Georgia. Each of us highlighted our experience as adoptees denied basic legal and equal rights in accessing our adoption and vital records.

My introductory comments can be found at the start of the recording.
My comments about my court petition begin here (17:00 into the recording).
A copy of my presentation that I shared with attendees can be found here.

As a presenter, I wanted to provide a roadmap for others who face nearly insurmountable barriers in getting what should be provided to all persons as a basic human right. My memoir and critical study of the U.S. adoption system describes why the state-level denial of these records must be understood historically and sociologically as part of the historic mistreatment of adoptees and illegitimately born persons, like me.

In addition, I provided what I consider to be a strategic approach for channeling defiance to an unjust system that had impacted my life greatly. At the very least I hoped my words and example helped to motivate a few others. Many of my decisions in my life were profoundly influenced by words I heard from someone else, sharing a story about why they took action to do good things.

As I had shared earlier, access to vital records by adoptees is intrinsically an issue rooted in power relationships. Those relationships are communicated through symbols that are invested with far more meaning than what they appear to have on the surface. And anything invested with this much magical and symbolic power, such as one’s original birth record, is worth a lifelong fight, which I have had to undertake only because I was born as an adoptee.

It is also critical to remember that an original birth certificate is a document that continues to be withheld from millions of U.S. adoptees. This denial of equal treatment by law has and remains in violation the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and equally the 14^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

My book also explains this struggle as a hero’s journey that too few adoptees can do for reasons too long to explain in one post. You can order my book on that issue, which describes how the state of Michigan denied me my birth record for decades until I finally took the state’s adoption bureaucracy to court and won my right to what was always mine as a human right.

“The state never had the legal and moral right to hold my past from me or the right to prevent my birth families from knowing about me,” I wrote in my memoir. “My true birth certificate shows the world that I exist as someone with a past. It shows I have an identity that I alone own. This document is and always has been mine by birthright.”

I would encourage adoptees, policy-makers, and journalists to visit the website of Adoptees United. The organization continues to host events that focus on issues it works on supporting the rights of adoptees in the United states as it works on changing laws and policies that deny rights to adopted persons.

Being disavowed in the official record: the adoptee’s mission inevitable

Rudy Owens and his paternal birth aunt, 2007

Last week I learned two of my three paternal biological aunts passed away, along with another aunt, who had married the younger brother of my adoptive father.

That means I counted three family losses of elderly family members in one week. It also meant I had to run through a lot of mixed feelings about the meaning these deaths as an adoptee.

I never met one of my two deceased paternal aunts. She, like her sister, apparently died peacefully in her 80s. However, I am fairly certain she had known about me since 1989, when I first found my biological father. Since that fateful meeting, neither she nor her immediately family made a single effort to contact me, and she died without ever speaking to me or communicating with me. Though I knew her name, and determined from online records where she lived, I decided not to reach out to her.

That same day I learned of this aunt’s death, further internet searching revealed I also had lost another of the two sisters, the one I had met. Both had passed away in 2013, and there was never any communication about these deaths that reached me from any family member or contact. That means half a decade had passed since my paternal aunts had died and at least two members of this clan who knew how to reach me did not bother to inform me. For an adoptee, I call that situational utterly normal.

I had met one of the aunts, and along with her daughter, my paternal cousin, in 2007 at their home in a Midwest state. I wrote about that meeting and its meaning in my memoir on the adoption experience called You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. It was a memorable day for all of us, but in the end, even in the years after we met, I was still the official bastard, the filius nullius, or no one’s son.

Illegitimate offspring are not counted in the record

I read the official obituaries of both women online and made copies for my files of the strangers who are my kin. Like most obituaries, the columns listed all of the surviving kin, including the surviving sister, offspring (alive and dead), grandchildren, and more. But I, a member of this clan by blood and DNA, was not acknowledged. I am the whited-out person who is not “legitimate,” and thus not a part of the “official story.”

In my aunts’ deaths, I would remain forever “illegitimate” to this family, never to be acknowledged. This is not the case in the obituaries of my maternal grandparents. My name and family status were recognized in their obituaries. I was real kin in their eyes and hearts.

These outcomes for adoptees of my generation provide important lessons we learn after we find our kin, if we are lucky to do that with the system stacked against us to prevent most family reunions. In my case, my bastard status was confirmed, yet again, by the truths that these facts reveal about my place in the world and my meaning to my paternal kin and to others.

I can only guess, still, what my deceased and unknown aunt may have known of me, beyond the meeting I had with her sister in 2007. I do not know if my story ever reached the surviving relatives’ ears. I learned there are surviving grandkids of the aunt I did not meet. So, am I unknown, or am I still that dirty family secret that is hidden in the not-so-benevolent cloak of adoption secrecy that is meant to keep kin like us forever apart?

Another death in the families

At the end of the week, I also learned about the death of one of my adoptive aunts. She was married into my adoptive father’s kin, as the wife of my adoptive father’s youngest brother. We had barely known each other over the decades, except through regular holiday correspondences we kept up for decades. On that count, we connected.

Adoptees, like the IMF team in the Mission Impossible franchise, shown in this publicity still, will be disavowed in life, and their existence will mostly be erased from the official family records.

Along with her departed husband, who died last year, we had a lot of unspoken issues that we never talked about, particularly my adoptive father and his alcoholism and what that meant for him to be taking care of me and my adoptive sister part of the year when he had custodial rights. I describe these awkward skeletons in the closet in my memoir.

I last saw this aunt in 2015, when I was completing research for my book and revisiting places I had spent part of my childhood in West Virginia and Ohio. Those were perhaps the darkest days of my life. When I met my aunt and my uncle in 2015, they were frail and both suffering from health problems. I felt kindness to them and no ill feelings. In the end, we never spoke about my adoptive father’s terrible drug problems as an alcoholic and his tragic demise or my status as the adopted son. We let the sleeping elephants lie.

By week’s end, I felt exhausted. I was processing the loss of three family members. Yet, in the end, two of them were still strangers, and one was estranged by family ghosts. I felt loss and also I felt emotional distance.

This complicated emotional space that I have navigated my whole life is not new to many adoptees. One reason I wrote my book was to share how hard it is for non-adopted persons to understand this lifelong experience and journey. I explain this complex dance at length in my memoir.

In the end, when the records of our lives are written, the official record will still disavow the illegitimate offspring who were lost to the U.S. adoption system. We are like the IMF team in Mission Impossible, or some CIA team. In many ways we are very similar: We have dual identities, and because of discriminatory legal systems in most states, our records must remain top-secret documents that are never shared with the majority of those separated from their families after they were born.

It is a mission I never I had choice to accept or decline. It was my fate at birth.

Rudy Owens’ book reading will shed light on systemic inequities of the U.S. adoption experience

Rudy Owens holding his completed memoir.

Rudy Owens holds his completed memoir.

I am proud to announce my first book reading, and lecture, on my newly released memoir on the U.S. adoption experience, which examines the personal and public health impacts of this widespread American institution.

If you are in the Portland area, please mark your calendar for the event:

What: Rudy Owens book reading and lecture on his memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are
Where: Tigard Public Library (13500 SW Hall Blvd., Tigard, OR 97223)
When: Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2018, 6-7:30 p.m.

The reading is free and open to the public.

The event is geared to adults, given the subject matter of unprotected sex, illegitimacy, the treatment of bastard infants historically, and the taboo topic of adoption as a system that legally discriminates against millions of U.S. adoptees solely on the basis of their status of birth. The reading will be highlighting the need for comprehensive legal and public health system reforms to restore all U.S. adoptees’ full legal and human rights to their original birth records.

Copies of my memoir will be available for sale at the event. Copies may also be purchased in advance online from several online booksellers.

Please share this event listing with friends, coworkers, and family members who are impacted by the U.S. institution of adoption or who have an interest in human rights, civil rights, family separation, and women’s and reproductive rights.

I have created a Facebook event page you are welcome to share as well. I hope to see you all there.

Find a press release for the book reading here.