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 14th 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.