First, please add this event to your calendar. Great. Thanks for doing that!
Everyone is invited, because this is an issue that is about what many of us care about deeply: equality, fairness, and the right to know who we are.
This webinar will focus on something bigger than vital records and court processes.
This discussion will be about 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 is worth the fight.
The symbol I’m talking about is perhaps the single most important document any human can possess: their original birth certificate.
For decades, this document has been withheld from U.S. adoptees, through discriminatory state laws that still deny millions of persons equal treatment by law, in violation the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and equally the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Right now the people working to change these harmful laws are those denied the right to know who they are, where they came from, and who they can call their blood kin.
One way that many states provide the most slender means for an adult adoptee to get their basic vital record created at birth is through the courts.
Getting to that point is nothing short of a hero’s journey too few adoptees can do for reasons too long to explain in this post. I wrote a book on that issue, which details 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.
I hope you join my fellow adoptees and advocates Greg Luce, Courtney Humbaugh, and me for our webinar on March 21, 2021 (1 p.m. PST) about petitioning courts to release adoptees’ original birth records.
For my part in this special event, I’ll be highlighting my experience in Michigan, where it took me 27 years to secure the release of my original birth certificate, even after I had met my birth families.
In my book on this experience, I wrote: “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. 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.”
Learn why adoptees will invest years if not decades fighting for their legal and human rights, including in the courts. I look forward to seeing you there.