You Don't Know How Lucky You Are

Nearly 50 years after he was relinquished for adoption, Rudy Owens finally met his biological half-sister in San Diego. The meeting inspired him to tell his adoption story set against the larger adoption narrative that has impacted millions of adoptees, their birth parents, and their collective biological and adoptive families. Owens’s story examines the American institution of adoption, a national social-engineering experiment that remains mired in discriminatory laws and partisan politics, not equality and fairness.

Owens’s lifelong journey as an adoptee started in the mid-1960s, with his birth in a Detroit hospital created to serve socially scorned single mothers and place their infants for adoption. Twenty-four years later, he met his birth family and learned of his biological family history. It would take him another quarter century to win a bitter legal battle against the State of Michigan to release his sealed birth certificate that it illegally held for decades.

Owens ultimately answered life’s essential question, “Who am I?” Owens’s lifelong quest for his original birth records, full equality before the law, and his ancestral history ultimately gave him the makings of a meaningful life.