You Don't Know How Lucky You Are: An Adoptee's Journey Through The American Adoption Experience - Softcover

Owens, Rudy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0692821562 ISBN 13: 9780692821565

Publisher: Rudolf SD Owens, 2018

Synopsis

Nearly 50 years after he was relinquished for adoption, Rudy Owens learned how fortunate life can be. In 2014 in San Diego, Owens met his biological half-sister for the first time. That meeting inspired Owens 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 memoir offers insights on the widespread 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 unravels the controversies and complexities of adoption. That adventure 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 finally met his birth family and learned of his biological family history. It would take another quarter century and a bitter legal battle for the State of Michigan to release his sealed birth certificate that it illegally held for decades. Owens combines his successful family discovery story with public health and evolutionary biology research to highlight the importance of kin relations and the damaging myths and archetypal prejudices that still cloud popular views of illegitimate children and adoption in the United States. Instead of seeing his experience as a loss, Owens finds greater purpose in having dedicated decades of his life to answering life’s most essential question, “Who am I?” His lifelong journey for his original birth records, full equality before the law, and his ancestral history ultimately gave him the makings of a meaningful life.

About this title

About the Author

Rudy Owens is a Detroit native who grew up in the Midwest and attended public schools in University City, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis. He spent most of his adult life in the West Coast states of Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. He has a professional background in communications, international relations, and public health. He earned a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in journalism and a master of public health degree from the University of Washington School of Public Health. Owens has worked as a reporter, editor, and political and public affairs officer for the Government of Canada. Owens also has worked in community-based public health in Washington State. Owens has been blogging about current affairs, policy, and public health issues since 2012. You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are is his first nonfiction work. Owens currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

Edition details

• Publisher: Rudolf SD Owens
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0692821562
• ISBN 13: 9780692821565
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 295