182 Gregory Luce
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/182
Haley Radke: You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is episode 182 Gregory Luce. I'm your host, Haley Radke. I am so excited to introduce you to Gregory Luce today, the attorney behind adoptee rights law. We get to hear some of Greg's personal story today, including the five-year court battle it took for him to receive his records.
We talk about some of the typical arguments adoptee activists hear from legislators against original birth certificate access and what impact DNA testing access has had on OBC legislation. Greg also challenges us to make sure we're listening to all adoptee voices.
Greg is a lawyer, but he's not giving us legal advice during this episode. We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website adopteeson.com. Let's listen in. I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On: Gregory Luce. Welcome, Gregory.
Gregory Luce: Hi, Haley. It’s good to be here.
Haley Radke: Okay, first of all, I'm so thrilled to talk with you, because I've followed you for years on Twitter, have learned so much from you, but I'm really excited to get to hear some of your personal story. So, would you mind sharing some of that with us today?
Gregory Luce: I am a D.C. born and adopted person. I was born in 1965 in the District of Columbia and seven days later, I ended up in Silver Spring, Maryland with my adoptive parents and I have an adoptive brother as well. My story’s probably pretty typical for most domestic adoptees, maybe most white domestic adoptees, but I grew up always knowing I was adopted.
I did wonder quite a bit as I got into my adolescence and then wondered quite a bit more, and sort of had a breakdown when (as I think a lot of adoptees do) when they are about to become parents or have just become parents. And that was my sort of breaking point in trying to figure out who I am, where I came from, and to get information about that.
And that was in–let’s see, it goes way back to 1999/2000, as I didn't really know anything about getting records. In fact, I think back in 2000, I was surprised to learn that I have two birth certificates. I didn't know that there was an original, and once I found out there was an original, I was going, “Whoa, they’re hiding that from me. It's in a court somewhere and I can get it.”
So I researched it a little bit. And I'm an attorney, and I was an attorney at that point, too. So I knew what I was doing for the courts in the District of Columbia. It just said, “Fill out this form, submit $80.00 and you'll be heard by the court.” And so I did that and I got an order back saying, “Yes, we are unsealing your records.”
And so I'm like, “Woo hoo, that was easy.” It didn't mean what it said it meant, though. It meant that they were going to unseal my file and then kick it over to the adoption agency. And then I got a letter shortly after from the adoption agency saying, “Well, if you pay us $500, we'll search for your parents and see if we can get your parents’ consent.”
And I was not interested in that. I wasn't prepared for a reunion. I wasn't prepared to meet my parents. So I said, “No, thanks.” So then, shortly after that, maybe six months? I had forgotten that I'd done one of these (they used to be private) these private registries. I think they still exist.
This private registry was related to the D.C. area. So Maryland, Virginia, D.C., maybe parts of West Virginia. And, lo and behold, there's a match. And in the fall of 2000, I met my birth mother through that. And we met towards the end of 2000, and then I think, if I’m still remembering correctly, she died 169 days later.
So, we did get to know each other. It was a wonderful reunion. She had been battling cancer for quite some time. And it’s my belief she held on for this amount of time to know that I was still alive and doing well. I ended up inheriting all of her records. I was an only child. She later married my birth father and they later got divorced as well, but I had thousands of documents from her.
And so I rebuilt her life and rebuilt her life, so I would understand it. I became essentially her biographer, or her historian. Then, about in 2015…and these things always take so much time. You sit on it, you think through it, you're not quite sure what you want to do. Life gets in the way. But in 2015, I said, “You know, I'm going to give it another chance and this time I'm going to go whole hog and I'm going to throw the book at the court to try to get my records.” And so I wrote a 35-page petition and memorandum and filed it with the court.
It took five years and two denials from the court, as well as the Court of Appeals case in D.C. when they finally said, “Yes, you can have your original birth record and your father's name will be unredacted.” Because their final decision at the trial court was, “Yes, you can have your records. We need to figure out the privacy interests of your deceased mother and even though you know the name of your father, we're not going to give you his name. We're going to redact that.” And I got a redacted original birth record. That was what I appealed and won on that part. It's changed D.C. law a little bit in that respect.
It means that consent of the birth parents is not the linchpin there. It has to take into account the paramount interest of the adopted person, but they do still attempt to contact the birth parents in D.C. to determine if they would release or what their preference is for releasing records.
I'm in a long snail mail relationship with my birth father. We write letters, plunk them in the mail, and open them, and read them, and reply maybe a few months later. So, that is ongoing and very slow, and I think eventually we'll meet at some point. But through all that, I mean, after coming away from 2015…for the two years it took me just to navigate the courts in D.C., I said, “You know, this is nuts. This is crazy. I'm a lawyer and it takes me this much effort to challenge the court and to try to get my records. What's it like in the rest of the states?” And that's when I began my sort of a new turn of my legal career and I became (what I call myself) an adoptee rights lawyer. I think I'm the only one in the country, because there's not many attorneys that do this full time. And I began the Adoptee Rights Law Center as a law firm that represents adult adopted people.
That grew into not only birth records and identity documents, but also representing inter-country adoptees who either are having trouble proving citizenship or need to secure citizenship because they did not get it done when they were young. So, that's where I am today. It's been a crazy four years now? So when you say we haven't spoken for years, I still think I started this last month. It just feels that way to me, but it's been four years of doing this and there's so much that has happened in those four years. So I'm glad it feels new to me still.
Haley Radke: What kind of law did you practice before starting this?
Gregory Luce: All kinds! I clerked for a judge for a couple of years. I did employment law for a few years. I was a technology person at the State Bar Association. I ran a nonprofit that organized low-income and tenants in their buildings to fix their buildings up.
I don't stay in positions very long. I just hop around because I get bored, but this is the one that's kept me (I think the longest of any), is this work here. Because it's so meaningful and so personal and it's actually really, really gratifying. So yeah, I did it all. I did litigation, family law, you name it. The only thing I haven't done–I have not done criminal law. Although, I think I did get thrown into court one time for a client and had no idea what I was doing.
Haley Radke: I remember when you started your Twitter account and just thinking, “Oh, this is really cool. This is fascinating to me.” I'm Canadian, so, but of course, most of my guests are American, and so I follow very closely what's happening down there in terms of legislation and things. So, it's amazing to me. You kind of glossed over this, but you changed D.C. law. That's amazing to have the interest of the adoptee as paramount. I mean, that's a big deal.
Gregory Luce: It is. It's not unrestricted right (which you get through legislation), which is the next step, but that's why I got into this. It was to figure out a way to change the law and figure out a way to make it so you do have an unrestricted right to request and obtain your original birth record if you're a domestic adoptee. But obviously, what happens with the court, is it takes such a long time and you have to have someone like me, that's willing to stick in there for four or five years in litigation. And there's not many people who really want to do that.
Haley Radke: Also, frankly, most of us wouldn't have the resources to pay for your services for that long,
Gregory Luce: Right. Yeah. If I were to have paid myself for what I did, it would be $40-$50,000. That's what my legal fees probably would have been in the end if I had hired an attorney. Some people will say, “Why didn’t you hire an attorney?” Well, that's the reason.
That was the other part of forming the Adoptee Rights Law Center. I'm in a part of my life where I call myself a stay-at-home lawyer, where I've been taking care of the kids while my wife works and doing sort of part-time work. We didn’t need–I'm privileged not to need to work to earn money in that sense. I mean, it's something we still need to worry about, but not in the sense that many other people have to worry about. And so I started out with almost entirely pro bono cases, because I knew that adoptees did not have the resources to pay $1,000, $2,000, $5,000 to file a court case.
And I've continued to do that, because there's so much demand, though. I have been fairly careful now about what cases I take pro bono, and then those cases where a client can afford, I'll have a low flat fee that would cover petitioning a court and getting records…the whole case, as opposed to an hourly fee.
So that would range. It's cheaper than hiring, at least in Minnesota. It's cheaper than paying $1,000, which is what it takes for the major adoption agency here to launch a search. And those searches depend upon consent to get any information back. So, I'm cheaper than the adoption agencies on purpose, and still try to keep my services pro bono. And most of my inter-country adoptive cases are pro bono. Not all, but most. So, that's sort of my way of giving to the community, but also keeping busy in an area that I really love.
Haley Radke: Yeah. I didn't know your story before you shared it and I usually make notes, and I do research before my interviews. I had a note to ask you about what your thoughts on mutual consent registries were. And then it turns out that that's actually how you found your birth mother!
Gregory Luce: Right. They never work. They are notoriously ineffective. And lo and behold…
Haley Radke: Sorry, I should just make a little note there. The reason I wanted to ask you that was because that's given as a reason. “Well, mutual consent registries are available, so that's what you should use to search.” From some legislators, I've heard that argument.
Gregory Luce: Right. No, they're just so terribly ineffective. No one knows about them. You have to sort of get lucky to find out about them. There has to be a match. They often don't work anyways, even if there is a match there, because something's messed up in the search algorithm or the search database. I just read a story in New York, where they currently have an unrestricted right now; they changed the law. We've changed the law. We helped change the law there. These were two siblings. They both registered for the registry there 27 years ago and they just found out from the registry–27 years later. So, the registry did not work in that case, and that's typical, I think, for many of these registries and they're just completely ineffective. Of course, that's what’s so interesting about my story, is that it worked. And it worked six months before my mother died.
So, just quite amazing that that's what happened. It worked six months before she died and six months after I first petitioned the court. And the court had nothing to do with her registering. She just happened to register, I think, in October, 2000. And I had registered, I think, back in 1987, or something. So that was 13 years there.
Haley Radke: I remember filling out those things as a teenager. We had the Internet, I had an old computer. Well, it wasn't old–it was new!
Gregory Luce: An Amiga or something?
Haley Radke: Yeah, I don't know! We'd get an Apple for a while, and then, I don't know when we switched to PC, but I remember just randomly filling out these online database things and nothing ever came of that for me. But that was in the olden days.
Gregory Luce: Obviously, I had forgotten completely that I had registered. Up pops an email from the administrator of this registry and everything's changed from there.
Haley Radke: I find this really interesting, because you have worked on changing statewide legislation, but also, it's just one off, going to unseal one person at a time kind of a deal.
So, can you talk about the differences of those things? It's fairly obvious to me, but for a lot of people, they don't understand closed records, etcetera. You've got this hole nailed down. Can you tell us about that, please?
Gregory Luce: Yeah, and it's a great question, because it's something I think about all the time. There are two approaches you can take when you believe you have a right to obtain your original birth record. One is to change the legislation so that they recognize that right, or in many cases restore it in the state that used to have it. And the other is to find a legal argument that would make the courts recognize that right as a right.
The legislation is actually probably easier to do (as hard as it is). It's probably easier to change a law than to establish a right through the courts. And so you have to have these dual tracks going, though, in which you're trying to pursue this right through legislation, but you're also trying to convince legislators that it is a right. And they recognize it as a right, because part of creating a right is advocating for the belief that it is a right. And that's really important to realize that you don't so much… It’s the pressure that you put on society through legislators that will lead to them saying, “Yeah, you're right. If you put it that way, it really is a right.”
And then how you define that is going to be the big question, both for legislation and for the courts. If you're narrowly looking at it and you're narrowly saying, “We have an absolute right to the original birth record,” that's going to be much harder to prove than, “We have a right to identity.”
And this is where I'm sort of moving and how I'm analyzing these things legally, is that there's a much broader right to identity, to heritage, to citizenship, that relates to birth. That is the right that's really an issue. That's why I'm so excited in some ways to be connecting with the donor conceived community who have the same identity rights that come up. They call them genetic identity rights, or any number of different rights. And it's a very complicated area, but it is. It encompasses this broad right to your own identity. I think that's where we're going to find a lot of support moving into the future.
The right to the birth record is a right that arises out of a right to a full identity. And so I'm seeing organizations arising and there's one in Switzerland now called child-identity.org. I think there's a hyphen between child and identity. It looks at identity from the point of view that birth certificates…everyone in the entire world does not get a birth certificate.
There are many countries that have pretty lax systems to even record a birth. And so that in itself is a right–to have a birth certificate or a birth record. I've had clients who haven't had them. And that creates all sorts of problems in moving through the world, but this organization in Switzerland (and there are many others, probably like it) takes a really broad look at identity.
And within that is a right to a birth certificate and a right to know who's on your birth certificate, to know your parents, and who they are. There's no general right to relationship unless that relationship is through the birth parent before they relinquish or surrender a child. But even then, there are going to be some rights that attach to that relationship.
But any adult doesn't have a right to a relationship with another adult. We're not talking about relationship rights. We're talking about identity rights.
Haley Radke: Right. Okay, I have never heard it put that way and that's really fascinating, because I was just looking it up and I wanted to ask you this, too, because I was watching some of the videos that you've made and I wondered if you could tell us what happened in California in 1935?
Gregory Luce: So, my theory with California…I don't think anyone really knows, but my theory with California is caught up a little bit with the Georgia Tan scandal. Georgia Tan was definitely involved with a lot of Hollywood adoptions and you had celebrity adoptions as well in California.
What was happening there was that you can request the birth record of anyone in California. You still can, actually, but in the 1930s, people who knew this and knew possibly there was an adoption would request the birth record of that child and would try to blackmail the adoptive parents to say, “We're going to tell.” Which is what's so odd to me. “We're going to tell the kid that the kid's adopted.” That was the blackmail. Not that they adopted a child, but we're going to tell the kid who’s adopted. So, it's wrapped up in that whole fiction that if you were born to the parent and blackmail was possible, because it was so secret that you actually adopted a person.
In 1935, California became the first state in the country to seal the birth records to everybody, including the adopted person. But the genesis of that was around potential blackmail that existed at the time. So, my theory is there's Georgia Tan, there's celebrities, there's actual blackmail going on, but it had nothing to do with protecting the birth parent, which is what eventually became the narrative in the U.S.
Haley Radke: I love that you said that, because what I was reading was talking about hiding from the adopted person the fact that they're illegitimate and covering that? So, that's a really interesting twist.
Gregory Luce: Right. Yeah. It would have been very different in Idaho. You don't have a whole lot of celebrity birth adoptions in Idaho or Oklahoma or wherever, but yeah, illegitimacy was a huge factor. Hide the child's illegitimate status by essentially legitimizing them through adoption. That was the other main, major impetus to do that. But in most cases, as you probably know, the records were not sealed to the adult later. That started to really come into play in the 40s and 50s, into the 60s, even into the 70s. In fact, I think Pennsylvania became the last state in ‘84 to seal their records.
Haley Radke: Because, in that video that I mentioned, Greg has this green map and then California goes red and then the states just go “blink, blink, blink…”
And so now what are your feelings on–Ok, first of all, I can't believe you said you think this is easier through legislation. That kind of blew my mind.
Gregory Luce: Let me say this, though. I think I would probably quit or threaten to quit every day doing legislation, because it's so exhausting, but I do think it's the route that's easiest, if you're looking at time. That's the easiest one to change, but it is very frustrating,
Haley Radke: So, easier, but not easy.
Gregory Luce: No, not at all. In fact, the divisive…I think the divisiveness is actually overplayed within the adoptee community, but I would say just the opinions within adoption itself are very exhausting. And a lot of those actually are coming from legislators and how they view adopted people and all the stereotypes they bring to the equation of determining whether this adopted person deserves a birth record. We saw that played out in Maryland this past session. That was pretty painful to watch.
Haley Radke: Can you talk a little bit about that and what you mean by how they see adoptees? I know I was in a session with you at a conference where Claire McGettrick was talking about some of these things and about how to approach legislators. And from us coming with this person–we come with all the adoptee…I'm an adoptee. We come with all our baggage, and feelings, and whatever–that there's not really a place for that, necessarily.
So, do you have some comments on that?
Gregory Luce: Oh, you mean coming with the difficulties of being adopted?
Haley Radke: I would say coming with the feelings arguments versus what you said, “It's a right to identity.”
Gregory Luce: Yeah, the feelings... It's a hard balance, because you have to be human when you advocate. You have to convince legislators that, yes, we are human and yes, we have feelings, but you don't want to overplay those. You have to balance that with the right that you're asserting. And so that can be difficult sometimes. Some people come into legislation believing this may solve their issues–that getting the birth record will solve other emotional issues that they may have associated with the adoption. And it doesn't, necessarily. It may contribute to solving issues, but the right to your record and your identity is the first step. That's the basic right: your record.
And so that's where you have to concentrate: on that record. Maybe its potential for use, but not what it can simply do by possessing it. It's very meaningful to possess it. I almost cried when I–I just got my original birth record unredacted in November of 2020 (so less than a year ago), after 20 years of trying to find it, and it was very meaningful to get that.
That's the fruit. That's always the first step to whatever you do with it, once you do have it. So, I think it is a real balance to figure out how you approach legislators and convince them that it is a right. You don't back down on that. If you back down on, “This is a right,” then they know how to split you off from others who don't believe it's a right, or think that you're overplaying what it is. And so you have to be really firm that it is a right. You're not going to back down on that, because you're trying to convince them that it is.
I think that’s very hard for some people, especially adopted people, to be firm in this right, because you're taught for most of your life that you don't deserve it. It's not yours. It said you don't deserve it. You're going to mess things up if you get it. You weren't supposed to know. All these myths that go along with that make it hard for some adopted people to say, “No, no. I don't care what you think of me. Think about what I need as an adopted person and the right that I have to have my own birth record. It’s not your birth record, it's mine.”
I think that's the hard part, to deal with legislators. It may often come to this with all of the myths of what an adoptee is. And often we're perpetual children. That's really at the heart of it, is we're not treated as full adults. We’re treated att the time we’re born as children. And that's the hardest thing to listen to and see underneath it all is that we're not treated as fully human. And that's what we saw in Maryland. I think we saw there the myth that we're going to destroy families. We're going to “out” birth parents. We're going to show up at the door and they would have to hide these birth parents from the shame that they had. But it was shame that was produced by the state. And so it's shame that's perpetuated by the state today. That's what I think they don't recognize, either. That it's perpetual shame and it's perpetuated by the laws that we currently have.
Haley Radke: And what are you hearing from legislators or other people that you're in contact with doing similar work in other OBC rights access organizations with the argument about DNA? What's less shameful? Getting connected to the third cousin who then digs up who your birth mother is, versus having your paperwork?
Gregory Luce: Right. That's a great question, and I take it by making sure we don't put all our eggs into the DNA basket, so to speak? Meaning, part of it and an argument is always, “Well, it's become irrelevant in many ways to not provide this record.” A lot of legislators still don't get that. They're so protective of the myth that existed when a child was relinquished in the 40s, 50s, and 60s–that it doesn't matter to them. So, what I often say, too, is that these methods of trying to find out just the names of your parents are so deeply embedded in who we are as adopted people (not all adopted people, but many), that we've been using different methods for decades to do that.
We've been using private investigators. We've been using searchers where you pay $2,500 in cash in an envelope through an intermediary. We have Search Angels. The methods have just changed. And DNA has become inexpensive and easy to use, and that's just the method we use now, but it does not substitute for a request for the birth record and you're provided with that birth record upon request.
But you're right, it does…And I've used this in court. If you have DNA and you get these matches to third cousins, second cousins, more increasingly first cousins, and you then get–I usually use Search Angels with my clients, because I don't do the investigation to try to find people. That Search Angel will take that list of matches and then start going down that list. What I've done in many of my court cases where we don't know who the birth parent is, we narrow it down. And then I get an affidavit from the Search Angel explaining exactly what she (usually she) is going to do over the next two months to try to locate and identify that birth parent. That means calling 200 people, contacting people on social media, and using existing databases to find them.
And so I put all of that in an affidavit and I say to the court, who, to be honest, is the fact finder…They're the ones that are looking at all these facts and making their decision, like legislators really should be doing in the sense of creating legislation. The judges in almost every case say, “Well, I'm just going to release you to the record–the birth record.” Because that's way better than this route you're outlining here, of contacting 40 people and asking the question, “Do you know if a cousin or an aunt or someone gave up a child or surrendered a child to adoption in 1975?” That question then reverberates across generations. As opposed to requesting the record, and receiving it, and doing what you want with it.
So judges understand that and they respond to it. They're the fact finders, neutral fact finders, hopefully. Legislators have not yet fully understood that, and some don't really want to understand it. I tell people that this issue is bipartisan. It really is. You get staunch Republicans who are fully in favor of the right to your own birth record.
You get Democrats who are very similar. It skews a little bit Democratic, depending upon what abortion politics are in play in that state. But the biggest factor, and Annette O’Connell in New York really brought this home to me, is age or generation. It's a generational difference. The younger the legislator is, in general, the more they're not going to care. They’re not going to see the big deal. I mean, they're going to care, but they're not going to see the big deal of releasing an identity record. Whereas, the older legislators are locked into the myth that developed around adoption in the 40s, 50s, 60s, into the 70s, and are unwilling to let go of that myth. So it's really skewed by age, more than anything else.
Haley Radke: I know you're an attorney and I know you have this view of the courts and the judges and most of us would not understand, but when you are talking about fighting for your own record and literally saying, “I already have my birth parents' names and I already have this information.”
What are you feeling inside? It just sounds so ludicrous. “How can you not give me this paper? Because I already know what’s on it.” Are you not like, “Is this all a farce? Am I being punked? What is happening right now?”
Gregory Luce: Those are good ways to explain it–being punked or the absurdity of it was often really brought home by that whole process. They're hiding things for the sake of hiding things. At some point, they're just, “We were so locked into hiding this birth record, that that's the reason we're hiding it. Because we're hiding it.” And that circular absurdity was really what was brought home to me.
I've written about this on my personal blog, and the one question that I got from a social worker…So in D.C., again, when you unseal the record, they then refer it over to an agency to look at whether there's consent already and then look at whether they should contact the birth parent. My mom was deceased at that point and I had had a relationship with her for the time we knew each other. I had inherited all of her records, so I was part of her extended family. But the question I got from the social worker was, “Do you have proof of the relationship with your mother?”
And it was such an absurd question to me, for a number of reasons. One is, well, the proof is the birth record that I'm trying to ask for! There's the proof right there–her name's right there and I'm there on that record as well. But what I wrote about was all the records that I have. The absurdity of what I was–I was almost using satire, in some ways, in what I sent back to the social worker.
And that satire was–I gave her Christmas cards that we sent to each other. I gave her other cards that we sent to each other. I gave her–I have a recording of her on New Year's Eve saying, “New Year's Eve.” It's on my– back in the days where you had actual machines that recorded voicemail. I have a video of being at her home in Florida for Christmas. So, do I send all of those things in to the social worker just to prove that I had a relationship with her? It was just so absurd. And I think that may be where a lot of people would give up, and I would not blame them, either. A lot of adoptees probably give up as part of this process. Sometimes, it's so hard, especially the court process, but I knew I was right.
I knew that I had a legal point here to make, as well, and I stuck with it. Over the years, I've learned how to deal with the absurdity as well. And I think that's what I like about being a lawyer, is I can deal with that absurdity in a constructive way, but I do feel for my clients who have to deal with it on a very personal level.
I have a client in the last three weeks who has really gone through the wringer of–We've got a birth record, but she wanted a baptismal certificate. She wanted the original baptismal certificate. I don't know if many people know, but in the Catholic church, they issue amended first baptismal certificates that make it appear as if your adoptive parents were at the baptism, which physically, this was impossible. She wanted her original baptismal certificate and then we got a court order for the agency to supply it. The agency said, “Well, you need to pay our fees to do that.” The fees approached around $400, just to open the file and to release an original baptismal certificate. $400! And it was just so absurd.
There's not much you can do on that, because you're dealing with (usually) a private adoption agency. So, they really have a lot of power there. And so she paid. I think we negotiated the fee down, but, again, the absurdity of hiding things for the sake of hiding them is really what comes home to me and to my clients as well.
Haley Radke: Well, when you were describing–I got emotional when you were describing what you were sending over as satire, you said, to the social worker. I was thinking, “Who has the right to privacy here?” Sorry to say this, to use this wording, Greg, but it’s just what has come to my mind–prostitute my precious memories when I only had 164 days with my birth mother. And now I have to show you all these precious things to me. That is…I don't have the words for it.
Gregory Luce: It was, no, it was stunning. It really was. That's why I tended to write about it. That was one way of therapy for me is that won out–I would say is writing. Yeah. It's stunning what you have to give up of your own personal self to get your records. And this was to get my original birth record. It ended up the courts–well, not the courts. They kind of made a mistake in my case. I mean, I asked for three sets of records… And this is what I always tell people–there are usually three main records that you're seeking. One is the birth record. It's generally very hard to get, but generally of those three, it's the easiest to get. The next are court records, which are a little harder to get, depending upon the state. Some states will give them to you as part of the birth record.
And then, third, are the agency records. It could be the public agency, or often, it's a private agency. Those are the hardest of any to get–usually it's in a private agency. The courts don't really want to order a private agency to relinquish records. And in my case, they gave me 77 pages of agency records.
They redacted my father's birth name, but I already knew who that was, so I just would fill it in every time that redaction came along. And they just did a poor job redacting it anyways. Sometimes his name was Aaron, sometimes it wasn't. But I got the hardest records ever to get, but then they're also the most revealing. They are probably–If you were to think about three sets of records, they are the most valuable, because they have the most information of who you were at that age and what went into the machinery of your relinquishment and adoption to a new family. And so, I learned quite a bit from those agency records.
There was a Georgia adoptee that was at an event recently. And she also got a scad of OBC records and they were incredibly helpful. But then what they couldn't answer for her, was she was in foster care for five months, and there are no records related to that. That's often the hole that people have. I had a seven-day hole, where it was probably in between the hospital and the maternity home. It's not that hard to fill in those seven days, but for people who have five months to fill (where foster care records aren't typically provided anywhere)--that's much harder.
But you're right. It's this whole issue of…you could call it prostituting yourself to prove that you're entitled to your own information. It’s just bizarre and absurd, and I don't wish it on anyone and I'm not going to insist on clients to follow through if they don't want to. I don't have that power, but I certainly leave it up to them as to whether they want to, how hard they want to fight for that, and what they have to give up to get it.
Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. We're going to do our recommended resources, but before we do that, is there anything else that you want to say to adopted people, or share further about your story, or anything that you really want adopted people to know?
Gregory Luce: I guess, I usually don't have New Year's resolutions at all, or they just have never been important to me. I did have one this year, and it's been really important to me. I think it's something that resonates with adoptees and that is: listen. It’s to listen. And not saying you listen to those voices that you hear all the time, especially in adoption. It's often the adoptee is not centered when there's discussion about adoption. But I'm talking about, “What are the voices we're not hearing right now in adoptee rights work?” And a lot of those are transracial adoptees, inter-country adoptees, and in-race adoptees. So these are the voices I think that, one, are the future of adoptee rights work. And it's the voices that I think we need to not only listen to, but follow. And I'm seeing a lot of that, but I think we still have a lot of work to do to get there.
I think we're going to start talking about the resources, and Adoptees United is one of those. We're making a very conscious effort to build our board so it's diverse and inclusive. And we'll have more information about that board, probably pretty soon now.
Haley Radke: I went to your Adoptee Rights Town Hall for Adoptees United, which is one I want to recommend and I wrote down a quote from you.
Gregory Luce: Oh no, oh no. Sometimes I cringe that I'm recording and oh no.
Haley Radke: Oh, come on. You are entirely staying intact here. You said, “Domestic adoptees need to be better allies to inter-country adoptees.” You said that before you made your New Year's resolution. So, there you go, you’re staying intact.
Gregory Luce: All right. Well, good. It is work that we have to do, and I truly believe that. The other voice that I think we need to listen to, too, especially, is our young adoptees, I have no idea, really, what issues they’re having. We are about to add a young, 25-year-old, transracial adoptee to our board. What he listens to and thinks about is very different from what I listen to and think about as an older, white, domestic adoptee–in a very good way.
If you listen, and you truly listen, I think that we're going to make some progress. But we also have to act, and acting means that you act positively, and what you learn and listen from those who will be and should have more power today. That’s how I do it.
Haley Radke: Well, thank you. I really appreciate you sharing your story and so much wisdom about adoptee rights. I love that your name is Adoptee Rights Law Center. It’s very.--That’s it. That is it.
Gregory Luce: No, it sounds like I’ve got a staff of 30! I’m a center, you know.
Haley Radke: Someday!! Come on. You’ve got to live into it now. That's awesome.
I want people to go and make sure they're checking out your writing there, because I learned a lot from you about integrated birth certificates from a post that's there. Recently, you wrote about (this is a good title, too) “The Five, Most Pernicious Myths about Adult Adopted People.”
Gregory Luce:Yeah, it’s true! We've talked about some of those today.
Haley Radke: Yeah, we did. But Adoptees United, especially–can you tell us more about what that organization is meant to do, and what your plans are for Adoptees United?
Gregory Luce: We're going state-by-state, legislatively. And that was, for me, Minnesota court cases and also inter-country adoption and also inter-country adoptee work. But we were really limited and having to reinvent in every state or every issue, the infrastructure, the logistics, the messaging, all of that. So we wanted to form a national non-profit organization that could, one, raise money, and two, educate people on these issues and become a national voice on adoptee rights issues in a very specifically oriented towards adoptees/adoptee rights.
It wouldn't be an umbrella organization (nothing against umbrella organizations), but we're very specific on limiting it to adoptees, but also building coalitions. The coalition was largely responsible for what happened recently in New York. Coalitions work because they bring different organizations together that may not want to work together without having some structure behind it, or some bottom line commitment to what we're all after.
And so Adoptees United helps form those coalitions that help with the logistics of websites. It helps with the logistics of emails and it helps the local advocates, which make all the difference. Those people who are in the state trying to make change, to focus in on their advocacy work that is actually physically going to the legislature, and lobbying for the legislation that we need. So it's a national organization that could raise money, provide education, and also provide logistics behind legislative efforts across the country. And also, hopefully, as we very consciously build our board, become a very diverse and inclusive voice as well.
I see myself–I'm the president of Adoptees United, but I see myself more as an administrator to get it to where it needs to go. I'd like not to be the head of it for two years from now. I think it needs to have leadership that changes to reflect where we're going with adoptee rights. So that's why we have Adoptees United now. It's going really well. And I think part of that is, to be honest, the ability to draw in people on Zoom and on our Zoom events, like the town hall meeting that you went to,
Haley Radke: Can adoptees (and if not), what's the best way–Can adoptees that are interested in changing legislation in their state, but they don't know where to go? Can they connect with Adoptees United? Or where's the best place for people that are itching to do the work go?
Gregory Luce: That's what I would recommend, is contact us at Adoptees United. There's a form there to fill out, or they can certainly just contact me directly at Adoptee Rights Law Center, because I'll just hook them in.
But that's how it happens. It's a combination of the events that we do and what grows out of those. Because they're now actively trying to build coalitions in California. There's a real interest in a Southeastern United States Coalition. It's not just Florida, or Georgia, or Louisiana, specifically, but these regional lines I think are a really good model for the future.
And partially that because we're such fun, and let's say, we’re such fungible creatures, adoptees. We may have been born in one state, but we likely live in another state at this point. And therefore we're not a constituent in the state that holds our birth records or any records. And so you're disenfranchised in that way, but regionally, we'd be more powerful than that.
We're trying to build these regional coalitions. We have one that's the Capitol Coalition for Adoptee Rights. And that was the one that was involved in Maryland and we'll probably see D.C. happening next when Maryland got defeated. It’ll probably going to be a couple of years before we go back to Maryland, but D.C., may be the next one as well.
Yeah, so it's building those regional coalitions and in the bigger states like California, maybe a state, only a state-level coalition, because it's so big.
Haley Radke: It is big. I've had a lot of California listeners, so hopefully we'll find some people for you here.
Gregory Luce: Oh my God, it is. It is by far the most requests I get from adoptees is how to get your birth records from California. And it's such a restricted state.
Haley Radke: Wow, I'm so excited. Glad we have it. I think it's great. I think it's really great. So I hope that you guys are able to follow Adoptees United, watch out for their events that are coming up, and if you're itching to do some work. If you’re ready, they're ready for you.
What do you want to recommend for us today, Greg?
Gregory Luce: Boy, there's so many books that I have. American Baby is one, the book by Gabrielle Glaser.
Haley Radke: Look at all my book tabs.
Gregory Luce: Yep. I happen to have one of the few paperbacks because I have the galley version.
Haley Radke: Oh, you so fancy! You got referenced in this book.
Gregory Luce: I know, I saw that! That was so generous of her to do that, but I've been in touch with Gabrielle for awhile now. She's been doing such a terrific job of getting the issue of secrecy and adoption out there and discussed. And I think it may have even led to that Steve Inskeep piece that we saw more recently, but that's a book that I'd recommend. Cleave is a book of poetry. I have it around here…Tiana Nobile?
Haley Radke: Oh, I just went to her poetry–the lunch. It was wonderful.
Gregory Luce: Oh, cool! So another one is done by Megan Galbraith and it's The Guild of the Infant Saviour. I'm looking forward to that one. I think that's out in mid-May/end of May.
Haley Radke: Yes. It's coming out soon and she's going to be on the show. So, we're very excited. You can look forward to that.
Gregory Luce: Good! I have a whole pile. And then I still came across all sorts of books from the past that were written several years ago, Invisible Asians is one by a professor in Minnesota. One that's out right now is Surviving the White Gaze by Rebecca Carroll. That's a memoir. She's a Black adoptee, grew up in a white family in New England and is a cultural critic for…well, has been a cultural critic for many prominent publications in the past.
So, I always recommend books. You know, I often don’t have time to read them. So, I just listed a bunch of books that I have, and I haven't even read yet, but they look so good.
Haley Radke: They look so good! I have read them. They are good! I haven't read all of the ones you mentioned, but I’ve read most of them. Oh my gosh. Oh, that's hilarious. If you would like more dry humor from Greg and wisdom about adoptee rights issues, where can we connect with you online?
Gregory Luce: The best way is probably Adoptee Rights Law Center and that's at adopteerightslaw.com, or I'm more active on Twitter than any other social media and that's @adopteelaw on Twitter.
Haley Radke: Wonderful! Thank you so much for sharing with us today.
I hope Greg will come back, because I had so many more questions for him and I just want to know more about the people who are doing such great work on our behalf and what passions propel them. And I just want to get all their wisdom so that I can help you advocate and me advocate for other adult adoptees.
So, what a gem. Love Greg. He is such a gift to the community and has done such great things. He's too modest. He's very modest and he probably wouldn't have told us half of those things without a little pressing. So I'm so thrilled that Adoptees United exists and is going to hopefully connect more advocates nationwide.
So, I do encourage you–If that's something that's been on your heart, get after it. We need more people speaking up for OBC. And I know there's lots of people already doing it, so join in with them and see how many more states you can get opened up down there. Anyway, I am so grateful for Greg's voice and so many of the other guests we've had recently really sharing such powerful things with us.
And I'm also very thankful to my Patreon supporters. You know I couldn't do the show without you, so thank you so much. You know who you are. You know, some people list off names of Patreon supporters, but I've never done that, because I know some of you are very private and you don't necessarily want people to know, but I see you.
I know you, and I'm really grateful. I wouldn't be able to do this without you. So, if you want to join my friends that are supporting the show every month, you can go to adopteeson.com/partner to find out details of how you can support the show and keep it going.
And also how you can access my other weekly podcast. I do two podcasts a week–I feel like that’s too much. Anyway, it's Adoptees Off Script and we have a monthly book club over there, we have lots of silly news reports (it's not silly, but sometimes I get a little bit silly over there), news reporting on adoptee things that are happening. We break down news articles that are– you'll find out the real Haley and how much I want to hear adoptee voices over anybody else’s.
I'll just leave it at that. Sometimes to my detriment. Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.
