Rudy Owens is an advocate for adoptee rights. He lives in Portland, Oregon in the US and in 2018 he published a memoir called You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are.

Born in Detroit in the mid-1960s, 24 years later Rudy Owens finally met his birth family. It then took another 25 years and a legal stoush with the State of Michigan before he received his original birth certificate.

Rudy Owens’ book details the lengths he had to go to get his original birth records and his campaign for other adoptees have the right to access their records.

In You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, Owen’s also uses a public health perspective to discuss the importance of connections to kin.