What is in a Name: State-Sanctioned Identity Theft
How the Child Welfare System Erases the History and Bloodlines of Foster Children
While still forming in the warmth and safety of our mother’s womb, many of us, long before coming into the world and taking our very first breath, had a name. For others, our parents waited until we were swaddled in a delivery blanket and placed into their arms for the very first time, to give us the name that would become our identity.
What is in a name?
A name is not just a generic word used to call us apart from the rest. A lot goes into the naming of a child. Countless hours pouring through baby name books; the yearning to bestow a familial name upon a new little life, passing down generations of history; a living, breathing testament of bloodlines. Our names are our birthright, our inheritance, our connection to family. Our names are our place in the tree — the roots that connect us to who we are, where we come from, and our belonging.
But what happens when the state steps in with a heavy, bureaucratic axe and chops those roots away?
In Michigan, approximately 9,500 children are trapped in the foster care system at any given moment. Between 2020 and 2023 alone, the state finalized 6,759 adoptions. Behind those clinical, sanitized numbers lies a hidden, haunting reality that the system completely minimizes: the systematic erasure of a child’s entire identity.
When the state terminates parental rights, it doesn’t just sever a legal bond. It hands over the power to completely wipe out who that child was. The system calls it “finalization.” I call it a forced identity theft, funded and approved by Child Protective Services.
The public is led to believe that name changes in foster adoptions are rare, or perhaps limited to an infant’s last name. That is a comforting lie. The state does not even bother to centrally track how many children have their identities fully scrubbed. They wipe the slate clean and leave no statistical trace of the original human being.
I know this because CPS did this to my children.
They took my 11-year-old daughter, Aleisyana Saree Long, a child who had answered to her name for over a decade, and transformed her on paper into Leisy Dawn G.
They took my 9-year-old, Ember Jene Long, and rewrote her into Emily Lamay G.
They took my baby, 2-year-old Joelle Nevaeh Long, and turned her into Josephina Joy G.
And they took my 5-year-old son, Cameron David Long — bearing the name of my own father, David, a living testament to our shared bloodline — and completely stripped it away to label him Charles Peter G.
Get Stephanie Koehl’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
My father died at just 51 years old. Cameron David was his only grandson at the time, and still to this day, remains his only grandson. I remember being at my father’s deathbed, setting my then one-year-old baby boy onto his dying grandfather’s stomach. My father couldn’t even speak. But he still held up a weak, shaking hand to lovingly poke his grandson’s belly, while tears fell from clouded, dying eyes.
That was their moment. That was their bond. And the state of Michigan stole that child’s name. They stole my father’s name from his only grandson.
The state did not stop at their first and middle names; their family surname was stripped away and replaced as well. I have omitted that government-mandated last name here, referencing it as simply G., because the system demands the protection of its own secrecy while three of my children are still minors. But the erasure in that courtroom was absolute.
In one single stroke, generations of history, family lineage, and personal identity were erased. Their original birth certificates were legally sealed away in a government vault, replaced by altered documents that pretend their original names never existed. It is an act of absolute erasure disguised as protection.
How many of the estimated 50,000 children adopted in Michigan since modern tracking began have been subjected to this total identity scrub? How many are lost forever in a system that severs their roots so deeply they can no longer find the tree they came from? The state does not want to answer, because to answer would mean pulling back the veil on how cruel this process truly is.
But bloodlines cannot be overwritten by a judge’s ink.
As soon as my oldest turned 18, she walked back into that legal system and reclaimed her birthright. She legally shed the name the state forced upon her and took back her true identity: Aleisyana Saree Long. She chose her roots. She chose her history.
And now, at 19, Aleisyana is pregnant with her own child. A new life is forming. The tree is growing new branches. And this baby will be born knowing exactly who they are, where they come from, and the name that connects them to their bloodline.
This is a call to action. We must strip away the veil of child welfare “benevolence” and look at the psychological trauma of state-sanctioned identity theft. A child is not a blank canvas for the state or an adoptive household to reshape at will. Their names are their inheritance. It is time to demand accountability, to force states like Michigan to track and limit these complete name replacements, and to protect a child’s fundamental right to know — and keep — their own name.
What is in a name?
Everything.
How many children are left forever, with not even a memory of their names? How many parents are left forever, with only memories of the children they named?
What is in a name?
A calling to come home again. A promise of not being lost and forgotten. A promise to always be here waiting.
