Shawna Hodgson speaks at a Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs meeting.
Every year on her birthday, Shawna Hodgson and her brother drive out to East Texas, and they visit her grave.
Hodgson was adopted soon after birth. Her biological brother is older than she is, and when their pregnant mother didn’t come home from the hospital with a baby one day, he asked questions. Their grandmother took him out to their family cemetery plot, and showed him a grave marked “(Infant) Marshall.”
That’s your sister’s grave, she told him.
“They told my brother that I had died,” she said. “He grew up 40-something years of his life believing he had a little sister that had died, so imagine his surprise when I showed up.”
The “Marshall” grave in the East Texas cemetery is next to generations of Texans. But Hodgson didn’t connect with her roots or birth mother until much later.
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It’s something she said her adoptive parents haven’t been thrilled about.
“They were told at the time ‘she’s never going to know her birth family,'” Hodgson said. “‘They’re never going to come back in the picture. She’s yours. She’s a blank slate. Make her your own.'”
Like many states, Texas adoptees are issued a new birth certificate with their adoptive parents’ names. Their original birth certificate, which lists their birth parents, is sealed. And Texas born adoptees can’t access their original birth certificates until they’re 18. Even then, they have to already know the names of both of their birth parents. Otherwise, the adoptee will have to petition the court.
And adoptees say that creates confusion and sets up roadblocks later in life.
Hodgson, who grew up in Cypress, said it took years for her to access her birth records. Her birth mother was 24 years old and recently divorced when she was pregnant with Hodgson in the 1970s. Because Hodgson’s maternal grandmother refused to help care for both Hodgson and her then three-year-old brother, Hodgson’s birth mother gave her up for adoption. Feeling pressured by her family, her mother later told her she would have raised her if she had more of a choice.
Not knowing where she came from made Hodgson feel less grounded in her identity. When she turned 18, she expected that gaining access to her original birth certificate to get answers about her history would be easy.
Instead, she had to wait decades to find her birth family through DNA testing.
A gravestone in East Texas, which Shawna Hodgson said was used by her birth family as a cover for her adoption as an infant.
Struggling to access birth records isn’t uncommon for adoptees. Gregory Luce, an adoptee who founded the Adoptee Rights Law Center, had to …….
