National Adoption Day: 2 North Texas families share their journey
When you adopt children from foster care, you have to get licensed and matched. The process takes about a year.
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When you adopt children from foster care, you have to get licensed and matched. The process takes about a year.
Illustration by Texas Monthly; Birth certificate: Calysta Images/Getty; Scale: Tetra Images/Getty Shawna Hodgson was adopted as an infant in the seventies and, she says, “raised in a great family” in Houston. But despite her happy childhood, she always had an underlying need to know more about her birth family. When Hodgson became an adult, she decided to request a copy of her original birth certificate , something she had always assumed she was entitled to receive, from the Texas Department of State Health Services’ vital statistics office. Her request was immediately denied. “I di...
Fed up with DNA tests and expensive investigators, some adult adoptees are fighting the state for access to their original birth records.