The Feeling is Virtual

Work, visits to the doctor, ordering from a restaurant – so much has gone virtual.

Hunger, however, has not. And right now more Texans than ever need help feeding their families. The North Texas Food Bank is answering the call, and they need our help to provide nutritious foods to those in need. Please consider participating in our Virtual Food Drive. You can order from their wish list (at this link) and it will be shipped directly to NTFB. For those who’d like to coordinate an in-person food donation, please email my office at District16.Johnson@senate.texas.gov.

Stay well, and remember, 

In and around the District, virtually, in June:

• In response to the recent surge in COVID-19 cases in Texas and Dallas County, Fox News (no, really) asked me (seriously) to appear live to discuss Texas’s pandemic response. Catch my remarks here.

• The North Texas LGBT Chamber of Commerce hosted me and my colleague, Rep. Julie Johnson, at their annual Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion Conference for a discussion of our expectations and goals regarding individual rights and equal protection under the law.

• Blood supply in North Texas is critically low. Thanks to many wonderful folks in and around my district, we had a successful blood donation drive. My sincere appreciation to those who participated. I have to say it’s a funny feeling to catch up with friends in a trailer while wearing masks and watching blood flow out of a tube in your arm, but it’s a good feeling.

Back at the Office 

• More than 500 constituents called or wrote to us in June, voicing concerns and seeking information about the reopening of schools, masks, the closing of bars (again), driver’s license renewal, professional licenses, unemployment benefits, and other matters related to public policy and practical life in the midst of a pandemic. If you need assistance relating to COVID-19, you can find a Resource Guide on my website.

Policy talk

• I’ve resumed policy meetings, albeit virtually. The Greater Houston Partnership brought me in from out of town ($0 airfare!) to talk with Representatives Garnet Coleman and Senfronia Thompson about the cost of healthcare. I also met with the Interim Director of the Health and Human Services Commission (one of the state agencies charged with managing the statewide response to the coronavirus), discussed school reopening plans and state education policy initiatives with local school board members, and joined other legislators for numerous policy conferences with agencies, county and city governments, and school superintendents. 

Policy Spotlight: A Practical Policy Nudge from the U.S. Supreme Court

We often think about U.S. Supreme Court decisions in terms of how they affect individual rights, or business rights, or both. But this month’s policy spotlight shines on how the Court’s recent decision in Bostock v. Clayton County may affect the fate of certain bills in the Texas Legislature next session.

In a 6-3 opinion, the Supreme Court held that the federal ban on employment discrimination “because of … sex” (under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) covers discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The logic is pretty clear: if you can’t fire a man for being attracted to women, then you can’t fire a woman for being attracted to women; because the only difference in the latter scenario is that the person in question is a woman instead of a man. That’s discrimination “because of” a person’s sex. “Sex”, says Justice Gorsuch, writing for the majority, “plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”

The decision has great importance to individuals, of course. But it also has interesting and perhaps important implications for the Texas Legislature. Every session, a bill is filed to impose a statewide ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation. Every session, it goes nowhere. Although the Bostock decision renders such a bill unnecessary in the employment context, what about other contexts? Might the reasoning in Bostock be applied to state and federal laws that ban sexual discrimination in areas like housing, access to credit, and insurance?

The resulting uncertainty means that if we don’t pass a statewide discrimination ban, a number of lawsuits may be filed. A statewide ban could, perhaps, prevent litigation while also providing consistency in state law.

Those opposed to passage of a statewide discrimination ban have expressed concern that such laws invite litigation. The thing is, in practice they don’t. Many local governments have had nondiscrimination ordinances in place for years, without ensuing litigation.

Second, many feel that nondiscrimination laws may threaten their religious freedom. Here we run into the question: at what point does “religious freedom” – which we rightly cherish and enshrine – become “freedom to discriminate” – which we rightly abhor and condemn? It can be a difficult question. But we’re capable of crafting legislation that accommodates the distinction, if not perfectly, at least well enough to take us in the right direction.

Could this be the session in which the Legislature passes a statewide ban on discrimination based on the trait of sexual orientation? The Bostock decision provides a new practical context for the discussion.

Texas Adoptees Are Fighting for the Right to Access Their Own Birth Certificates

Fed up with DNA tests and expensive investigators, some adult adoptees are asking the state to unseal their original birth records.

By Kristin Finan, Texas Monthly

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 didn’t know that my original birth certificate was sealed. I just kind of assumed they would hand that information over to me when I was [of age],” says Hodgson. “So imagine my surprise when I marched in there like, ‘I’m ready for my file,’ and they were like, ‘No, no, no. You don’t have the right to that.’” 

Birth certificates are a hot-button issue for Texas-born adoptees, some of whom have spent decades trying to change a state law that makes getting the records a Kafkaesque challenge. Many adult adoptees say that by restricting the ability to obtain their own records, the state denies them the opportunity to access potentially life-saving information about their medical and family histories. 

Under current Texas law, a child’s original birth certificate is sealed when he or she is adopted and the adoptive parents are sent a supplementary birth certificate that lists them as the child’s parents. Adoptees who do not know their birth parents’ names must petition for access in court in the county that granted the adoption and must show what the law calls, without defining the term, “good cause.” 

Hodgson, who did not know her birth parents’ names, went to court twice, and both times she was denied. A judge in Harris County even told her she needed her adoptive parents’ permission, despite the fact that she was 38 years old. She ultimately spent five years conducting her own search, during which she says she spent more than $15,000 on everything from DNA testing to private investigators. After all the arduous effort, Hodgson says, “When I met my birth family, it was like a photo that was blurry came into view.” The search fired her up so much that she became an advocate for other adoptees, and is now a spokeswoman for the Texas Adoptee Rights Coalition. (I met Hodgson during my search for original birth certificates for my two adopted children.)

Adoptees have long said these restrictions violate their civil and human rights. But as a result of increasing awareness of the topic, recent laws granting unrestricted birth certificate access in nine other states including New York and Colorado, and a newly introduced bill in the Texas Legislature that’s more streamlined than bills in previous sessions and has bipartisan support, many advocates are hopeful that this will be the session when things change. 

The new bill was introduced in the Senate by Democrat Nathan Johnson, and in the House by Representative Cody Harris, a Republican who represents an East Texas district that includes Palestine and Corsicana and who is an adoptive dad himself. 

Harris said his experience of adopting his daughter Chloe, now seven, out of foster care and “just seeing how guarded and limited the information is from an adoptive parent’s perspective” greatly informed his decision to sponsor the bill.

“I believe everyone should be able to know where they came from and gain access to that information. It covers everything from knowing your own family medical history about things you might be predisposed towards to diseases that you could take a preventative approach to if you only had the information,” Harris says.

If passed, the bill would allow any adult adoptee to receive a copy of his or her original birth certificate without a court order as long as the adoptee was born in Texas, was previously issued a supplementary certificate, and is now eighteen years old. Unlike previous versions, this simpler bill does not include the option for birth parents to fill out a form saying whether they’d like to be contacted by the adopted person or provide him or her with family medical history.

Because of the size of Texas’s population, changing the law here could affect 800,000 Texas-born adoptees, says Tim Monti-Wohlpart, an advocate who worked on the similar New York bill that passed in 2019. “A lot of eyes are on Texas right now,” he says, adding that, if passed, the Texas bill could help inspire similar legislation in other states.

While thirty years of advocacy within the Texas Legislature have left lawmakers well-informed on the topic, advocates’ inability to get the law changed up to this point can be attributed in large part to the decades-old culture of secrecy surrounding adoption. Whether it was promises made by adoption agencies to unmarried birth mothers who wanted privacy or politicians seeking to protect adoptive parents from intrusion from birth families, adoptees argue that the laws have rarely been about them or their own needs. 

The Gladney Center for Adoption, a national agency based in Texas that has completed 36,000 adoptions since 1887—the majority of which took place in Texas—is among the organizations now voicing support for adult adoptee access. Mark Melson, CEO, president, and Gladney parent, said via email that one of the main requests that the Gladney Center for Adoption’s post-adoption team receives is access to birth records by adopted adults. 

But not everyone agrees that all adult adoptees should be able to access their original birth certificates, including Texas senator Donna Campbell, an adoptive mother herself. Campbell said that because 90 percent of adoptions that occur today are open, respect should be paid to the birth mothers who choose closed adoption. 

“It is rare for a woman to choose a closed adoption—meaning she desires no contact with the child. … She does not do this lightly or without justification,” Campbell said via email. “I am an adoptive mom who understands the unintentional consequences of this bill. We are in no position of trying to undo her decision. This is not the proper role of government.”

Instead, Campbell offers up the state’s Central Adoption Registry, in which adoptees, birth parents, and biological siblings of adult adoptees can register themselves in hopes of locating family members without going through the court system. The mutual-consent adoption registry, she says, “allows both consenting parties to come together on their own accord.”

Adoptees in search of biological family members can also turn to DNA tests like 23andMe and AncestryDNA—a process that advocates say can become emotionally loaded. “As greater access to DNA records exists today, we are seeing more ‘accidental’ reunions by family members who are not ready or prepared to meet,” Melson said, adding that Gladney believes it’s preferable for adult adoptees to gain information through birth records rather than through a genetic relative. For many adoptees, learning about family history from a birth certificate allows them greater control over how to use that information, and can be less stressful than sourcing information from unsuspecting members of their birth family. After all, sliding into the Facebook messages of a potential second cousin who may or may not be able to connect you with your birth parents is quite different from learning their names directly from an official state document.

Getting the bill passed this session will come with challenges, as the Legislature is also tackling major issues like the state budget and redistricting, as well as the ongoing impact of COVID-19 and the state’s electricity grid failures during the recent winter storm. Still, thanks to the new bill’s bipartisan support as well as the force of well-known Texas agencies like Gladney, advocates are cautiously optimistic. 

“It’s way past time for people to understand this issue,” Hodgson says. “Can I predict what’s going to happen? No. But I feel optimistic. I have to, because that’s how we keep going.”

This article originally appeared in Texas Monthly at https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/adult-adoptee-birth-cerficiate-legislation/.

With this change, Texas can save the lives of new moms

Women who lose Medicaid health coverage soon after giving birth are at high risk of bad outcomes

By Dallas Morning News Editorial

Childbirth is a joyous time for a mother, but also can lead to medical crises, postpartum depression, and premature death, including suicide.

At a time when new mothers are so vulnerable, access to medical resources and counseling that could save lives should be available. However, if a new mother is poor, several post-childbirth risk factors sharply increase, and a key safety net is available for only the first two months after delivery. Medicaid health insurance currently provides coverage for new mothers for just 60 days despite the fact that medical experts say new mothers are at risk of suffering psychological and medical setbacks related to childbirth for at least a year.

It is heartwarming that womens’ health issues have caught the attention of some lawmakers. With slight differences, SB 141 by Sen. Nathan Johnson, SB 1187 by Sen. Carol Alvarado, HB 107 by Rep. Senfronia Thompson, HB 133 by Rep. Toni Rose, HB 146 by Rep. Shawn Thierry, and HB 98 by Rep. Lina Ortega all extended Medicaid health insurance for new mothers from 60 days to one year after pregnancy.

We urge lawmakers to extend benefits for a year and not put more women at risk. Roughly, 89% of pregnancy-related deaths reviewed since 2013 were preventable and 31% occurred 43 days to one year after the end of pregnancy, according to the state’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee. The committee also determined that Black and Hispanic new mothers were at elevated risks of bad outcomes.

In 2018, for example, the severe maternal morbidity rate for Black women in Texas was 299.4 cases per 10,000 delivery hospitalizations, significantly higher than the overall state rate of 182.3, as were the statistics for Hispanic mothers. The severe maternal morbidity rate includes “unexpected outcomes of labor and delivery that result in significant short-term or long-term consequences to a woman’s health,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Texas ranks an embarrassing last, at 25.5% in the rate of uninsured women of childbearing age, according to a Georgetown University study, so expanding Medicaid coverage to 12 months would be a step forward. Women who lose health coverage soon after giving birth are likely to stop taking medication or obtain support for postpartum depression and treatable maladies such as infection, hemorrhage, preeclampsia, eclampsia, and cardiovascular and coronary conditions.

Texas lawmakers have known that this is a major problem but have come up short in previous sessions. Two years ago, the state House approved legislation to provide 12 months of Medicaid coverage to mothers following childbirth only to watch that bipartisan bill fail when the state Senate didn’t take action before the deadline to consider legislation.

Texas temporarily paused removing mothers from Medicaid coverage during the COVID-19 emergency, undoubtedly saving lives. Lawmakers must deliver a bill that extends benefits for one year, and the governor should sign it.

This article originally appeared in the Dallas Morning News at https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/2021/03/17/with-this-change-texas-can-save-the-lives-of-new-moms/.