Adoption Swindle Shafts Dads

http://www.reason.com/cy/cy032806.shtml

March 28, 2006

Adoption Swindle Shafts Dads
Equal rights for unwed fathers
Cathy Young


While the "Roe v. Wade for men" lawsuit filed in Michigan earlier this month
seeks the right for men to terminate their financial obligations to a child
in case of unwanted pregnancy, another dispute over male reproductive rights
has been making news as well. Last week, a front-page New York Times story
explored the plight of unwed fathers who fight for children placed for
adoption by the mothers.

One of the men profiled in the article, 23-year-old Arizona resident
Jeremiah Clayton Jones, learned that his former fiancée-who had ended their
relationship-was pregnant and seeking to put up the baby for adoption in
Florida, where they had met while attending college. An adoption agency
called Jones to ask for his consent to the adoption. He refused, fully
intending to raise the baby himself. But Jones did not know that in order to
exercise his parental rights, he had to register with the state registry for
unmarried fathers. Because he missed the deadline, he lost all his rights
and has never seen his child, now 18 months old.

Sadly, this case is all too typical. While divorced fathers complain that
they are often treated as second-class parents, never-married fathers are
much lower on the totem pole. True, their situation has improved since the
1970s, when an unwed father's children could be given up for adoption
without his consent even if he had raised them.

Today, partly as a result of several legal controversies in which unmarried
fathers successfully contested adoptions, the majority of states have
"putative father registries" by means of which a man can assert his
paternity. But the purpose of these registries often seems to be less to
protect the rights of the father than to protect the rights of everyone
else: the mother who wants to give up the baby, the adoption agency, and the
adoptive parents. Some would say that they also protect the rights of the
child. But that depends on whether you believe that a child is better off
being adopted than being raised by the biological father.

In most states, the unwed father has to file with the registry either within
a certain period of the child's birth-from five to 30 days-or, as in
Massachusetts, at any time before the adoption petition is filed. But
neither the mother nor the adoption agency has any obligation to notify the
man of the adoption, or of the fact that he is a father or father-to-be.
Even when the father is notified, he may not be told about the putative
father registry-which is what happened to Jones, whose attorney, Allison
Perry, refers to the Florida registry as a "well-kept secret." That is the
situation in most states. Not only are most men unaware of the registries'
existence, even some lawyers don't know about them.

Amazingly, many specialists believe that it's too much of a burden on the
woman or the adoption agency to require that a man be notified of his
paternity. Instead, they argue that it should be his responsibility to file
with the putative father registry every time he enters a sexual relationship
with a woman, on the off-chance that a pregnancy may result-a requirement
that, if nothing else, smacks of a humiliating invasion of privacy. Surely,
it is far more efficient and less invasive to limit the notification
requirement to cases in which a pregnancy actually happens, and to place the
burden on those who are aware of the pregnancy.

You would think that, unlike men who seek to avoid their paternal
responsibilities, fathers who want to be responsible for raising their own
children would at least encounter societal sympathy and support. Sadly, that
has not generally been the case. Unwed fathers who contest adoptions are
often faulted for not taking affirmative steps to find out about the child's
existence, and in some cases are blamed even if they were actively deceived
by the mother. Often, they're suspected of being abusers whose real hidden
motive is to control the mother.

The issues of men burdened with responsibility for unwanted pregnancies, and
of men who are not allowed to be fathers to wanted children, are linked by a
common thread. Biology has made men and women unequal with regard to
reproduction. In recent decades, thanks to both technology and social
change, we have made strides to alleviate the inequality for women, helping
them avoid unwanted childbearing. But we have lagged far behind in
equalizing the situation for men. We cannot ask men to be equal parents
while giving virtually all the power in reproductive decisions to women.