Pro-Life/Pro-Baby ping!
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Posted on 03/18/2006 7:06:58 PM PST by wagglebee
Jeremiah Clayton Jones discovered that his former fiancée was pregnant just three weeks before the baby was due, when an adoption-agency lawyer called and asked if he would consent to have his baby adopted.
"I said absolutely not," said Mr. Jones, a 23-year-old Arizona man who met his ex-fiancée at Pensacola Christian College in Florida. "It was an awkward moment, hearing for the first time that I would be a father, and then right away being told, 'We want to take your kid away.' But I knew that if I was having a baby, I wanted that baby."
Mr. Jones has never seen his son, now 18 months old. Instead, he lost his parental rights because of his failure to file with a state registry for unwed fathers — something he learned of only after it was too late.
Under Florida law, and that of other states, an unmarried father has no right to withhold consent for adoption unless he has registered with the state putative father registry before an adoption petition is filed. Mr. Jones missed the deadline.
Although one in every three American babies has unwed parents, birth fathers' rights remain an unsettled area, a delicate balancing act between the importance of biological ties and the undisrupted placement of babies whose mothers relinquish them for adoption.
While women have the right to get an abortion, or have and raise a child, without informing the father, courts have increasingly found that when birth mothers choose adoption, fathers who have shown a desire for involvement have rights, too.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Baby ping.
they don't stand a chance. the dark side of adoption is that it's an "industry."
Florida and it's freaking registries. I've been calling it a police state for years.
It is possible that some women would have abortions if they couldn't write the father out of the picture.
Just throwing that out there.
Mrs VS
Excellenet post, very good article. These guys are just having their rights hidden under a bushel basket, that is wrong.
That's a good point, but it still doesn't make this right.
Please FReepmail me if you would like to be added to, or removed from, the Pro-Life/Pro-Baby ping list...
Thanks for the ping. It's hard to believe that fathers' time can run out on them to file something or other, when they don't even KNOW about the baby in the first place. I would think there has to be a notification, and when that happens - THEN the clock starts ticking.
Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a nonprofit research and education group, sees it differently. "It's all smoke and mirrors," Mr. Pertman said. "How can registries work if no one's heard of them? And it's just not reasonable to expect that men will register every time they have sex."
bttt
You're right - those laws need to be changed if that is the case. But, I have one big caveat: the child's best interests must be taken into account, so there's got to be some kind of time limit on it. If a fair and reasonable effort is made to inform the father and he doesn't respond, the child's life should not be put on hold while the courts try to decide to determine who his/her legal parents will be.
A woman should be required to list a father on the birth certificate or list unknown, it should be criminal fraud to deliberately conceal paternity from the father.
Try to determine, not "try to decide to determine". Fat fingers.
I once met a girl once who deliberately made up a name on her baby's birth certificate so she could get welfare, and they wouldn't be able to "find him" for child support --- it was her boyfriend who was working and they just didn't want to work harder. The baby was a "get free stuff" situation for them. Sad.
I tend to agree on that to a point. If EVERY effort is made to find the birth father, and the birth mother is under oath to reveal his REAL name, and he doesn't respond, absolutely. We've read and heard too many stories involving manipulative mothers who are only in it to sell their babies and hide the baby's existence from the real dad.
The mother has a right to murder her unborn baby or give it away without the Father's consent if she wants to. The father has the right to pay child support for the baby if the mother wants him to. Unbelievable. I honestly feel that this is going to be an important front in shattering the "pro-choice" movement.
Lookie here-- here's another article about unwed fathers not being informed of adoption for everyone to argue over!
Fine. Set up a national DNA registry, then.
And there's way too many babies who get caught up in the system and don't get a set of parents until well into their childhood, and it scars them for life. There's not a perfect answer, but I would tend to err on the side of getting that child to a set of loving parents. Very sad for the bio-dad, but then he had choices along the way, too.
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