Posted on 03/19/2006 10:41:42 PM PST by Giant Conservative
That's very statist: someone has to decide what the best interests of the child is. Should the biological parent who loves their child enough to keep and raise them make that decision, or should The State?
Only one non-communist answer...
He is a grandfather? I missed that. Thank God my grandfather was cut from a different cloth. My mom got pregnant in the 50's when it was about the worst thing that could happen to a girl. There were arguments, recriminations, accusations and finally accceptance among the adults. But no one ever, ever thought the child (me) was any different than any child born inside a marriage.
Here's a story that is similar that generated quite a few
responses from FReepers:
Dad: Son put up for adoption without his knowledge (Girlfriend said baby was stillborn)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1576839/posts
The CNN link on the thread no longer pulls up so here's
the story from another source:
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4485527,00.html
Pueblo dad seeks custody of son he's never known
By Andrea S. Anderson, Associated Press
February 22, 2006
VERONA, N.J. - David Archuletta has never met the 4-year-old boy with the dark eyes.
He has only seen a photo of the boy, the son he thought was dead, the son who was adopted without his knowledge or consent.
That New Jersey officials say they were misled by a private adoption agency doesn't cut it for Archuletta. He wants to see his son - and he wants custody of the child.
"He looks just like me," said Archuletta, 46, of Pueblo. "I just want to be able to see my son."
The boy's mother, Archuletta's former girlfriend, told him the baby was stillborn during a 2001 trip to visit a sister in Michigan. That was a lie. In reality, she was in New Jersey, putting the baby up for adoption.
More than a year later, she said she felt guilty and told him the truth. Archuletta immediately told New Jersey authorities that he wasn't notified of the adoption as required by state law. State officials initially rejected his complaint but now say they were misled by the agency, Verona-based Children of the World, and that Archuletta should have been notified.
For three years, Archuletta's search for his son has been mired in bureaucracy, stifled by a slow-moving government agency and a private adoption company whose records are protected by the confidentiality that surrounds adoptions.
An Associated Press review of hundreds of pages of state documents that involve the adoption and Children of the World show that the company knew of Archuletta's existence for nine months before it allowed his son to be adopted yet made no attempt to track him down.
"Children of the World didn't do nothing to find me," said Archuletta, who is disabled by Parkinson's disease and lives with his mother. He says he can't afford a lawyer to help him in his custody quest.
Veronica Serio, Children of the World's executive director, declined to speak about the case when reached at the agency's headquarters in this town about 19 miles west of Manhattan. The adoptive parents' attorney, Steven Sklar, also declined to comment when reached by phone at his Kendall Park office, citing confidentiality.
Archuletta first learned he had a son when shown the photo by his former girlfriend, Penny Sue Candelaria. In a recent telephone interview from a Colorado jail, where she is serving time for attempted vandalism, Candelaria said she showed him the photo six months after the adoption was completed in August 2002.
"I started really feeling guilty," Candelaria said of deceiving Archuletta. "He has no children, and that's his only child. He was very upset. So was his family."
Officials initially dismissed Archuletta's complaint against the adoption agency as unsubstantiated, state records show. But in a letter sent to Archuletta three months ago - nearly three years after he sent the complaint - the Department of Human Services said it had reversed that decision, saying Children of the World had failed to tell state officials it had knowledge of Archuletta's existence during its initial investigation.
"Based on additional information that was made available to us, we found out that licensing regulators had been misled," a DHS spokesman, Joe Delmar, said.
New Jersey law says agencies must notify anyone who may be a child's biological parent before the adoption process can be finished. The state also is obligated to search for a birth parent when an adoption agency is told one has been identified.
The state is looking into the agency's handling of the adoption.
Legal experts say the adoption should not have gone forward in the first place.
State adoption investigators say Candelaria first told the agency's workers the father was unknown. Later, but still months before the adoption was completed, she sent a letter to the adoptive parents demanding more money for expenses and threatening to tell the child's father about the adoption if the couple did not comply, according to DHS records.
Sklar, the attorney for the adoptive parents, notified Children of the World's Serio of the letter nine months before the adoption was completed, but she did not follow up on the information, according to DHS records.
In an interview with state investigators in 2003, Serio said she had learned of the birth father's existence only that year, according to DHS records.
But in an affidavit taken in December 2004, Serio wrote she had received the information in 2001. Serio also said that the father had failed to come forward within the required window of 120 days and that the agency was not legally obligated to locate him.
DHS officials say Serio's interpretation of the law was wrong and that she made contradictory statements to investigators.
"Your agency's explanations for failing to reach out to the birth mother after receiving information that she knew how to contact the birth father are unacceptable," DHS licensing chief Gary Sefchik wrote in a letter to Serio in September.
Candelaria, 44, acknowledged placing the baby for adoption without Archuletta's permission. She said she was unprepared for a second child when she became pregnant in 2001.
"I had a 7-year-old daughter I was already raising by myself," said Candelaria, who was also in the process of divorcing another man, her daughter's father, at the time she became pregnant with Archuletta's child.
She said she contacted Children of the World after reading the agency's classified ad in a newspaper in Pueblo, where she and Archuletta were living.
As she readied to give birth, she told Archuletta she was taking a trip to visit a sister in Michigan. When she returned, she told him the baby was dead when it was born.
In reality, she had given birth in a New Jersey hospital, and the newborn was taken by Children of the World for the adoption.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4485527,00.html
You may disagree with me but I imagine that it causes most people to take a negative, critical attitude toward someone described this way.
If anything derogatory is warranted, and in charity it shouldn't be, the unmarried parents of a child would deserve it, not the innocent child.
With all the changes in the dictionaries, I'd like to see the word bastard removed. It's demeaning.
In which cases should the interests of the child prevail, and in which cases should the rights of the biological parents prevail? I think that's an important question, since the idea of "do what's best for the kids" can lead to some interesting legal problems.
Imagine a very young married couple with a newborn. Suppose they have the means to provide the child with an adequate existence, but barely so. The kid will have enough food to grow up into a healthy adult, would probably graduate high school and not go much farther, and would probably have to start working at age 16 to help support the family.
But a much wealthier, very loving older couple want to adopt a child just like this newborn. They can provide it with an outstanding education, enriching childhood experiences, and a great head start in life.
Almost everyone wants the situation that's best for a child. In this case, if we followed that principle rigorously, we should expect the child to be taken from his loving biological parents and given to the loving adoptive parents. Obviously, that would not seem right to most of us, as we have some sense of rights attached to biological parenthood.
So where do we draw the line between doing what's best for kids, while respecting the just claims of a biological parent? Or does biology really confer any rights at all?
Perhaps the bio-dad is married and has other kids. Who knows?
I do not think the presumptionm should be that the child is better off adopted than with the bio-dad given the facts in the article.
There are studies that show that the degree of bonding found with a biologically linked parent is often greater and therefore would tangibly benefit the child when compared to some adoptive homes. I would not want to generalize that too much since there are many adoptive homes that are in nearly every respect impossible to tell from well adjusted biological families.
you are the one lacking in logic (just adding my two cents!)
What an emotional turmoil. The father had the most precious gift stolen from him. If it was my child, I would walk through hell and high water to get him back.
Yet the child is 4 and we have all seen footage of a child being yanked from the only parents he knows, given to someone who is a complete stranger. That is not right either.
There has to be something better than the all or nothing solution in these cases..I just don't know what it is.
Jeff, where is the newborn baby who should be ashamed of his/her irresponsible behavior? Where? Yet you insist that this baby should be called a nasty name...bastard.
Two people conceived him/her. If you INSIST that someone in this trio deserves to be given a derogatory name, pick on one or both of the parents.
Some posters here want to ascribe characteristics to Jeremiah Clayton Jones that are not mentioned in the article. The article does not say that Jones had unprotected sex with multiple partners. It does not say that he is unwilling or unable to support his child. The mother of the child is his ex-fiancee, but the article does not say who ended the engagement, or why, or if there is a chance for reconciliation.
Do you ever sleep??
You might want to check this out. Wanna let us play with him for a while? I pinged a bunch of other FReepers to watch him.
http://www.freerepublic.com/~kelso/
I agree. Lets stick to what we know about this article in particular. The baby has not been born yet. The mother has already decided to give up the baby for adoption. The father wants the baby.
Where is the moral dilemma here? The father gets custody. Period. Anything else would be just plain evil without major extenuating circumstances. (Such as the father is a felon in prison, major drug user etc... and there is no mention of any of that in this article.)
Just because it might have been a one night stand or a short relationship out of wedlock doesn't change the father's right to claim his chilren if mom will not.
According to this, the mother doesn't want to raise a child, doesn't want an abortion but doesn't want the child to be raised by his father either. What does this say?
Lets take it a step farther. The baby is born and the father absconds with him/her and runs. The father of the baby has then just what, kidnapped his own baby that the mother already legally claimed she didn't want? Unless there's a lot more to this story, I say it's disgusting.
Yes. Next question!
Given that men are "expected" to screw around, I'm tempted to believe many do. Society gives them more freedom that way.
So how do single guys view their sexual experiences? Is it selfish pleasure or the thought of conceiving a child? I'll go with the former.
They don't get pregnant. They got what they were after. In my opinion, they should have no rights. If they got three women pregnant in a year's time, which they could, will they want custody and financial responsibility for all these children?
Need I say that there is a big difference between the male and female genders, despite what the feminists try to shove down our throats.
I think he should be able to have the kid. It is too late to worry about the fifteen minutes. Now, he needs to worry about the next 18 years. The man is 23 years old and should be able to take care of the child if he wants to. I don't understand why you are so cavalier about this. We are always preaching personal responsibility and now when we see it, you are complaining about that too. What is it that you want from this 23 year old?
To hell with the baby, it's all about "me".
If that were the case, he would be demanding abortion. He still has three weeks to aboart!!!!
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