Posted on 03/19/2006 10:41:42 PM PST by Giant Conservative
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
My logic is fine, yours is a trifle f**ked up though. Somehow you think a father should just dump his child. It isn't pride that makes a father want his children, it is called parental love. A father alone can raise a child just as well as a mother alone, it happens all the time. You are stuck on calling these babies bastards and trying to get them out the door and fast as possible.
Also, you are so big on logic(you think) you had better reprogram your brain for some logic, because a divorced parent IS a single parent. After the divorce they are alone, see? This means they are single. This is how it works. You get a divorce, THEN you no longer live with your mate, this equals SINGLE PARENT. Think about it for a day or two and I am sure you little brain will figure it out eventually.
He left his sperm behind and didn't bother sticking around to see if they'd accomplished their natural result, impregnation.
Just read the indignation of the 'men' in the story when they ask incredulously about the unwed father registries, "You mean I'd have to register as a potential father once for EVERY GIRL I have sex with???"
Up until recently, a divorced parent was refered to as a divorced parent. The libertine left purposely blurred the lines in the terms to remove the stigmatization of people who produce bastards.
Agreed, but that has nothing to do with my posts.
In that situation the child is not a bastard.
"You mean I'd have to register as a potential father once for EVERY GIRL I have sex with???"
A little bit of Monica in my life
A little bit of Erica by my side
A little bit of Rita's all I need
A little bit of Tina's what I see
A little bit of Sandra in the sun
A little bit of Mary all night long
A little bit of Jessica here I am
A little bit of you makes me your man
Gosh, this is fun, but I have to go to bed now. I leave you here alone to battle the sperm worshippers.
Maybe in some cases, but I don't think so this time. From the article:
He tried to contact his ex-fiancée, who disappeared from his life when her parents took her from school and to another county. He called her friends, her brother, her pastor.
It looks to me like Mr. Jones attempted to stay in contact with the mother of his child.
After he had moved 2,000 miles away from her, and only after he was notified that he'd knocked her up.
You know as well as I do that there is a stigma assigned to single girls who engage in sex. It's not there for guys. Society "understands" that men will be men.
Maybe this is a message to men to wise up. You can't "sleep around" without the risk of paying a price for it.
How many of these "sperm-donors" are kids who don't have a nickel to contribute to the support of their offspring? If the mother gets the help to keep this child, HER parents will provide financially and physically for the baby.
Listen up, guys. You really don't have the sexual freedom you think you have.
You really are a shallow piece of work. You call yourself a loving father and grandfather but call a defenseless infant by what in this day and age is a form of blasphemy. You 'assume' the father has no real feelings for the child as he's never seen it, so in the same sense your opinion must be that all our troops in Iraq who's wives have given birth since they left also must not have feelings for their babies because they haven't seen them either. Whether you like it or not there is and always will be a biological tie and who's to say the father is not involved in a loving relationship and could be on the verge of getting married whereas the bride would become the adoptive mother.
Sould have read down a bit further. I am a bastard, imagine that! Is bastard the correct term for a woman? Are you saying that in the year 2006, you place the stigma on the same child whose best interests you claim to be concerned about? Man, you gave yourself away with that term. A bit of a hypocrtite, wouildn't you say?
I will have to say in my entire life no one ever treated me like different. My grandparents on my father's side gave me as much love as if they were there the day I was born, as if their son was my biological father.
The sun rose & set with my grandparents on my mother's side as far as I was concerned. That grandfather, well quite frankly, he'd probably beat the holy crap out of you if you said that word near him, even right before he died 2 years ago at 92.
I'm very confused. So, if a child is a "bastard", meaning that it was concieved out of wedlock, it should be given up for adoption. This is because the bastard needs a father and a mother, not just a father. Whether or not the father loves the child, or whether or not he would make a good parent, doesn't matter. The bastard needs a mother and a father.
If a child has a divorced or widowed father, it is not a bastard. The same rules do not apply, because the reason the child does not have a mother is different. In this situation...is it NOT appropriate to give the child up for adoption? Does the child NOT need a loving mother in addition to a loving father, since the biological mother is absent for a different reason?
If you believe the two dads- the unmarried dad vs. the widowed dad- should make different choices, I would like to know why. Why does one motherless child need a mother, whereas the other motherless child does NOT need a mother?
(To all: I apologize for the use of the word bastard. I don't like the term, but it was the easiest way I saw to communicate my point)
One-sided messages divesting men of their parental rights while not exacting any such horrible price from women who conceive under the same circumstances have been in place for a long time, and society has gotten worse because of such one-sidedness.
Oh, I get it, I was a bastard until I was 6.
My mom married my dad when I was 2 but he did not adopt me until I was 6 and about to enter school. Then I magically lost the bastard title. Is this a great country or what? All this time I thought it was so my legal last name match what my thought my last name was.
In a perfect world, all kids should be brought up by married, biological parents who love and care for them.
We don't have that world, so the best we can do is put the best interests of the innocent child before, in many cases, the wishes of their parents, especially those who have not married each other and have no real means to adequately take care of a child.
The article really isn't clear on the sequence of events. All we can say from the article is that Mr. Jones was in Florida, and later lived in Arizona. At some point, before or after he moved, it says that his fiance "disappeared from his life." That would seem to imply that it was the mother who abandoned him. Even if he had moved, it would appear that he was at least still in contact with her.
After he lost contact, he made several attempts to reestablish it. It's possible that he was informed of the pregnancy after those attempts, and also possible that he found out about the pregnancy before trying to reestablish contact.
Then again, it is late, so maybe my reading comprehension is just not up to the task. But unless I am missing something, I'd say it's too early to condemn the guy just yet.
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