Last week, Lord Justice Wall, President of the Family Division gave a speech to the organization Families Need Fathers that sketched the outlines of the coming changes in family law. A blog by family attorney Marilyn Stowe sheds a good bit more light on the subject.
Now courts in Ohio and many other states are starting to take the rights of biological fathers far more seriously than ever before. The narrow ruling in the Ohio case is that a biological father has one year from the time his paternity is established to file suit to stop the adoption of his child. That means that mothers can no longer hide a child or a child’s paternity from a father and deprive him of his parental rights via adoption.
Parental Alienation is child abuse and should be seen as such by courts. Of course, the judicial process is not always able to draw proper conclusions about parental alienation by judges who aren’t trained in the nuances of clinical psychology. But that’s not an argument against trying. Indeed, it’s an argument in favor of educating judges, mental health professionals and the public generally about the realities of parental alienation and the stress and damage it visits on kids.
Every Michigan parent who’s involved in a child custody case should be aware that (a) your child has a right to parenting time, (b) the law presumes strong parent-child relationships to be in the child’s best interests and (c) parenting time shall be granted so as to promote that strong parent-child relationship.
Last year, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Germany’s law requiring the mother’s approval for a single father to be granted parental rights violated the European Union’s charter prohibiting discrimination. Now Germany’s highest court has followed suit declaring the scheme unconstitutional.
The State of Michigan is suing Gary Harper for AFDC payments made to a woman named Dorothy Hoose. She had a son in 1988 and named Harper as the dad. There’s just one problem, though; he’s not.
Finally! Here’s a court that sees the obvious - that the rights of biological fathers have legal importance, and that courts and legislatures must respect them for the welfare of all concerned.
Massachusetts HB 1400, which would establish a presumption of equally shared parenting in a case of divorce or separation, will be voted on in committee soon, perhaps as early as July 13th.