Excellent post.
I imagine that part of the problem is that unwed fathers are a group that generates little sympathy--and thus interest in ensuring justice--from either the right or the left.
Is this a case where the law is protecting children from "Rob Lowe can't raise a baby by himself" syndrome? Whether the After School Special was a fair representation of reality, the narrative of the irresponsible manboy—or irresponsible man—is a difficult one to overcome, since it has the added bonus of sounding like conventional wisdom.
Children conceived out of wedlock are illegitimate and thus are not the property of any man; the unwed father is thus not being deprived of his property rights over his child. One would think that you would be familiar with this basic point of law.
I read that article and thought about blogging it too, just as a sort of "proof" that I don't hate men. It's obviously insane, and it occurs to me that the problem is partly one of the ease with which men can simply *not know* that they've caused a pregnancy. I would see no problem instituting a law that requires adoption agencies to track down fathers and gain their consent to an adoption. Probably requiring mothers to do it wouldn't work, b/c women who don't want the men they've slept with to know about the pregnancy can just say they don't remember or whatever. But if the agency can't proceed with the adoption without a paternal release--or documentation that they've tried to obtain one--there'd be some teeth in the law.
Yeah, the law as it is now is really protecting adoptive parents rather than mothers. You'd have to let adoptions go forward when the father was unknown because of the possibility of genuinely unknown fathers, but leave them open to a withdrawal of consent (maybe a two or three year laches period, after which a father who had never been found would have his rights terminated, just to avoid too much chaos for adoptive families.)
I totally agree, but I have to wonder if the motivation behind the polivy is the fact that people don't want to hold up the adoption any more than absolutely necessary, b/c sadly, people are not so into adopting non-newborns.
See, I would argue that you can't possibly allow a 2-3 year window for withdrawal of consent, for obvious reasons: the trauma to a child at that point would be horrendous. I don't care about the chaos for the adoptive parents, but I'm extremely concerned about the upset for the baby in a situation like that. I don't see why you couldn't put the onus on the agency--after all, isn't adoption pretty profitable?--to find the father within, say, three months or so (ideally, though, I'd say it should be before the adoption is finalized). The trick would be, how to compel women placing children for adoption to reveal fathers if they knew who they were, or even just to give a list of possible candidates or something.
I dunno. On one hand, I think father's rights are a miserable state of affairs, but on the other, I can imagine about a million ways in which hunting down the unknown fathers of unwanted babies and asking their opinion is a really bad idea. It's only a step away from making all reproductive decisions revert to the wang-bearer who made it happen.
Well, it's not opinion: it's, "you've fathered a child, do you want custody, or will you consent to an adoption?" I mean, those are really the only two options the dad has.
Maybe 2 or 3 years is too much -- a year? That seems like time enough for any man who was in any sort of social contact with the mother to have found out that she had had a child that might be his. You'd need to oblige state agencies, adoption agencies, whoever, to be cooperative about providing information for fathers in that position.
It's only a step away from making all reproductive decisions revert to the wang-bearer who made it happen.
I can't see this. Pregnancy is an inherently asymmetrical situation, and the rights can't be symmetrical, but once the kid is born I can't see why the father's rights should be more circumscribed than the mother's.
I'd like to hear how the promiscuous (or ex-promiscuous) guys on here would feel about receiving that call, say, a year after a one-night stand.
The father's rights should be circumscribed on the eighth day.
"I would see no problem instituting a law that requires adoption agencies to track down fathers and gain their consent to an adoption. Probably requiring mothers to do it wouldn't work, b/c women who don't want the men they've slept with to know about the pregnancy can just say they don't remember or whatever. But if the agency can't proceed with the adoption without a paternal release--or documentation that they've tried to obtain one--there'd be some teeth in the law."
So mothers who want to give up their kids will be forever prevented from putting them up for adoption when the agency can't ID and find a father, and you " see no problem" with this notion?
Gary, you quoted the answer to your question: "or documentation that they tried to find one." They have to make an effort; they can set up reasonable standards for when to give up.
re: 11
I think the notification issue here is not one that presents a problem to men, promiscuous or not. If they want custody, they get it, along with all of the responsiblities. If they do not want it, they say something like: "huh? Not me."
For sure, most men want to avoid the knock on the door that says "Hey, there is this kid, it's yours, and you owe $10,000 in back child support," but the issue here--the loss of parental rights without notice--is a different one.
[clearly the child support issue is a generally reasonable one--not going out on limb here to start an argument on behalf of deadbeat dads]
Here's my cynical side coming out: "or documentation that they tried to find one"? There's a loophole to drive a truck through! The agency simply file a transcript of their interview with the mother, who might say who knows what, append a record of phone calls to people who may or may not have anything to do with the pregnancy, and a couple of "hell noes, I consent to these adoption" by random passers-by, and there's your paper record.
I'm not sure I see a good way of ensuring a fair balance of fathers' rights and expedicious adoptions, frankly, and if those are the two values I have to weigh, I'd go for the latter.
It's not that there aren't problems with the notification -- the issue that I'm all cross about is at least, for the father who has been notified and does know the abortion is taking place, shouldn't he get to keep his kid? Based on no actual knowledge a all, I think that an infant under a year or so is going to be fairly resilient about a change of caregivers, so I'd allow for an unnotified father to emerge from the woodwork for at least that long, but certainly a father who's objecting before the adoption has taken place should be allowed to claim custody of his child.
(BTW, I'm completely Becks-commenting. Took Buck out to dinner with some friends, and then came home and broke into the bottle of cognac they got him for his birthday. And anyone who has smack to talk about American cakes can look at the picture-perfect Boston Cream Pie I baked this morning and then bite me.)
I have represented putative fathers in paternity cases and parents wishing to adopt when the father's whereabouts was unknown. Since I've never heard of these registries, I'm obviously not in practice and in fact have not done this sort of case in a long time. In every case I ever had, the father was known, and knew about the pregnancy, although sometimes pfs entertained enough doubt to go for the test--which I always advised.
I can think of several occasions when I lost touch with women shortly after having sex with them; we'll leave the question of birth control out of this since we all know it's not completely reliable. I think based on my subsequent experience as a lawyer that I'd have been made aware of the pregnancy had there ever been one, but these cases obviously exist. Knock on the door? Well, I used to ask clients first if it was possible they were the fathers, and the usual answer was "Well, it could have been me." I guess I'd have answered the same way.
If I were looking at your lovely baked goods do you think the odds are very high that I would bite you instead of them?
The cake is pretty darn appealing; probably I'd be able to save myself by offering up the cake as a sacrifice.
(And Tingley: So, pretty much everyone here who isn't a philosophy professor is a lawyer. Figures.)
Right on, Lizardbreath. I commented on this at Majikthise. Parental rights should be at least as durable as the obligation to provide child support. Guys can't lose that by failing to sign up in some secret register.
You typed "abortion" for "adoption," LB. Other than that, you're showing admirable lawyer's ability to remain apparently coherent while drunk. But shouldn't I get to see a picture of this pie before I'm required to bite you?
I actually hate that way child support is run int his country, too. It leaves women dealing with resentful guys, which can't be a lot of fun, screws kids over if the guy doesn't pay, and just feeds the resentment of men, hence the stupid recent "Roe v. Wade for men" bullshit.
What I'd support is a tax on fertile men of child-bearing age, the proceeds to be used to support the children of single mothers.
Kidding! Well, about that last part, I mean.
Boston Cream Pie, by definition, is not cake. It is pie. Filled with cream. Totally different bag.
Well, this isn't it, but looks pretty close. And BCP is pie in name only -- crustless and without fruit, it is perhaps the most American of cakes.
Dan Savage, in his first book, describes a similar situation from the opposite perspective. He and his BF had arranged an open through a Oregon agency. The mother was a gutter punk: voluntarily homeless, etc. Savage and his BF helped her through the pregnancy, providing $ for medical care, etc. Then, at the last minute, the father shows up. (He is also a homeless punk kid.) There is a real worry that he might nix the adoption, but fortunately he doesn't.
I didn't read much of the NYT article, but having read Savage's book, I can see being reluctant to give fathers veto power over all adoptions.
That will do, no bites for you. My background is about half Scottish Highlanders and half New Englanders, both transplanted to Atlantic Canada. Only the NE left any worthwhile recipes: brown bread, backed beans w/ molasses, and BCP about like that. I'm completely mollified.
The thing is, though, as much as I personally adore Dan Savage and would willingly bear him a child if I had a spare nine months, structurally, I don't give a damn about the adoptive parents' rights. If the father showed up (in any reasonable condition to care for a child) and wanted to take care of his kid (at any point where the change in caregiver isn't going to damage the kid) that's his kid, to precisely the same extent that Sally and Newt sleeping in the other bedroom are mine. If Dan wants to adopt, he can wait for a kid whose parents don't want to keep him.
Haven't thought about this much, but some things that might cause problems for a father-waiver proposal:
1) The time-frame needs to be short because potential adoptee babies go stale. But the time-frame also needs to be longer so that the dad can be tracked down. Ideally, the woman knows who the father is, but that's not always going to be the case. It may take some knocking on doors. How would this tension be resolved in a way that doesn't a) leave large loopholes, negating the purpose of a notification at all or b) make it largely impossible to adopt?
2) Statistically, a child born to an unwed mother is likely to live with her. If right now, we had a fifty-fifty split in between unwed parents and custody, I'd be more amenable to a father's rights sort of notification proposal. But chances are, if that adoption is successfully contested, the baby will end up with the mom, and if they're lucky, the dad stays in the kid's life, and pays his child support payments on time.
If they're not lucky, and he reneges on all those duties, well, now she's stuck raising a child she didn't want to raise, with the extra bills, etc. And it's going to be hard to put the child up for adoption later due to a lack of l33t baby preservatives. Even if the adoption is successful, it's more traumatic for the child. And it's certainly not like the state's ability to force deadbeat dads to collect is even approaching acceptable.
I think this is what A White Bear is hinting at; the man is just unlikely to end up being the primary provider for the child, so his input in the adoption decision is extremely disproportionate to the effect it will have on his life.
3) My limited understanding of adoption seems to include adoption discussions often occurring with the prospective parents before the baby is born. Now how would that work? Assume a scenario where the options are a) find a nice couple to adopt the baby or b) have an abortion. (I assume this isn't too farfetched.) Now the biological father contests the adoption, leaving her no option but to have an abortion that she wouldn't have had otherwise.
1) Allow the adoption to go forward without identifying a father, with the understanding that a father who comes out of the woodwork can contest the adoption at any time up to six months? a year? Hard on the adoptive parents, but my understanding of the 'market' for healthy American infants is it's tight enough that the adoptions will still take place.
2), 3) Same answer -- for a father to contest an adoption, he'd have to commit to taking custody. Take the kid home and take care of it. A spite veto, where the father simply wants to force the mother to take care of the kid but intends to vanish, reamins possible, but face it -- if the father abandons the baby on the mother's doorstep while it's still less than six months old, it remains adoptable. If he does so after it's six months old, we're talking about someone who's willing to change diapers and bottlefeed for six months as part of a fiendish plan to victimize the mother -- while people like that may exist, I can't picture there being enough of them to make it worthwhile to deprive fathers who want to raise their children of their rights generally.
29: Your point 3 is exactly what I was imagining. If I had been a young woman who had gotten pregnant after being coerced into frathouse couch sex with some creepy dude, I might be capable of having the baby and privately giving it up for adoption. I would not be capable of continuing on campus with the guy and him having been informed that I had had a baby and given it up. I would be much more likely to choose abortion.
I am totally commenting by proctological extraction here, but we don't need the strawman who fiendishly deceives her for six months and abandons her for this to be a severe problem for her. I agree that guy is pretty rare.
But we don't need that rare of a case. Guy gets joint custody, is enthusiastic for a little bit, slowly drops out of the kid's life, first missing visits cause he's hanging out with the guys, then sending payments, then loses a job, then doesn't bother. Woman could go through the whole process again, and he could contest again. Promise to change his ways, just need a second chance. Meantime, she's spending money on lawyers and that kid is really getting ripe.
I don't think this is all that farfetched, as there seem to be a lot of unwed mothers with kids and absent fathers around, and I'm sure a lot of them thought, at one point, that it would be okay because the dad would be around.
I never saw a case where the father was willing to live with a woman he didn't like for the sake of fulfilling his parental responsibilities. Never saw a case where the woman really wanted the man back in her life. Just wanted support, just payments, really. Now, people close to me have hurried up and married due to a pregnancy, when they might not have otherwise, but those were cases where the man and woman had a relationship. I can't see forcing myself back into a woman's life because of a child.
33: I can't see forcing myself back into a woman's life because of a child.
This is exactly what happened to a young friend of my mother's. At 19, she went on a date with a guy, they got drunk, and the next time they spoke was when she was telling him she was pregnant. Her parents wanted them to marry, but they had only met once. The guy suddenly decided that having a kid would make him attractive to other young ladies, so he does the joint custody thing, half-heartedly. The young mama's not much better, and if the guy had expressed any interest, she would have given the baby girl up for adoption. As it is, the two young parents barely speak except for to scream at each other and try to find evidence that the other parent is abusive.
s/b "if the guy had not expressed interest"
I should note that the child is now three, so this has been going on for a long time. Never underestimate the stubbornness of Christian farm folk.
Adoptive parent chiming in. Even though you don't care about us, Lizardbreath, you may be concerned about hurting the vast majority of adoptable babies who need to be adopted. The market for healthy white babies is fairly tight at the moment, but that is not the universe of babies who need adopting. Competition from foreign orphanages that love American money, and medical advances in infertility treatment are starting to strain both the supply side even for "desirable" American babies. Abortion restrictions are likely to strain the demand side in the next few years. Making all adoptions contingent for a year or two would dissuade enough of us from even trying domestic adopting, to leave many more babies in foster care or orphanages for the duration of the contingent period. Not in the best interest of the baby. Nor the adoptive parents.
structurally, I don't give a damn about the adoptive parents' rights
I dunno, LB. Myself, I don't think either set of parents' rights measure up to the child's welfare. Looks like a decision between a stable family situation and an inherently very unstable one. It's shaky ground legally, perhaps, but if the child's welfare is the tiebreaker, then this seems like an obvious decision.
Well, look. Trumping up hypothetical dads who agree to adopt kids and then six months down the line realize, gee, it's harder work than I thought is neither here nor there. Presumably there are women, too, who decide to keep their children and then six months down the line realize it's harder work than they thought. I see no reason to presume that men are, on average, less capable of learning how to take care of children than women are. There's a big difference between the scenario where the mom has custody and presumes that "the dad will hang around" and he doesn't, and the scenario where the father agrees to be the sole caretaker for the baby.
I thought of the Dan Savage thing, too--but in that case, the father was homeless, as was the mother, and therefore the presumption is that social services would take the kid away regardless. Also, as LB says, Dan's desire for the kid isn't as important as the question of whether the child's father wants to raise it. IMHO. Even though doubtless Dan and his partner are better parents than the kid's dad would have been. (FWIW, I've met their kid--he's cute.)
The one thing I see as problematic is that it gets back to this child support issue. If the father wants custody, does the mother therefore have to pay child support? If so, then there's a financial incentive for her to lie about not knowing who he is, and, sadly, there is also a financial incentive for an asshole guy to try to "punish" the kid's mother by opting for adoption in the hopes of child support payments. This gets to the same problem that obtains w/r/t forcing men to pay child support, I suspect. On the one hand, you have a kid, you're responsible for it; on the other hand, women *do* have an option for terminating parental responsibilities, via adoption, and men usually don't have access to that. It's clearly a problem that needs to be resolved.
"And BCP is pie in name only -- crustless and without fruit, it is perhaps the most American of cakes."
I really feel the need to consult with Fafnir on this.
It's clearly a problem that needs to be resolved.
But is perhaps a problem with no clear resolution.
the scenario where the father agrees to be the sole caretaker for the baby.
"Sole caretaker" is not co-extensive with "custody", is it? This isn't about arguing that women are natural caregivers or some such, but the reality right now that most kids in single-parents homes are cared for by their mothers. I'm not sure that having one unwilling parent and one parent that statistically is pretty unlikely to wind up as sole caretaker is going to lead to a healthy, happy child.
A lot of my qualms go away if the law works like this: If the guy contests the adoption, he is the sole custodian of the child, and the woman who wanted to give up the baby just has to pay child support (and he takes the risk that she's a deadbeat mom, etc.). But I don't think that's what's meant by 'custody'.
Given that a child is a crimp on a young person's lifestyle, I can't see a guy going out of his way to have sole custody and throwing his life out of whack (esp. since in our current culture guys aren't usually the ones expected to do this) to get child support.
w-lfs-n Discretionizing Service springs into action!
Thanks, Ben. I'll go get the hairshirt.
What indiscretion? The linky redacted person has comments bearing her name all over this site.
And now her name looks like a censored "Bill Wang".
Also, my absolute favorite mystic connection is that between Fig Newtons and Choco Leibniz, and I want to have Bill Wang's babies for mentioning it. I can't believe I missed that thread the first time around.
Dude, SB, you're not supposed to do that.
Whoops! Link didn't work. "don't go using her real name here in Google-findable form, ok?".
But without the link in 55 who's to say who was being referred to? No connection was drawn.
Not that it's a big deal, anyway.
44 - Well, that's what I am presuming: that the options are "hey, this chick is having your kid. she plans on putting it up for adoption. Do you want first dibs, or will you sign these papers?"
Normally I'd give you stink-eye for diddling my comment without leaving editor's brackets as a token of goodwill, but I actually had originally meant to write "Bill Wang's babies". So.
I think he has 30 days after diddling your comment to put his name on a registry to claim ownership.
To clarify, "her" in 54 is Bill Wang's genitive.
Oh, sure. Like she's actually shown you her genitives.
In Italian the word "torta" means both cake and pie. For some reason I find this incredibly frustrating. Might be related to the fact that I am unimpressed by Italian cakes/pies. Although pear & chocolate cake/pie can be excellent.
A lot of my qualms go away if the law works like this: If the guy contests the adoption, he is the sole custodian of the child, and the woman who wanted to give up the baby just has to pay child support (and he takes the risk that she's a deadbeat mom, etc.). But I don't think that's what's meant by 'custody'.
That was precisely what I was thinking would be just. A regime in which the father could veto the adoption and force the mother to care for the child would be awful; a regime in which he could claim custody and care for the child himself (and I really can't see any reason that he shouldn't be entitled to child support) seems only just.
37: I should apologize for the callous tone in which I dismissed the interests of the adoptive parents -- I meant merely to say that the interests of the child should be paramount, and the presumption that a child is best off when a biological parent willing and able to care for it shouldn't be disturbed just because the parent in question is a father rather than a mother. I still don't think this would change the current adoption regime all that much: remember, it wouldn't be all adoptions that were contestable for a year, it would be only adoptions where the father hadn't been contacted and given the opportunity to contest beforehand, which would be most of them. This would only be a difficulty in the case of genuinely unknown or unlocatable fathers, which have to be a fairly small percentage of cases.
Yes -- this is what I'm envisioning.
The last sentence above is an editing error -- I meant to take it out.
Somewhat related, this article in today's NYT on the worsening prospects for black men has an interesting observation about how child support obligations are reducing the incentive for men to work, contributing to the cycle of crime and poverty:
The second special factor is related to an otherwise successful policy: the stricter enforcement of child support. Improved collection of money from absent fathers has been a pillar of welfare overhaul. But the system can leave young men feeling overwhelmed with debt and deter them from seeking legal work, since a large share of any earnings could be seized.
About half of all black men in their late 20's and early 30's who did not go to college are noncustodial fathers, according to Mr. Holzer. From the fathers' viewpoint, support obligations "amount to a tax on earnings," he said.
Some fathers give up, while others find casual work. "The work is sporadic, not the kind that leads to advancement or provides unemployment insurance," Mr. Holzer said. "It's nothing like having a real job."
Yeah, I honestly think that the whole child support thing is bullshit, frankly.
Not to flagellate the expiring equine, but how much of a problem are these few guys wanting sole custody? Presumably the man wanting to take on full custody of the child isn't unaware of the child's existence. (I can't imagine that if I found out ten months after a one-night stand, mutatis mutandis, than I had impregnated someone whom I never had contact with afterwards, that I'd jump at taking on full custody.) If we're only talking 1% of all adoption cases, is that worth jeopardizing lots of American adoptions with longer mandatory searches?
Well, but look at the linked story. As it stands a father who knows about and does not consent to an adoption before it's final can still have lost his chance to keep custody of his kid. Whatever the best solution is for situations where the mother doesn't know or won't tell the identity of the father, surely we can agree that the situations reported in the Times are wrong.
Damn. I should have chosen "Bill Wang" as my supersecret blog name.
No, no. That's 'Hugh Wang'. Much better.
Whenever I want around here to refer to Alameida qua actual identity, I'm going to use "Bill Wang".
I used to enjoy writing with my firm's Wang.
Gary, that reminds me of a funny Stephen King preface where he's talking about writing some novel on a big Wang. When I was 12 that cracked me up.
I fail to see the humor in the name "Bill Wang."
I, Hume, do see the failure in it!
Necessary connexxxxxion.
It was a very powerful Wang. Most Wangs were powerful in their day, actually. But those who were expert with their Wangs could do things with them that others could not. Our Wangs brought us great pleasure, and were fine tools.
Really, one could just go on with these true observations.
But they'd be more fun written with your Wang. If only everyone could have afforded their own Wang at home.
Some say that all the power of those big Wangs fits into a tiny laptop, but I miss the old days. Back then, you could really pound on your Wang and still have confidence that it would be there when you need it.
