Adoptive parent shares thoughts on having returned a girl to her mother

NEW COMMENTS FROM JAY, BELOW ON 7/23/13

Received tonight as a comment at the last Baby Veronica post, but it is too worthwhile to leave as a comment alone:

A tree after Storm Sandy; the link not broken to the trunk

Jay Iyer said...Thanks for this comprehensive, sad post. I am writing as an adoptive parent of a boy who was taken from an abusive family and placed in foster care. I also write as a foster parent who helped reunify a little girl with her mother. These experiences helped shift my vision from an adoptive path focused on securing for myself a long-desired child to one of recognizing the importance, to a child, of an upbringing integrated with biological identity. I feel that adoption should occur only when all avenues for placement within a child’s biological family are exhausted. Much as I adore my son, I felt a profound loss on his behalf when no safe “forever” home was found among members of his first family.

Utah judge voids adoption, orders girl returned to her father

Lorraine

Utah keeps calling us back--this time with a SECOND good decision where a father is fighting for the right to raise his own daughter. One of our readers noted that a judge in the notoriously conservative 4th district (think BYU) overturned an illegal adoption and is giving the adoptive family 60 days to return the child to her biological father. The agency, Adoption Center of Choice, broke Utah's own law requiring the consent and relinquishment of the legal father, Terry Achane, since he and the girl's mother were married at the time. In every state, married fathers have the right to raise their own children.

The Provo judge, while noting the birth mother had deceived her husband, the adoption agency and the prospective parents, has given the adoptive couple 60 days to give the child back. According to Brooke Adams of the Salt Lake Tribune:

Adoption in Utah: No place for birth fathers

Lorraine

Sometimes justice for natural fathers in Utah is through the eye of a camel, or so it seems in the narrow ruling the other day that will allow a father to attempt to get his daughter back from the people who have been raising her since she was five days old. In a 3-2 decision, the Utah Supreme Court ruled that Utah's adoption law was "constitutionally defective" in depriving a Florida man, Ramsey Shaud, 26, a "meaningful chance" of developing a relationship with his child.

He's only been trying to have that meaningful relationship since before she was born in January, 2010. Yes, you read that right. She will be three in January.

Father's Names on Birth certificates: More artifice than fact

Oregon Health Authority

 

The baby may look like his dad, have his dad's  eyes and hair, but unless his parents have done their paperwork, his real dad may never be his legal father. As the chart above attests, Oregon laws, like those of other states, create a labyrinth which unmarried men seeking to establish themselves as fathers must navigate at their peril.

When my daughter Rebecca was born in California in 1966, the Vital Statistics Registrar took