What's wrong with stepfather adoption?

Lorraine

Thousands of fathers will not be celebrating Father's Day...either with all their children or expecting a phone call. These men let their children's step-fathers adopt their kids and now live with "what if" so familiar to those who lose their children to adoption. Consider this anecdote of a man we encountered recently: 

Three generations are sitting at the end of a table. A man in his forties, his grandmother, and his father. Son and father are the spitting image of each other--and both look like Grandma. The subject of legal costs came up. The son says that at his company, he paid six dollars a month for a legal insurance policy that would cover simple legal matters, and so he asked if that would cover the cost of "fixing" his birth certificate since his it did not have his father's name on it--but the name of the man who was married briefly to his mother and "adopted" him. "In future generations they will be able to trace the family, but they they'll come to me and take a left turn," he said, matter-of-factly but obviously frustrated.