Fatherhood rights being stripped away
Virginia's new putative father registry violates fathers' rights to raise their own children
Date published: 8/16/2007
Washington--Virginia's controversial new Putative Father Registry law asks any man who has had heterosexual non-marital sex in Virginia to register with the state. Supporters say the law will help connect fathers with their children before the children are put up for adoption. Critics see it as another example of the erosion of citizens' privacy.
Both sides miss the real point of the registry--to remove a father's right to prevent his child's mother from giving their child up for adoption without his consent.
Incredibly, under the new law, putative fathers who fail to register waive their right to be notified that their parental rights are being terminated. They also forfeit the right to be notified of the adoption proceedings, and to consent to the adoption.
Rather than being required to make a legitimate effort to find and notify the father, the state can now simply check the registry and, if the man has not registered, give his child away.
Such violations of fathers' rights are common. For example, in the widely reported Huddleston adoption case, Mark Huddleston's baby boy was adopted out when he was 3 days old, but Huddleston didn't know the baby existed until two months after his birth. As a New Mexico court later found, the private adoption agency did not notify Huddleston of the pending adoption, thus denying him the chance to raise his son.
In an adoption case, the burden of identifying the father should be on the mother. It is the mother, not the father, who is certain to be aware of the child's birth, and it is the mother who knows (or should know) the baby's parentage.
However, when states have tried to craft measures requiring a mother who seeks to put her baby up for adoption to find and notify the baby's father, there has been opposition from the National Organization for Women and other women's groups.
Defenders of the registry justify disregarding fathers with numerous unfair assumptions about men and their intentions. For example, Kerry Dougherty, a prominent Virginia newspaper columnist, asserts:
Date published: 8/16/2007
Most recent reader comments:
Fatherhood rights being stripped away
(posted by
SamuelBeckett
, Sep. 25, 2007 2:41 pm)
This registry is just another example of what happens when every family or gender issue is defined and resolved solely as a "women's issue." Any good lawyer will tell you that the person who defines the issue wins the argument. When the interests of fathers and children are always secondary to the latest feminist social engineering goals, we should not be surprised at results like this.
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