How Much Energy Should Go into Fathers' Rights?

The Birch Blog deals with the issue of fathers’ rights in adoption proceedings: http://www.thenewamerican.com/birchblog/index.php?entry=entry060403-152201 The writer comes at this from a different perspective than I do and is more interested in questioning the motives of the father’s attorneys in a particular case. The father’s attorney decries the fathers’ registries that a number of states have set up to deal with the paternal rights of unwed fathers. I can see the point that it seems unfair to require fathers to register in systems which are not well publicized and to cut off their rights for all time for failure to comply; however, such registries appear to me to be a substantial improvement over past practice. There have been a number of sad cases where unwed fathers have come forward years after a child has been adopted and have disrupted the adoptive family. Moreover, in former days unwed fathers had little chance to assert their rights at all, and registries are one way to do this.

Back in the days when I prosecuted cases for termination of parental rights, the identity of the father was often unknown and, if known, the father often could not be found. We ended up publishing legal notices for John Does or the putative fathers’ names, and this can hardly be said to be any fairer than a registry system. Who reads these notices, for crying out loud? Frankly, paternal rights were nothing more than a big honking pain in the ass in most cases. If the fathers had been around and interested in their children at all, the kids wouldn’t be in foster homes in the first place, and we wouldn’t have been going through termination trials. The idea that the contribution of a sperm cell was enough to confer rights that trumped the interests of these children seemed preposterous, especially where the father apparently didn’t care enough to find out that he had a child, or if he knew, to get involved in the child’s life.

We would have loved for unwed fathers to come forward and rescue their children, but they rarely did. The women who lost their children to the state tended to be of questionable character or drug addled beyond reason, and their paramours, as we tactfully called them, were usually no better. I recall one woman whose five children each appeared to have different fathers, or so she claimed, and she was unable to identify any of the dads. The judge asked her in open court how that could be, to which she replied, “Your honor, did you ever have too much to drink at a party and wake up pregnant?” In other cases, the mother might give a list of possible fathers, all of whom would receive summons and complaints. I got a lot of distraught phone calls from men whose wives had opened the mail and learned that their husbands had been named as fathers of children by some other woman.

To be fair, the Birch Blog deals with a woman who voluntarily gave up her child for adoption, not someone who had her children forcibly taken by the state. In such cases, unwed fathers may be differently situated and more deserving of a more solicitous approach to their rights. Also, the father in that case had come forward to assert paternity. It is not unreasonable to require unwed fathers to assert their rights in a timely manner. I submit that the scenario described in the Birch Blog, a woman is pregnant and puts the child up for adoption without notifying the father even though he is clearly interested in the child, is a rare case. In most cases, in my opinion, men who impregnate women and lose track of them may be presumed, in the absence of an overt claim of some kind to the contrary, to have no interest in their paternal rights. Contributing a sperm, without more, is not enough to warrant a costly state apparatus to protect paternal rights and interference with established adoptive placements. A few well-meaning men will get hosed, but that is a small price to pay for certainty in adoptions.

I have argued before that it is an imposition on the rest of us to have to maintain elaborate systems to adjudicate parental rights. The least costly way to allocate the burdens and benefits of parenting is to require parents to enter into contracts to deal with this. In the absence of such a contract, it seems fair, to all of us, to bestow the benefits and impose the burdens on the mother of the child. Those fathers who fail to take affirmative steps to arrange for paternal rights would have only themselves to blame.

Promoting finality in adoptions is one way to encourage adoption over abortion, if one cares about such things. Other ways are to permit a free market in adoption brokerage and other services and compensation for birth mothers. The Birch Blog seems to suggest that the father’s attorney in the case described is looking to attack the adoption industry in order to promote abortion. This seems farfetched to me since advocates for choice do not as a rule favor abortion over childbearing; rather, they oppose state interference in reproductive decision-making. I tend to think that the advocacy for the father’s rights is sincere and unrelated to abortion.