I disagree with several points in this post, and I thought I would return to the topic (see my comments in the thread some years ago here) and stir the pot a bit since I haven't commented on the subject in a while.
In general, I think there are some matters on which it is difficult for public policy to be neutral. Adoption is one of them. Policy can encourage it or discourage it, and several of the proposals made by the author of the post would discourage it, which I think would be a shame.
Moreover, it does not seem to me, though many will disagree, that the things she advocates are required by absolute justice. Therefore, they are matters of prudence and of seeking the commonweal, in particular seeking those policies which are likely to be best for children conceived out of wedlock who are most often placed for adoption.
If you haven't been reading W4 for very long or happen to have missed this, full disclosure: I am an adoptee, having been adopted as an infant. It was an old-fashioned closed adoption in the mid-60's when the law was somewhat different than, in many states, it is now. In my early thirties I was able to make contact with my biological mother, but only with her consent, obtained by the adoption agency before giving me any contact information. I will return to the issue of contact with birth parents below.
One item suggested by the blogger is this:
Adoption professionals must present, however scant, the known research about the consequences of long-term grief, the true stats of adoptee outcomes, secondary infertility rates, and the legal truth about open adoption agreements. Adoption counseling should be from a true unbiased source and care must be made to ensure that mothers considering adoption do have real options insofar that they have parallel parenting plans and realistic recourses available. I can't imagine this is "anti-adoption" but instead see it as asking that mothers who "choose" adoption are really doing so freely and knowingly. I am asking for the word "informed" to be a true action rather than a pretty descriptive version of lip service.
The problem with this way of wording matters is that it treats placing a child for adoption like a medical procedure. "Informed consent" and all that. But in fact, the considerations involved in deciding to place a child for adoption are much vaster than those in a medical procedure and, crucially, they involve the good of another person, not just the birth mother. This blogger's suggestion is not, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, neutral. It actually would amount in practice to an attempt to discourage adoption by emphasizing the emotional pain of placing one's child for adoption. In no way do I deny such emotional pain. (Though I do find it a little odd that she is urging that research on this subject be made known to a birth mother considering adoption even though it is, by her own admission, scant!) I know that my own birth mother wondered all my life whether I was okay until I made contact with her. In fact, it's for that very reason that many women choose abortion rather than adoption. They believe that abortion will bring more closure.
But even though the grief and pain of separation for a mother placing her newborn for adoption is very real, how is it remotely possible to write out in some "disclosure" statement the possible or even plausible emotional consequences both for the mother and for the child of keeping the child and raising him without a father, as will almost certainly be the case if there is no adoption? Or only maybe finding a stepfather somewhere down the line? Not that all stepfathers are such great shakes, either! Shall we inundate the poor woman in a crisis pregnancy with studies on the ill effects of fatherlessness, both material and spiritual, on a child? What about the difficulties for herself of raising a child alone? That sounds rather cruel, and unfortunately almost any information one would give along those lines, even though perfectly accurate as far as it goes, could well have the horrible consequence of motivating a woman to abort her child. Yet if we are being told that we have to give a woman some sort of clinical "full information" about the psychological risks of giving up a baby for adoption, accuracy alone would seem to demand telling her the other side of the story. Common sense, contrary to both of these, would dictate that this incredibly complex and emotionally charged decision--whether to keep and raise one's baby or place him for adoption--isn't even remotely a good place to apply the mechanical "informed consent" model which we use for, say, surgery. You aren't going to be able to fit the relevant considerations onto two single-spaced sides of a piece of paper, with a place for the "I have read this" signature at the bottom.
And in the absence of that, requiring "disclosure" of the possible psychological risks to the mother of giving up a baby for adoption is, whether this author realizes it or not, simply going to discourage adoption by means of public policy. Which will mean that more babies will be raised by single mothers, which in my opinion is not a good thing.
The blogger also suggests that adoption agencies should not work with crisis pregnancy centers. She says that it is outright "wrong" (her word) for adoption agencies to use "crisis pregnancy center connections to recruit mothers to consider adoption for their babies." Why in the name of goodness is that wrong? With whom else should they work? As far as I can tell, her idea is that this is getting at women when they are vulnerable. No kidding. That's why they call it a crisis pregnancy! The mother in such a situation is going to be vulnerable for, I dunno, a few years now, at least. If you wait until she isn't vulnerable to propose that it might be best for the baby if she were to place him for adoption, it will be too late. The baby will have already bonded to her and she will be raising him de facto. If adoption is to be suggested, it needs to be suggested early, and there is no way around the fact that this will be during a time while the mother is vulnerable. There is nothing unfair about that, unless you think of the adoption proposal as per se a suspect one or unless you have an unrealistic idea that important decisions should never be made by people in an emotionally fragile state. But life isn't some kind of libertarian fantasy. Very often in the real world important decisions have to be made by people in an emotionally fragile state. Again, this idea of women's being insufficiently informed of the possible badness of adoption, of women as being exploited by the adoption proposal, conveys the idea that adoption is probably a bad idea, bad for women, and that both public and private policy should discourage it rather than encouraging it. The author might not admit that. In fact, she seems to think there is some kind of neutral ground on this. But placing a firewall, even if voluntary (because to do otherwise is deemed unethical), between adoption agencies and crisis pregnancy centers is far from staking out neutral ground. It is cutting off women in crisis pregnancies from ready access to people who, if the agencies are well-screened, can be trusted to find good and loving parents for their child.
If anything, it's my opinion that crisis pregnancy centers don't seem to push adoption enough. They seem to be all about giving the women baby clothes and such, implying a default assumption that the baby will not be placed for adoption, that the single mother will keep her baby. So if there was ever a situation where crisis pregnancy centers were hard-selling adoption through connections to adoption agencies, I see no trace of that now in what I know of crisis pregnancy centers. Frankly, we could maybe use a little more of that, for the sake of all the children who will be better off with two parents and a stable home.
The author also proposes this:
I believe that as a country we must restore to adult adoptees the access to their original birth certificates. Currently adult adoptees are the only classification of US citizens that are denied the right to access their original birth certificates based on the fact they were adopted. This is a classic case of discrimination. This issue touches on the right to know one’s identity, the normal desire to know the story of one's birth if desired, access to genetic history and medical information, genealogy, and sometimes even the ability to get a passport, a driver's license, to vote or to have health insurance.
I cannot for the life of me imagine what in the world she is talking about concerning the ability to vote or get a driver's license. What? What? I was adopted in one of those evil, old-fashioned adoptions with the sealed birth certificate, and let me pass on a little tip: There's a birth certificate out there that isn't sealed. It has your adoptive parents' name on it. That's the one you get if you apply to your birth county for your birth certificate. As far as I know, that's how it has always worked everywhere in the U.S. Foreign adoptions might present unique problems, and I can't speak to them, but here she is explicitly talking about U.S. closed adoptions with sealed original birth certificates, and unless some states are doing something really bizarre that I've never heard of, she's just flat wrong. This has nothing whatsoever to do with being able to get a driver's license or other ID.
Now, about that "story of one's birth" and "identity" and such. Perhaps it sounds crass to point it out, but whether one gets that or not depends in part on whether one's biological mother and/or father wants to tell you the story. Speaking as a person who was curious and did seek out the story, I want to say here and now that I did not have some kind of right to force my birth mother to chit-chat with me and tell me her whole story.
Moreover, as a matter of prudence, forcing biological mothers to have their identity revealed to their birth children may very well discourage adoptions in some cases, which could result in more abortions. (More below about the abortion connection.) Unless you can come up with an argument that it is absolutely required by the fundamental moral law that biological children be able to hunt down their biological parents without their consent, I think that prudential side of things must be weighed. The biological mother goes through the psychological pain of giving up her child. One small thing she gets in return, in a closed adoption, is that the child cannot, unannounced and without her consent, return to her life, possibly even revealing her past to others to whom she has not explained it (e.g., later children she might have after getting married). I am unable to find it now, but my recollection is that there is evidence that, in the UK, adoptions have dropped off in part because of the opening of past birth records. That seems quite a probable consequence, and it is one we must consider. Again, this is not a neutral matter. Public policy is either going to favor or discourage adoption, and requiring birth certificates to be open, whether the mother wants it or not, will discourage adoption.
In passing (because this isn't related to policy), I want to address something else the blogger (whose name is Claudia) says. She claims that it is hurtful to an adopted child if he later makes contact with his biological mother and she says that she "has no regrets" regarding her decision.
"Please, Claud, promise us, if you ever do search for Max, if he finds you, please do not say that you have no regrets. For us, the adopted, that means that you did not miss him in your life and that will hurt his feelings."
Please, people, don't speak for "us, the adopted." Speak for yourselves. I understand that this is a sensitive issue, and I cannot imagine being a birth mother and figuring out what to say to an adult child you placed for adoption who makes contact with you later. I can definitely say that my own birth mother has handled our (entirely electronic) contact extremely well, with kindness, warmth, and tact. But to me, this statement about what is hurtful sounds exaggerated and self-centered. We shouldn't be so bound up in our own feelings that we're looking to get our feelings hurt, and there is nothing intrinsically hurtful about a birth mother's statement that she does not regret placing her child for adoption. Is she obligated to regret it? Where does such an obligation come from? Such a wide-ranging statement implies that the birth mother has an obligation to feel guilty or to think that she should not have placed her child for adoption. For goodness' sake, people! The poor woman will probably be spontaneously inclined to feel guilty anyway. Don't deliberately guilt trip her! It would make more sense, unless you actually encounter evidence that makes this attitude untenable, to thank her for loving you enough to give you up.
Now I'm going to move on to what is, knowing our readership, likely to be the most controversial part of this post. In passing, the author says,
I want fathers’ rights upheld.
In an adoption context, this sentence almost certainly refers to the idea that unmarried fathers should have equal rights to those of unmarried mothers when it comes to releasing a child for adoption. I realize that a phrase like "fathers' rights" is going to push positive buttons for some of our readers, but let me try to forestall some of that by saying this: This is not about divorce. I repeat, this is not about divorce. This is not about child custody in cases of divorce. (Do I need to repeat that, too?) I resolutely refuse to have the thread on this post devolve into a discussion of child custody in divorce cases.
Traditionally (and I do think that matters) there was a great gulf fixed between the prima facie custody rights of a man married to a woman when she gave birth and a man not married to her, even if in the latter case paternity was acknowledged by both parties. Until the 1970's, biological fathers not married to a baby's mother could not block adoption, period. Obviously, married fathers could. It was feminism and the sexual revolution, and the effects of these upon law, that made changes to this. The whole idea was that men and women should be treated identically in law and that it was "unfair" that a birth mother had any more say-so over whether her baby was placed for adoption than a birth father. This all had to be made identical in the name of gender sameness.
Well, I don't buy gender sameness, and life isn't fair. It isn't "fair," for example, that the woman has to bear the child through the pregnancy and go through childbirth. Let's not forget that this same attitude that the effects of unexpected children have to be made the same for men and women was also what gave us the abortion holocaust. It isn't "fair" that an unmarried woman, if she doesn't end up placing her baby for adoption, is going to be prima facie responsible for the child's daily care. And it also isn't "fair" that a biological father, unmarried to the child's mother, should be unable to disallow the child's placement for adoption. But none of this is about what is "fair" in that reality-challenged, abstract, gender-equality sense. Nor should it be. There are a great many ways in which the effects of an unintended pregnancy fall harder on a woman than on a man. If the mother can place the baby for adoption and the unmarried father can't stop it, that is just one way in which the effects of the child's existence and the laws surrounding it might be considered "worse" for the man than for the woman.
Now, once again, full disclosure: I know who my biological father was, though I do not propose to tell the story here. I have never met him, but it was possible to do some research, partly through corresponding with his friends and family after he was dead. (My information did not by any means all come from my biological mother.) He was an extremely bad person, and I thank God every time the matter comes to mind that I never had any contact with him as a child and that he had no power to block my adoption, which he would undeniably have done had he had the legal power. He argued for a long time with my birth mother on the subject.
As I said at the outset, these are not matters that are instantaneously and absolutely given by the natural light. It is not simply a given that it is unjust for an unmarried father to be unable to block an adoption while the birth mother, unless her rights are formally terminated, can refuse adoption. The research I have done indicates that now, in many states, a birth father can block an adoption if he simply registers his putative paternity. A subsequent custody battle will tend to focus on whether the biological father wants and is capable of having a part in the child's life. This is an extremely low bar.
Even the threat of such a challenge would be enough to discourage many women, lacking the resources to fight such a legal battle and lacking knowledge of the law or access to legal aid, from placing their children for adoption. And couples desiring to adopt are understandably worried about an adoption that is legally shaky, open to challenge by a birth father after they have bonded with the child and are happily raising him. Giving the birth father equal rights over the adoption to the rights of the birth mother places another block in the way of adoption for illegitimate children and, de facto, discourages adoption. It is by no means neutral.
We pro-lifers should also solemnly consider the following: Such a threat as "I won't let you place this baby for adoption" is an extremely powerful weapon in the hands of an abortion-minded boyfriend. Sure, if the mother is strongly pro-life and would never even consider abortion, it won't have that effect. But many are not. Nor is a crisis pregnancy the easiest time to learn to think rationally about such matters. If her boyfriend tells her that he has a say-so over the adoption question and won't let her do it, she may well feel trapped: Either she raises this baby herself or else puts it into the never-ending limbo of the foster-care system by convincing the relevant authorities that she is unable to care for it. Is it rational to say, "I'd rather kill this baby than put it into the limbo of foster care"? Of course not. Is it exactly the kind of thing that many women would say? Undeniably. It is extremely psychologically plausible that a woman in such a situation, with abortion allegedly "safe and legal," would abort the child. This is a grave prudential matter, and conservative pro-lifers should think long and hard before they endorse a "fathers' rights" position that has such a strong potential for such an evil consequence for the innocent. I have little doubt at all that the shift since the 70's in the direction of unmarried fathers' rights over adoption has resulted in the deaths of more than a few unborn babies. In fact, even if abortion were illegal, it is not at all implausible that, "If you have this baby, you will have to raise it, because I won't let you place it for adoption" would be just the kind of thing that would motivate a woman to find some way to obtain an illegal abortion, even if she had to cross borders to do so.
Ironically, the sentence right before "I want fathers' rights upheld" in the blog post I'm critiquing is "I want to see children's needs come first." Really? If we're talking about fathers' rights in an adoption context, those two may well not be compatible. Those of us who think a child is going to be best off in many cases with a married father and mother are especially likely to see a tension between those two priorities.
One more point: We pro-lifers have often argued, rightly, that a father should be able to prevent a woman from aborting his child. Is there an inconsistency between my supporting paternal consent for abortion, even when the mother is unmarried, and my opposing paternal consent for adoption? There is not, unless my argument for paternal consent is that the father ought to have exactly the same rights as the mother regarding what happens to the child, even if they are not married. (By the way, as far as I know no pro-life law has ever actually proposed paternal consent for unmarried fathers. My recollection is that that aspect of the Pennsylvania law in Casey applied only to married fathers, but I don't have time to look that up right now.) Let me be quite frank: Nobody should be able to give consent for an abortion--neither the father nor the mother nor the grandparents. Abortion is the murder of a child. Any consent law, be it paternal consent or parental consent, is ipso facto, for the devoted pro-lifer, merely another attempt to prevent and discourage abortions. Such proposals should not be based on abstract principles regarding the equality and rights of the adults involved. If we believed that this was about "fathers' rights," we would seem to be saying that a father should have the right of life or death over his innocent child. But that cuts both ways: In ancient Rome, a father could demand that his newborn child be exposed on a hillside if unwanted. I am not required to argue for a law that requires paternal consent for an abortion by arguing that an unmarried father has prima facie custody of the child, or should have, equal to the mother's.
In passing, I note that no one seems to think that parental consent laws mean that the unborn child's grandparents (the parents in "parental consent" for minors' abortions) automatically have custody, either. So this isn't, even legally, about giving prima facie custody to someone in the name of equality or rights. This is about trying to protect children from abortion and discourage abortion. In fact, my willingness to admit that point strengthens my case: "Fathers' rights" in adoption is de facto a legal approach that discourages adoption just as paternal consent for abortion is a legal tool to try to discourage abortion. What one thinks about this will depend upon what one thinks about public policy that discourages adoption, but there is no point in pretending otherwise.
I am by no means saying that adoption is always, everywhere, and for every child the best option. That's why somebody has to have prima facie custody and make that decision. Another somewhat appalling fact is that, the more the government messes with adoption agencies and forces them to place children with, e.g., homosexual "couples," the more difficult it will become for a loving birth mother to feel confident that she is doing the best thing for her child by merely placing him for adoption with an agency. The agency may be required to choose parents "without discrimination" out of a pool that includes those she would (rightly) regard as unfit. At that point a responsible birth mother might have to be heavily involved in the selection of adoptive parents herself, as indeed already is sometimes done. Adoption itself can be distorted by other social and policy factors in such a way that it becomes a bad choice, depending on how adoptive parents are selected. Nonetheless, as of now it opens up the possibility of a child's being adopted by a married father and mother who will care for and love the child and raise him in a more normal and normative context than single-mother rearing. This is a consideration that we should never lose sight of, and given this consideration, I maintain that public policy should favor adoption rather than discouraging it.
Comments (25)
Our son put off adopting his wife's handicapped daughter for many years because the biological father -- who never wanted anything to do with mother or baby -- threatened to make it a court battle, and they had too little income to risk it. They did finally say "enough is enough" and it turned out that he gave it up with a single letter from their lawyer pointing out his negligible standing. It was frustrating for them, though, because our son was her only *real* father and she couldn't even have his name. We are grateful that her gravestone has the name of the man who loved and protected her for the last ten years of her life -- but it shouldn't have taken so long to get that legal protection.
Posted by Beth Impson | November 24, 2013 6:25 PM
Thank you, Beth, that's an excellent illustration of the fact that this does have real-world consequences.
I note, too, that this shows that it is false to say, "If the biological father doesn't want and love the child, he won't make that threat." That's just not true at all.
Posted by Lydia | November 24, 2013 6:44 PM
Yes -- it was so frustrating, and we were all worried about getting embarked on what could have been a terribly expensive (as in, destroying their financial stability) battle. He may have given up immediately earlier, but they didn't feel they could take that risk then. When she was becoming more ill, they knew they needed to try so that there would be no question of who had legal rights concerning treatment and so on.
Posted by Beth Impson | November 24, 2013 6:52 PM
Right, biological fathers who are not married to the mother are, often, self-centered, manipulative, and even vindictive. (that can go both ways, I have seen vindictive women as well). Especially good reasons for the mother not to marry him, really.
What is really nutty is our current drive to pretend that biology somehow trumps everything else, so that the mere fact of being the biological father somehow gives the man a wide-ranging set of rights over the child. What about the plain, simple fact that siring a child (outside of marriage) is, ipso facto, shorn of any of the reasons for those rights?
True fatherhood, the root, basic, REAL fatherhood in its origin, is an act of self-giving love for the good of the child, not mainly an act of sensual pleasure. God's fatherhood, of which ours is a distant metaphor, has NOTHING to do with material transmission. What our form of fatherhood properly shares with God's is mainly in the will, the deliberate choice to love a child and therefore to bring him into existence. Because man is not God, he cannot do this alone, he needs help - both the "help-meet" who is his spouse, so that the act of love of spouse is itself an act of love of the child engendered, and the help of God whose creative love breathes new life into the act of spousal love. Bringing a child into existence out of lust without choosing to love that child and the mother (permanently, faithfully, definitively) is, in effect, denying true fatherhood and embracing animal sensuality. Let us be clear, this is the absolutely LEAST particle of fatherhood that can still be called with the name.
Of course the laws, and all of society, should promote adoptions and de-incentivize abortion as well as single-motherhood. Whatever the "statistics" (using the term with scare quotes advisedly as being almost certain to be devoid of real information), there cannot possibly be good statistics that tell us adopting out does more harm to the child than aborting him or her. And statistics that show poor outcomes for adoption given the fact that we undermine adopting with various social degeneracies cannot begin to tell us what adoptions would look like in a healthy society, for comparison. And, as Lydia says, we would have to compare them to single-motherhood outcomes, and permanent foster-family outcomes, which have perfectly dreadful stats. Factor in, too, the fact that orphanages (back when we had such things) ALWAYS had the orphans hoping to be adopted - and the same for foster kids - that suggests something about where the better option is, doesn't it?
What block-headed nonsense. If you want access to genetic history for ACTUAL purposes (instead of pie-in-the-sky stuff), get the birth mother to submit to a DNA screening and provide a report on specific markers that are needed, scrubbed of other information. If you need medical information, same thing: get a court order for a list of medical questionaire by the mother (father if he can be found), and scrubbed of other information. A child doesn't have a RIGHT to the other stuff if the parent doesn't want to give it - heck, if a married mother and father choose to move away from extended family and refuse to talk about their past, their child can't find out about the "story of one's birth" anyway. How can an adopted child have rights to that story that a child in a normal home doesn't have? It's not a legal right, it's a benefit bestowed by parents when they choose to.
What the author is seeing is that normally a child would have access to this stuff. True. But there have always been exceptions. Orphans, for example, often had no way to satisfy their desire to know their roots. Adoptions should be considered something along the lines of a state-sanctioned legal orphaning of a child. Not surprisingly, such an event will leave the child without some of what a child in a normal family has. That's the nature of the problem, not some "discrimination". The MOST OBVIOUS loss is that in a normal family, the mother and father are married and choose to conceive, bear, and raise the child out of unstinting love, and an adoptee often doesn't have access to that reality. Nothing the state does can re-arrange reality so that the typical adoptee be loved from the very moment of his conception by his married parents.
Posted by Tony | November 24, 2013 7:38 PM
That's an extremely important point, Tony, and it's worth emphasizing. It took me a while to realize, as an adult, that the one, major thing that bothered me about being adopted was knowing that I was the result of an unwanted, crisis pregnancy. When parents are married, it's always possible that the discovery of the pregnancy caused the parents panic or was a crisis in some way, but the child need never know this. When you are adopted from an unwed pregnancy, it's a given in the situation: "My mother was probably horrified when she discovered she was pregnant with me. Well, isn't that sweet?" Obviously, I can't speak for others and don't know how widespread my own previous feelings are, but that was fundamental. It was never that I thought, "My mother must not have wanted or loved me, or she would never have given me up." To the contrary, my mom and dad (which is to say, adopted parents) did an excellent job of teaching me to regard my bio mother's decision with respect as one made out of love. But the crisis nature of one's origins as an illegitimate child is not something one can get around in that fashion.
In fact, this is one reason why I think children conceived in rape pretty much _always_ should be placed for adoption, and placed in such a way that they need never hear the story. That, of all things, would be a very hard story to live with about one's origin.
Posted by Lydia | November 24, 2013 8:00 PM
Hmmmm, also a powerful weapon: A father who wants to put a baby up for adoption and a mother who says "No," because she thinks it would be "too painful", then aborts the baby. Want to talk about fair? In this case, the father has absolutely NO say in the issue. If the Mother wants an abortion, an abortion it will be - unless I'm misunderstanding the law, in which case I will admit I'm wrong immediately.
This seems suspiciously close to me to eliminating, or at least greatly weakening, the rights of fathers in deciding what is best for their own children. I feel as if we might be placing far too much faith in the mother's judgment.
But once again, as is often the case with me because of the holes in my knowledge, this is more a gut feeling than anything I can really articulate well through legal argument. It does raise suspicion, though.
Posted by MarcAnthony | November 24, 2013 11:39 PM
...Keep in mind, too, that I don't have NO experience on the issue. I know a girl very well who told me that her father (who she lived with for a large portion of her life and who is, to put it in not so gentle terms, a swine) told her mother that if she got pregnant again after her he would make her abort the baby. I don't remember for sure so take this part with a grain of salt, but I think she may have carried the (original) girl to term against his wishes (like I said though, the guy comes off badly enough whether this section is true or not). And I still hesitate in regards to your comments about men with adoption rights.
If I ever do get married, I'd love to adopt (though I don't think my parents would be too thrilled with having non-genetic grandchildren!).
Posted by MarcAnthony | November 24, 2013 11:46 PM
Marc Anthony, let me address your first point regarding abortion by calling attention to what I said on that very point in the main post: I _do_ support giving men veto power over abortion, but that's because abortion is murdering the child. It is _not_ because it is "unfair" for the woman and not the man to have decision-making power about the abortion. I just want fewer babies aborted. In fact, I'm not quite sure why you brought that up, since I did address it in the main post. I find that a little puzzling. *Of course* allowing women unilaterally to abort their children is evil, but that's because abortion *is* evil. It's evil no matter who is pushing it. It will certainly cause enormous pain to a man, even if he didn't marry the woman, if he doesn't want their baby aborted. Such men have my deep sympathy, even though they did wrong to conceive the child out of wedlock. As a pro-lifer, of course I don't endorse an unmarried woman's decision in that case, and of course I feel the terrible pain of the man unable to protect his child. But that's because it would be protecting his child from murder, from a grave evil. Adoption is not murder, and it is not a grave evil. It's something public policy should _encourage_, not _discourage_.
As for your second paragraph, you say:
A major point of my response to this in the main post is that there was traditionally, and in my opinion ought to be again, a great gulf between the rights of married fathers and the rights of unmarried fathers. "This," that is to say, the public policy position that an unmarried father cannot block an adoption when the couple is not married, obviously *does not* eliminate or greatly weaken the rights of *married* fathers, because what it amounts to is a statement in public policy that married fathers are vastly different from unmarried fathers in terms of their relation to and rights over their children. So, no, it doesn't either eliminate or greatly weaken the rights of *married* fathers in deciding what is best for their children.
It does, and unabashedly, amount to a statement that unmarried fathers have *no* prima facie custody over their children, aka "the right to decide what is best for them." They never used to, and I don't see why they should. They should marry the woman before the child is conceived. And if they did wrong and didn't do that, they should marry her before the child is born. Oh, by the way, my own proposal would be to return to the older idea that the father could obtain custody rights by being married to the mother at the time of birth even if they were not married at the time of conception. That worked pretty well for centuries and gave a "haven" to many children who would otherwise have been illegitimate. Sometimes, in fact, even someone who was not the child's biological father would out of love and magnanimity marry the mother shortly after the child's conception and put himself forward in law as the child's father. Now that has all been ruined by the courts. One crucial court decision allowed a biological father to interfere in a married family and demand visitation rights even though, under ancient common law, the married father would have been the child's sole legal father. That should all be reversed.
As for "putting too much faith in the mother's judgement," I'm not sure exactly what you would count as addressing that. Certainly, biological mothers can do stupid and even evil things. In my opinion, placing the child for adoption is one of the *least* stupid things she can do. In fact, if she is feckless and makes poor decisions, her agreeing to let someone else raise her child is a pretty good idea! She admits that she's not able to do it well and lets someone else's "judgement" take over. Might she choose bad parents for her child? Yes, she might. Might she keep her child and be unable to do a good job mothering it? Yes, she certainly might.
The only alternative which would be "fairer" would be to dump _all_ illegitimate children into the foster-care system, to forcibly take them _all_ from their mothers. Would that be a better idea as a matter of public policy? If you know anything about the state and the foster care system, I hope you will agree that it would not. In this far-less-than-ideal situation, it's usually going to be at least a little better for the child if _someone_ has prima facie custody when he is born who has a natural connection to him which will, Lord willing and nature urging, create affection and a desire to do what is best for him. I simply object to placing _two_ unmarried people in this position who will have the power to block the decision to place the child for adoption. I'm certainly not going to endorse taking all illegitimate children away from their mothers in the name of fairness to fathers! Not that you were suggesting that, I understand. But my point is to explain how this "unfair" situation arose. It didn't arise from a rosy-tinted idea that all unmarried birth mothers are great, wise, wonderful decision-makers. But I would say that's just another argument for adoption.
Posted by Lydia | November 25, 2013 9:44 AM
It's one thing to disallow the men from blocking the adoption, but it's quite another to make it legal to deny or deceive the biological father from being able to take custody of the child. There's a case from Virginia and Utah called "Baby Emma" which is typical of certain groups' views of biological fathers who are not married. The father actually filed a court order to take custody of the child in Virginia, but the mother and her agency fled to Utah to give the child away anyway. Right now I believe they're headed for a furious battle in the Supreme Court because the Virginia case asserts it as kidnapping, not adoption.
While this is not typical at all of most states, Utah apparently has quite a bad reputation for this sort of behavior and much of it is based on the view that a biological father who is unmarried has effectively no right to adopt his own child regardless of his character.
Posted by Mike T | November 25, 2013 10:10 AM
That would be fine if your position also includes neither welfare nor child support obligations in return.
Posted by Mike T | November 25, 2013 10:18 AM
Mike, I don't follow your "it's one thing" but "it's another thing." Obviously, the two are legally linked. If the unmarried father can't block the adoption, then he can't demand custody. Utah is applying the principle that the biological father can't block the adoption. It follows from that that he can't demand custody. If he can demand custody, he can block the adoption. Utah's position seems to me consistent and in line with what I am recommending.
Perhaps what you're saying is that you support his being unable to block the adoption if and only if he is unwilling to take full custody himself. This used to be my position years ago--that if the father was willing and able to take full custody of the child himself, it would be okay for him to be able to block the adoption. I've changed my mind on that, because it still blocks adoptions by throwing the matter into a court case with the attendant uncertainty. Any biological father can say that he wants to take custody of the child and "won't let" the mother place the child for adoption, and practically speaking this by itself simply blocks the child from being adopted even if the father makes no actual move to seek full custody. Second, full custody is unusual, and the child is more likely to end up in some kind of undesirable joint custody situation. Third, the parents still won't be married, which is not likely to be best for the child. Being raised by a single father? Not what we're looking for, any more than being raised by a single mother. Fourth,if the child has lived since birth with the biological mother, it's almost certainly not in the best interests of the child and is going to be highly traumatic to have that bond broken and have the child placed with a father who is a stranger to him.
It would be an _improvement_ over some current state laws if the bar were raised so that no unmarried father can block an adoption unless he actually files for custody of the child. That would prevent _some_ frivolous blockings. But in my opinion it would still not be good policy.
Well, I thought we'd come to that, so I just waited to address it when you inevitably brought it up in comments. This, again, assumes that there is one and only one fair or just arrangement, some kind of tit for tat or quid pro quo, that must be enacted in public policy. I deny that premise. I think that in this area things may well work out "unfairly" for the man, just as in other areas they work out "unfairly" for the woman. As I pointed out in the main post, there are lots of ways in which, in a society with the laws I favor, it would be "unfair" for the woman--for example, she wouldn't be able to murder the child in utero and hence would have to bear the visible and physical burden of pregnancy. She could even (if all the laws I favor were enacted) get fired from her job for immorality or just because being pregnant and having a child would make it harder for her to carry out her duties. Lots of unfairness to go around. If part of that unfairness of life is that the unmarried father _can_ be sued for child support but _can't_ block placing for adoption, cry me a river. Perhaps in that case he should be all the more supportive of the adoption option, because it would release him from the fear of having to pay child support! Kids are an inconvenient result of sex. Both he and she should have thought of all the "unfair" inconveniences a child could bring before having sex.
I also did some research on this very question in English and American common law in anticipation of your bringing it up: Interestingly, as near as I can figure out, that very unfairness was the status quo until the sexual revolution. The child could be placed for adoption without the unmarried father's consent, but the local or state authorities (this goes back to the English parish!) could seek child support from him if the child was otherwise going to be fatherless and without support. There is then a whole history of pre-DNA procedures for determining fatherhood for purposes of child support. Kind of an interesting history.
So I'm inclined to defer to tradition on this one.
However, I'll go so far as to say this: I consider it so important that an unmarried father not be able to block adoption that I would even consider that it _might_ be better policy for him not to have to pay child support and also be unable to block the adoption. I'm hesitant to advocate that "balanced" view, however, because it seems like a perfect case for all sorts of negative unintended consequences.
Perhaps a modified version of it would just be this: Once the mother has sought or accepted child support payments, she cannot _subsequently_ place the child for adoption without a custody hearing of some kind. Hence a mother who wanted to place the child for adoption would have to do so _prior_ to seeking child support payments. This would dovetail well with the fact that newborn placement for adoption is preferable anyway. Even there, however, I would want to know more about how this would work in practice before wholeheartedly endorsing it. How much of a window would it leave for the adoption to be finalized? And can the mother be forced by the state to seek and accept child support payments even if she is attempting to find adoptive parents as quickly as possible?
Posted by Lydia | November 25, 2013 10:54 AM
As for welfare payments, I don't admit linkage there. There isn't even the fig leaf of "Don't make this man responsible for payments if you won't give him prima facie rights over the child" to justify linkage. As everyone knows, I'm libertarian-ish enough that I'm no fan of welfare, but it shouldn't be linked to adoption policy in that way. Whether welfare should exist or not, how much, and who should get it should be decided independently of whether an unmarried father should have a prima facie "right to decide what is best" for a child.
Posted by Lydia | November 25, 2013 11:24 AM
Just FYI about foreign adoptions: there are some additional immigration-related hoops you have to jump through, but as a beneficial side effect the child will necessarily end up with federal documentation of their identity. (And identity as a U.S. citizen: all minors adopted by U.S. citizens derive citizenship automatically.) So concerns about getting a passport / drivers license / voting registration are off-base.
Posted by Craig | November 25, 2013 11:39 AM
What I really meant to say is that the father should have to have a window of time where he can legally adopt the child. Perhaps a week where he can decide before the mother can put the child up for adoption. I don't agree that putting the child up so a hypothetical nuclear family can adopt it is intrinsically in the child's best interests. What is in the child's best interests is a case-by-case issue. Sometimes having an extended biological family present is as much or more important.
One obvious example of why being adopted is not always the best thing for the child is precisely what was done in Baby Emma's case. I can't remember what religion the father is, but the adoptive parents and their agency are Mormons. Suppose the father is actually a decent enough Christian (Catholic or Protestant). It is absolutely not in the child's interests to be raised by a Mormon family because Mormonism is a false religion. However, let's a take it a step further. Suppose a lapsed Mormon father who was coming back around to the LDS were to have his kid adopted out to a nuclear family that is pagan or atheist. Is that in the child's interests? That's a very mixed bag for the kid at best (good: nuclear family that's table, bad: their socialization on religion and politics).
What you posted, and to which I responded, linked a number of topics together. You advocated what was the norm for men prior to the modern era. I said that was fine, provided you restore what was the norm for women which was (at best) limited obligations from the father of the child if they were not married.
Posted by Mike T | November 25, 2013 12:16 PM
I don't know what you mean by "limited," but I wonder if you've researched this. He could be made to pay child support payments--exactly what you said shouldn't be included. Read your comment to which I was responding. Child support payments are an old, old tradition. It goes back hundreds of years.
Posted by Lydia | November 25, 2013 12:36 PM
As to your other comments, Mike T., this is the kind of response I expected--not just from you but from those who disagree with my post generally. The response is to imply that public policy cannot be based on any generalities but must always and entirely go case-by-case. Now, for one thing, that isn't possible. If public policy discourages adoption--e.g., by letting bio-fathers have veto (even for a limited time) over adoption--that isn't case-by-case. It isn't neutral. It is making adoption harder, as if that is better overall.
Second, I just disagree that public policy should even _attempt_ to treat every newborn, illegitimate child as a case for the state to step in and decide what is best. And de facto, that is what it would mean if every one of those could go into a custody battle in virtue of the father's stepping forward either during the pregnancy or in a window.
I do admit that your proposal that he must apply actually to _adopt_ the child himself and must do it within a very brief window would put something of a limit on the effects of such a block to adoption. This is similar to my point above regarding allowing the father to veto the adoption if and only if he applied for full custody. But for all the reasons I gave there, I still don't consider that ideal policy.
The difference here is that, despite the fact that we can make up specifics in various directions, public policy should favor parenthood by married couples. Is that going to mean that we can envisage situations in which a single, Christian father is disfavored in comparison to a married Mormon couple? Sure, we can make up all kinds of scenarios. The Christian should have thought of that while his clothes were all still on his body. I'm sorry to be so crude, but there is something very strange here about attributing to this man some deep concern about the specifics of his child's religious upbringing when he fathered the child in the first place in a way that showed little or no concern for its having even the bare minimum of a stable home, fatherhood, and family. So now, within nine months and one week, we're supposed to feel so sorry for the Catholic father who sees his baby adopted out to a Mormon family? I don't feel that way in the slightest. Nor is it obvious to me *at all* that the child is worse off in a Mormon family than in the full custody of an unmarried man, with no mother, just because the man has basically orthodox theological beliefs!
Ideally, the mother would place the child with a Christian adoption agency who would place him with a Christian couple, and in fact there are lots of Christian adoption agencies. But as far as that's concerned, the buck has to stop somewhere, and if somebody is going to micromanage that decision (whether it's best for the child to be adopted by Mormons or even atheists), better the child's biological mother who just gave birth to him than the state. After all, as you well know, the State of Virginia isn't allowed to "discriminate" on the basis of religion anyway, and most government agencies, if given half a chance, would probably discriminate *in favor* of atheists.
Posted by Lydia | November 25, 2013 12:46 PM
Likewise, I would like to see your sources because no reference I've seen has ever suggested that this was common practice. In fact, every reference to out of wedlock birth from pre-modern times I've seen has emphasized how little claim the mother actually had to the resources of the father.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd like to see the sources for my own edification and "child support in common law" didn't yield much on Google.
I'm absolutely not in favor of giving unmarried men veto rights over adoptions. What I think ought to be criminalized is any act of deception, denial or subterfuge that would deny them a reasonable window of time to go before the court and establish themselves as a competent legal guardian for the child.
By the way, this is one area where you and Tony seem to be a bit blind to gender differences. It's easier for an unwed father to find a good wife than the other way around. An unwed father with some prospects, a little game and not burdened by child support is in a much stronger dating position than the average unwed mother. Men with decent prospects are simply far more likely to be turned off by an unwed mother (for reasons ranging from her sense of responsibility, to having to support another man's child) than decent single women are to be turned off by a man with decent prospects who has a kid. If anything, in much of America it would be an incentive to marry him for a lot of women since it's automatic signal that this man is much more likely to be a good father to her kids since he fought to get his kid.
Now would be a good time to recite Spengler's Universal Law of Gender Parity:
Posted by Mike T | November 25, 2013 3:23 PM
I'm totally uninterested in whether the unwed mother or father has better prospects. I'm interested in the child's being adopted from Day 1 by a loving, married couple. The mother gets prima facie custody because
a) her being the mother is indisputable, biologically, from the instant of birth,
b) gender roles are different, and God made women to have a more natural biological connection to little children than men,
c) statistically, I believe the children will be much more likely (probably orders of mag more likely) to end up without any parent at all loving and caring for them on a daily basis, in other words, dumped into foster care, if biological fathers are given prima facie custody rather than biological mothers,
d) only one unmarried parent, at most, should have prima facie custody, so we have to pick.
Some support for what I have said about child support. This page states:
Notice that this supports the idea that the practice of "going after fathers" to recoup the costs to the community is older than the United States.
http://www.childsupportanalysis.co.uk/information_and_explanation/world/history_usa.htm
La Wik's article on Colonial bastardy laws, with multiple references to Jenny Teichman's book on the subject of bastardy and English common law concerning the "filius nullius" (no man's child) definition of a bastard, actually takes the history back farther than the American colonies:
I don't happen to have a copy of Teichman's book, but she is discussing the concept of "filius nullius" on the pages cited, as can be seen on Google books.
Perhaps your sources have been splitting the hair that the payments were made directly to the community (this is mentioned in the first link I cited) to recoup the parish's costs for keeping the child from destitution, rather than being made directly to the woman. But the fact appears to be that the father could be legally "gotten," if he could be juridically determined, and required to pay money because he had engendered a child out of wedlock.
Posted by Lydia | November 25, 2013 3:45 PM
Mike T., I don't think you understand that (leaving aside "deception," which I'll get to in a moment) this _just is_ giving at last some unmarried men veto rights over adoptions. In practice, it would mean several things. First, _any_ unmarried father could say that he intended to do this, and thus create sufficient uncertainty that a woman would either abort the child or at least refuse to start adoption proceedings during the pregnancy (which is when it's best for her to be working with an agency). This would make it more likely that she would bond with the child in the hospital and in the first weeks of infancy and therefore that _she_ would become psychologically unwilling to place the child for adoption. This is all the more probable given the present emphasis on breastfeeding in hospitals. Unless an adoption were already arranged, the nurses would teach the mother to breastfeed in the first two days before she is even released from the hospital.
Notice that these points about bonding also apply to men who aren't merely bluffing but who, in fact, will lose the subsequent court proceeding. By that time, it is really too late to arrange the best type of neonatal adoption, and it's unlikely to happen at all, even if the man loses his custody claim.
You also appear to think nothing of all the other considerations I have raised regarding joint custody and the like. I presume you think them of little importance compared to the paramount importance of giving the unmarried father such an opportunity. There we simply disagree.
Second, as regards deception. Of course nobody should be telling lies. However, I take your reference to "denial or subterfuge" to mean that the mother has a bounden duty actively to come out and say who the biological father is, if she knows. I don't think she has such a bounden duty.
In any event, deception, denial, and subterfuge will all be irrelevant if the father doesn't have the right to put up roadblocks in the way of adoption. AKA, if the unmarried father doesn't have a prima facie right to custody or to establish custody after birth. Again, as I said, giving him that prima facie right in law *just is* giving him the opportunity to block the adoption. I realize it isn't an *unlimited* right to block, but it is a very significant one, especially as regards probable outcomes.
Posted by Lydia | November 25, 2013 4:10 PM
Oh, golly, Mike. The whole point is that custody should be presumptive in one direction, with the state getting formally involved to the extent necessary because of unusual cases. You can't define "unusual" around a need to assign custody.
OK, how about this: He gets a window of time (1) from the day of conception to expected day of delivery minus 30 days. That's 8 months. 7 months of knowing, presuming he cares about the mother (and his child) enough to check back within the month to see if conception happened. 7 months is plenty of time - just ask the mother how long it feels subjectively.
(2) In the meantime, the guy is already paying for medical care for the mother and child, and establishes up front payment for birth costs. (Make his health insurance cover it if the DNA shows the child is his, if he has health insurance. If he doesn't have insurance, make him buy a short term policy for the mother / child.) The lodging of his payments itself declares his possible intention of asking for custody - and his failure to do so carries the natural consequence that he harbors no options to seek custody: that is, he has to pay these amounts EVEN TO GET HIS FOOT IN THE DOOR.
(3) Define "competent legal guardian" in the main by his being married. Make sure that his wife really does want to bring the child home. Have them go through adoption screening.
(4) Ideally he should also be paying for the mother's maintenance during pregnancy.
(5) Establish really significant fines if he divorces within 5 years, to cover the costs of adopting the child out AND the costs of mental / emotional therapy for the child.
OK, with those provisos in place, I am OK with the bio-father getting the right to the child, if he can get approved under adoption screening, and thus blocking the adoption out to another couple. (With a qualification expanded on below). In effect, the father gets first dibs (right of first refusal) by showing he REALLY IS JUST AS GOOD as adopting the baby out to another qualified couple. You can imagine the thousands upon thousands of dads who will be beating down doors to make this happen.
No, I think you've got it exactly backwards. The presumptive option is for the child to be born and immediately released into a stable adoptive family with a father and a mother. (If it weren't for extraneous ill effects that would creep in, that would actually even trump the birth mother's rights, in my opinion.) There might be situations where that would NOT be better than the child being with the biological father (your "family" is a mis-nomer because "family" properly means father and mother actually married). But such would be few and far between, and would be MAINLY because of unforeseen defects in the adoptive family, not in some unique virtue of the biological father's extended family. We don't need a law that undermines the presumptive option in favor of an adoptive stable family with a father and mother for the off chance that - in spite of screening - they are not as secure a family as they seemed.
Of course, all other things being equal, it is better for a child to be raised in the true religion (Christianity) than a false religion like Mormonism. But we have already posited that all other things are not equal: the biological father gravely and ineradicably damaged his relationship with his child by engendering the child out of wedlock. Part of the moral gravity of that act was his loss of the fatherly role of guiding the religion of the child. That loss of the fundamental right to raise, educate, train, discipline, and hand on that belongs to fatherhood properly was JUST EXACTLY what his choice included.
Now, in a good Christian society the rest of the community would pick up that role, and would also ensure that the child could be placed with a good Christian couple. That the right outcome. Given that we no longer have a Christian society, we have to make do with lesser goods. The one we actually have within reach is to make sure that the adoptive couple is the same religion as both biological parents (if they have the same religion) or that of the mother (she and the bio-father are not the same religion). If the mother doesn't care, well then sure the father's preference should control - that is, control which religion we allow for the adoptive couple, not the option to block the adoption. See, if the bio-parents are different religions, society cannot (because we are degenerate) choose between them based on a preference for one religion over the other, so we have to prefer one over the other based on other criteria. Lydia's comments on the unequal relationship of the bio-parents to the child come into play: the mother has greater natural rights given that they were not married at conception and did not get married.
Posted by Tony | November 25, 2013 7:56 PM
Frankly, I don't see how that matters much at all. That is, the CORRECT window we are talking about is the window BEFORE the baby is born, and for all intents and purposes I don't see much prospect of an unwed father with a just-conceived baby (remember, full disclosure to the girls) finding, wooing, and marrying a decent prospective step-mother to his baby, all in 8 months or less, AND that we confidently think this is going to happen enough to forego planning out an adoption. It's a virtual impossibility. Remember, this acceptable step-mother has to both be a decent prospect for stepping into a mother's shoes even though the child is not hers, AND has to basically not care that her man was siring a child with another woman - just a few months ago - outside of marriage and without any reasonable prospects for marriage. She would have to be a saint to have both qualities. The sheer concern for unfaithfulness would make most people say "hang on, take it slow, take your time, be SURE before you go through with it", all of which isn't what happens in a mere 8 months of courting and getting married and establishing a "stable" home.
I have seen people get married at haste (under pressure of a conceived child) and repent over years and years. I have also seen, in one case, a couple who were already planning on marrying "accidentally" conceive a bit early, and do just fine with married life. I have also heard of single motherhood instilling some chivalrous leanings in a decent guy, so that he takes an interest in a woman who, in former times, would have been shunned. I don't know that a woman with a child has seriously worse prospects finding a REAL honest to goodness wholesome and marriageable mate than an unwed father, rather than merely finding a possible "spouse" to continue serial intermittent monogamy. But even if the real prospects are a lot worse, the real comparison is adopting the baby out at birth to the possibility that the guy will find a good wife and settle down at some point in the future. In that comparison the former beats the latter hands down.
Posted by Tony | November 25, 2013 8:15 PM
Lydia, I made it clear that what I favor is a very limited window in which the man, duly informed of his child's existence, must take positive action before a court to establish his willingness and ability to become sole legal guardian. What this means is that he must affirm that he is willing and able to shoulder the entire burden himself, the mother completely relieved of child support and other obligations. That is to say, the very men who you fear would use it as a weapon would make costly fools of themselves in court because the court would make the focus entirely on him, not her or them as a couple.
If that is too much of a burden for some women, then frankly I don't care. Much like I simply don't care if outlawing "safe, legal and rare" abortion will lead to back alley abortions. Unlike you and Tony, I don't agree that being raised by a nuclear family is a good that inherently trumps being raised by a willing biological family. Now there are ways this can be handled efficiently for the mother such as requiring all adoption proceedings to have parallel paths so the moment the father is deemed unfit the child can be set up with prospective families.
I would rather see a child raised for a few years by a loving and capable unwed biological father than automatically presumed to be sent off to strangers. So no, I don't accept your time tables here. If you seriously believe that men and women are effectively equally burdened by being unwed parents, then I don't know what to tell you. All of the evidence around you says otherwise.
Posted by Mike T | November 26, 2013 4:41 AM
What "few years" are we talking about? You mean, the first 3 or 4 years of a child's life? Why in the world do we think the significant period is "a few years", we are talking about the person's childhood. Oh, you mean a few years before the dad gets married? At the best, that's a maybe, we cannot count on it, and there is no way to project HOW LONG the wait might be. At the moment the child is born, that's a future contingent possibility, not a given.
The basic choice you are asking us to consider is between having a child be raised - from birth - in a normal stable family with a father and a mother, or be raised by a single dad who may or may not get married in year 3 or 10. Presumptively this single condition could persist throughout the kid's childhood.
Let's return to what the normal family is for a moment: a mother and a father willingly receive the gift of a child, committing themselves to permanent, unconditional love of the child. In this environment, the child has one parent whose main activity focus is putting a roof over their heads and food on the table. The child has another parent whose main focus is the little, minute by minute needs and concerns of the child himself - his bottle, diaper, toys, playing, singing, reading stories, teaching language and building character. The child's first years are inundated with direct love borne out in the mother's actions all day long. The single parent cannot provide that. Nor can he provide to the child a home in which the parents willed to love that child from the first moment they learned of his existence in their lives. (I have a friend who found out in middle age that his parents for decades fudged the date of their wedding to disguise the fact that it was a shotgun marriage, and learning about it made him question whether they ever really wanted to be married and to welcome children together. It was emotionally traumatic.)
No matter how good a dad the single dad is, if he is putting a roof over their heads, he is not providing the minute by minute care of an additional parent, the second parent. While there are ways a single parent can sort of, kind of, substitute for this two-parent environment, they don't actually HAVE that, they only mimic it or (at the best) approximate it in some respects only. In all of them, the child's effective mother, the person who is standing in for the mother in terms of minute by minute loving care, is NOT MARRIED TO THE DAD. So, no matter how good a day care arrangement dad manages, and no matter how much the care-giver actually loves the child (say it's Grandma) dad is not providing to the child the integral 2-parent family structure. He is not modeling for the child the care of a mother and a father whose sexual love conceived the child. They are not providing the example of an actual mother exercising motherly authority over the children, and the father exercising loving authority over the children in one way, and over his wife in a different way. They are not providing the example of a life-long commitment of love freely chosen.
The prospect that dad may, in a few years time, get married and then be able to model all this for the child is not enough. The child needs it from day one. Right from the start. There is too much evidence that early months of life are critically important for emotional and psychological development to leave this for "maybe in a few years." The child cannot wait.
There's another reason parents come in twos. All new parents make mistakes and learn to avoid them. They learn together, in part by seeing each other make mistakes and being able to identify them and point them out to each other. A single dad is going to have a much tougher time becoming that "capable" father.
Now you are just switching the topic. The problem under discussion was the problem of raising a kid well, not "how burdensome" it is. You suggested that dad has better prospects of getting married and thus dealing with the problem of taking care of the kid, but the "all the evidence" stuff you are pointing to is all the evidence that SINGLE MOTHERS have it a hell of a lot harder than single fathers because they almost invariably have more duties of care-giving than the dads (about 5 to 1). I don't know that single mother's who are have the sole custody of their kid are more gravely burdened than single dads in the same position, and I don't know that there is statistical evidence out there on the subject. I did find this one bit:
Regardless, the real comparison is not single moms to single dads, it is a 2-parent family to a single-parent household, and in that comparison the stats are clear.
Posted by Tony | November 26, 2013 9:07 AM
As Tony said, the relevant window should be _before_ the child is born. I have pointed out (and you have ignored my pointing out) neonatal bonding with the mother as one extremely crucial reason for this. It's actually rather important that the decision to adopt be made in the mother's mind prior to birth, or it's unlikely to be made at all for reasons of hormones, breast-feeding, and mother-child bonding.
If we're talking about men who bluff, it need never get to court at all. Read Beth's comments above. A bluff is just that. Once adoption out has been taken off the table, the bluff has succeeded and no court case needs to be initiated at all. I've known of a similar bluff myself--a man who literally pretended to marry a woman before a justice of the peace (who was just a buddy of his pretending to be a JP) then, when a child was conceived before she discovered the hoax, told her he "wouldn't let her" have the child adopted. That was all it took, since there are in fact some legal structures in that vicinity, and the child is being raised by the single mother.
I never said it is too much of a burden for the woman. I said it is likely to discourage adoptions to two-parent families and result in more children being raised alone by women. _Some_ might end up being raised alone by their single fathers, but even more will just end up by default with their mothers because of the "nudge" of the threat of legal challenge or because of the uncertainty permitting neonatal bonding. I don't think you can deny that, but you probably don't care.
I anticipated this kind of statement in the main post. As I said there, there is no absolute requirement in justice that fathers be given some kind of equal treatment in law. Your proposals, whatever their merits or demerits practically, are not reflections of some absolute moral principle which would, under my proposals, be ignored. In contrast, abortion is murder, and murder should be illegal. I had a discussion of this issue on Facebook in which my interlocutor said something like, "We can't judge policies on the basis of what happens when people abuse them." She also implied that we can't judge them on the basis of their consequences. I differ strongly in this case. We can and should judge these policies on precisely those bases, because we don't *owe* it in some absolute sense to the father who isn't married to the mother at the birth of the child to do otherwise.
Here you're going back to your conjecture that the single father will find it easier to get married with the child in his household than the single mother will. What part of "we consider that irrelevant" or "we don't care about that" don't you understand? Why bother attributing a contrary position to yours on this particular probability to Tony and me when we both previously dismissed it as irrelevant to the question of the child's best interests at birth rather than challenging it?
Let me point out how interesting it is, Mike T, that you seem to be assuming that the bio father shouldn't marry the child's mother before the child is born. She was good enough to have sex with but not to marry? Or perhaps you're assuming she'll always refuse to marry him. Lots of so-called "shotgun weddings" in the history of mankind say otherwise. If he finds it so easy to get married, perhaps he should marry her in the next eight months. Then my proposed policies would make him the child's presumptive father without further ado.
Posted by Lydia | November 26, 2013 9:56 AM
Topical (out of wedlock births), and worth a post of its own is this section of a study that Roissy just quoted:
Iceland is still functional, most likely because it had more cultural and economic capital upon which to fall back on as these changes happened plus the fact that European fathers of illegitimate children are often much more active in their kids' lives (often living quite contentedly with the mother in a marriage-like-non-marriage) than is common among blacks and hispanics (the only American demographics that are at or nearly at 67% out of wedlock birth for now).
It would appear that we now have empirical evidence that it is quite true that welfare literally builds a culture of out of wedlock birth and legitimization of that view (sorry Jeff C.)
From a public policy perspective, the best way to counter this would be to prioritize job creation in male-dominated fields, scale back public support for female-dominated fields, cut back entitlements for unwed mothers and tie all divorce-related entitlements to demonstrated malfeasance on the part of the father. With regard to the latter, fathers who are the victims of no fault divorce should be allowed to direct their child support funds' use directly, meaning they buy the resources the kid needs and make them available to the mother when she has custody instead of writing her a check that she can just as easily blow on herself as spend wisely on the kid.
Posted by Mike T | December 5, 2013 12:58 PM