Open Adoption and Birth Fathers
Few birth fathers elect to take a role in adoption, given the fact the pregnancies were usually unplanned, and often there was no long-term relationship with the birth mother. For those few birth fathers who volunteer to take a helpful and active role in creating the adoption situation for the adopting parents, the potential benefits to a continuing relationship with the birth father can be just as viable as with a birth mother.
There are sometimes problems concerning birth mothers and adoption agencies who neglect to make sure the proper paperwork is done on the birth father's part. It is crucial to remember that no child can be relinquished legally without the birth father's consent, except in Utah. He must be given the chance to take full custody. For this purpose, many states have important putative father registries, although some adoption activists see these as a hindrance rather than a help.
Read more about this topic: Open Adoption
Famous quotes containing the words open, adoption, birth and/or fathers:
“When the inhabitants of some sequestered island first descry the “big canoe” of the European rolling through the blue waters towards their shores, they rush down to the beach in crowds, and with open arms stand ready to embrace the strangers. Fatal embrace! They fold to their bosoms the vipers whose sting is destined to poison all their joys; and the instinctive feeling of love within their breasts is soon converted into the bitterest hate.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Frankly, I adore your catchy slogan, “Adoption, not Abortion,” although no one has been able to figure out, even with expert counseling, how to use adoption as a method of birth control, or at what time of the month it is most effective.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“The warped, distorted frame we have put around every Negro child from birth is around every white child also. Each is on a different side of the frame but each is pinioned there. And ... what cruelly shapes and cripples the personality of one is as cruelly shaping and crippling the personality of the other.”
—Lillian Smith (1897–1966)
“The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)