May 21, 2012

Birth Father Rights in Utah

We encourage you to watch this video about Utah adoption agencies who are actively trying to take rights away from birth fathers — practices that were revealed when a group of women posing as birth mothers taped conversations they had with adoptive agencies where they stated that they want to explicitly keep the birth father out of the process.

Many agencies told the women that they could through the entire adoption process and not alert the birth father at all.

“You don’t have to even identify him,” one agency employee told the birth mother. “You don’t have to notify him because he’s not a legal.”

“I had one agency tell me that I didn’t have to tell him anything, that I could leave — basically eight months pregnant — from my home, come here, have the baby, and go back and not tell him anything,” said one woman, who told the adoption agency that she was from out of state and wanted to place in Utah.

“Fathers have zero rights in Utah,” she said, “zero.”

We’ve written about this issue before and we absolutely support the rights of both birth parents in the adoption process. If a birth father wants to be involved in a pregnancy and/or adoption process, he has that right, and for an agency to advise against that only shines a negative light on the adoption world and the importance of all parties in the adoption process.

What do you think about this? Adoptive parents: how would you feel about adopting a child where one of the birth parents was secretly kept out of the adoption process? Birth mothers: how would you feel if an adoption agency was trying to advise you to keep the birth father out of the process?