January 29, 2013
Why do Utah Birth Fathers Struggle So Much?
The adoption world has been in bit of a news storm recently, as the case of Terry Achane – who has been disputing his daughter’s adoption in Utah – won back his parental rights and was able to retrieve her from the adoptive family who had been parenting her for 22 months.
Teleah was was placed for adoption by her mother, Tira Bland, in 2010 to the Freis family while her husband, Achane, was away on military leave. Achane claimed to have known nothing about the adoption and immediately began protesting the adoption when the Freis’s filed him with an adoption petition for the baby, whom they called Leah. Not only did Achane contact the agency and say that he wanted his daughter back, but a lawyer for the agency contacted Achane, where he confirmed that he did not agree with the adoption and wanted his daughter back. At neither point did the agency cease the adoption or discuss returning Teleah back to her biological father.
This is a devastating situation for the adoption community because no one wants to see a child taken from a biological parent who loves the child and wants to parent them, but, equally, the idea of an adoptive family losing a child they had parented for nearly two years seems unspeakably cruel. Where does the fault lie? How did this happen?
It was the Adoption Center of Choice in Utah who facilitated the adoption without Achane’s consent. This isn’t the first time that a Utah adoption agency has been in the middle of a maelstrom because of practices that ignore the birth father and blatantly favor the birth mother. In 2010, Baby Emma made news headlines when she was placed for adoption illegally by her mother without the consent of the birth father, a Virginia citizen. While a judge in Virginia sided with John Wyatt, the birth father, arguing that he was a fit parent and had filed for paternal rights in a timely fashion upon learning his daughter had been born, the judge in Utah did not, allowing the baby to stay with the adoptive family while the adoption proceeded – also ruling that Wyatt could not legally contest the adoption.
A Huffington Post article about the situation notes:
The state has a reputation as “a magnet for those seeking to unfairly cut off opportunities for biological fathers to assert their rights to connection with their children,” Utah Supreme Court Chief Justice Christine Durham wrote back in 2009 in a case where a mother in Wyoming lied and told the father she had miscarried, then put the baby up for adoption in Utah. That was one of ten cases around that time in which adoptions went forward in Utah without the out-of-state father’s knowledge or consent.
No adoptive family should ever be put in a position where they are given a child who wasn’t consensually put up for adoption, and no birth parent – mother or father – should have to fight for the right to parent their child when they are fit and willing. For some reason this has become a noticeable battle in Utah, one where the parental rights of birth fathers are treated differently and less equally than that of birth mothers. To ensure that the adoption system works, laws in place must be abided, and no family should be in a position – on either side – where they are fighting for a child who wasn’t properly and legally moved through the adoption process. We’re interested to see if emerging reports and investigations into the situation with birth father rights in Utah will bring about any change. We certainly hope so.