Chino, CA--It’s a beautiful day as I enter the grounds of the California Institution For Men. I’ve got an adoption case assignment involving an inmate here. For the most part I enjoy these assignments I do on behalf of couples seeking to adopt infants to raise as their own children. In many adoption cases the natural parents have a sad life of drug addiction, poverty and crime. These people are just not equipped with the skills or motivation to raise children in a happy or safe environment.
For the birth-fathers to be, I bring an end to the prospect of child support, medical bills and responsibilities. I bring them paperwork that ultimately terminates their parental rights to the child.
If the birth-fathers don’t sign the paperwork, I serve them with court documents that will force termination on the grounds that the birth-father is not a fit nor proper person to raise the child because of his criminal history and imprisonment. No matter what, the results are the same but going through court termination proceedings take a lot longer.
Many of the birth fathers I deal with are not in prison but they have many of the same problems.
Even imprisoned birth fathers have the power to put the adoptive parents through many months of additional expense, uncertainty and worry if the men don’t agree to the adoption. The upside of signing the papers is good will and a guarantee their babies will get the good life with financially stable if not wealthy adoptive parents.
The reality is these babies have won the lottery. The’ve won loving parents that will provide for their needs and educational tools along with a new birthright.
Thankfully most birth-fathers do the right thing once the options are properly explained to them. I rarely meet the adoptive parents but talk on the phone with them. Sometimes as they cry with tears of joy that the adoption is finally settled. These adoption assignments have a lasting feel-good effect on me. The results of this work I do has caused the social workers and attorneys to give me a special moniker, “The Terminator”.
Comments
We were lucky in that parental rights were terminated before we adopted the boys--we picked up the tail end of a broken adoption process. We don't know who the father was, but the guy the mother named gave up his rights like nothing. As you point out, he saw it more as a termination of parental responsibilities. And to be fair, I don't think he thought there was much certainty that he was the father, given her lifestyle.
Until her rights were terminated, she had the right to visit the boys. They'd all meet at a restaurant, and she'd spend the whole time telling the boys that their foster parents didn't love them, that their foster parents had taken them from her, but she was getting them back.
The things this woman had allowed to happen to these boys made me want to puke when I read about them. I sincerely hope she gets her life together, but as you say, she was simply not able to raise children.