A Texas parent has been involved in a lengthy legal battle to assert his parental rights concerning his 2-year-old son. The Texas Attorney General’s Office had filed an action recognizing the father’s paternity back in November 2012. Yet it appears that the mother of the child nevertheless put the young boy up for adoption without the father’s permission.
The father has since been able to retrieve his son from another state. Yet these circumstances may have been completely avoided had it not been for an adoption system that purportedly handled the matter improperly.
Texas child welfare officials did intervene in this matter because both the mother and child had tested positive for marijuana shortly after the child was born. As the father was hospitalized at the time, two of the father’s relatives temporarily had custody of the child. It was after the custody was returned to the mother that the mother then went out-of-state and put the child up for adoption. The attorney for the father stated that there were misstatements in the paperwork concerning the child’s adoption concerning paternity.
The legal process for paternity does need to be honored. Attorneys practicing in the family law area can make certain that the process is complied with, and that the rights of both parents can then be established.
It is alleged that certain adoption agencies either are not conducting a sufficient investigation to discover who birth fathers happen to be in certain circumstances, or else these agencies are simply ignoring the rights of fathers when it comes to child custody determinations. “It’s critically important that men who want to step up and serve as fathers be allowed to do that, in law and in ethical practice,” stated the president of one adoption institution.
Source: News-Herald, “How a 2-year-old was adopted without his father’s consent,” Dec. 18, 2013
