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Originally Posted by hrisme
My stance on birthparent's rights may be dramatically altered after tonight.
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I should have specified further what my "stance" on birthparent's rights are--actually, thought I was posting this to another board where that stance is well-known.
In the past, I have been seen as an "extremist" when it come to "birth" father's rights. In fact, my general opinion is/was that the biological father of a child should have as much right to custody as the biological mother, unless proven that there is a reason he should not have custody--preferably by the same process of termination of parental rights required to remove any child from a home. This opinion has been based on my experience with a "birth" father who was ready & willing to step in to raise his son (and was certainly NOT abusive), but the baby was placed WITHOUT his consent, for adoption. There have been several of these cases lately.
In fact, with this situation I was initially supportive of his decision to raise the child. I didn't have all the facts, nothing about his history of abuse & violence (the authorities didn't have this history either, as nobody had the courage to press charges for domestic violence, even though they were concerned their hands were tied because of lack of evidence). Obviously, I never dreamed the situation would end this way.
Now I'm leaning towards not giving the birth father custody if there is a history of violence or domestic abuse--but, here again, we hit the problem of how do we determine if there really is a risk of domestic violence. If we increase "birth" father's rights, but make exceptions for incidences of domestic violence, what is to stop those individuals who simply don't want to identify the father from claiming they are victims of domestic violence?
I'm not making any judgments about birth parents in general, in fact anyone who knows my stance on adoption knows that I actually believe that every possible option for raising a child should be exhausted before adoption becomes a possibility. This would have been assumed, if I'd posted it on the right board, had I been in my right mind last night I would have worded things better! The fact that he had another child placed for adoption has not been brought into the picture, and for the sake of my friends & their son I hope it is not revealed.