[4myson]

My husband wants to adopt my four year old son. Do I need a lawyer or if its uncontested (I hope) can we go without one. If so how do we do that? His BF has never paid any child support and has only visited him for two months over two years ago. Does he autamatically loose his parental rights after so long without contact or support for the child. He only lives fifteen minutes away, so he has no justifiable excuse. Any advise would be greatly appreciated! I know every state is different so if anybody has any ideas I'm from Indiana.

[Zulaya]

I know nothing about Indiana, but I've had some experience in my own state. You're right, it varies greatly by state, but in general you can have parental rights terminated without agreement if there has been no contact for a specified period of time. Here, the time is 6 months. I've heard a year is also fairly common.

The easiest and cheapest route by far is a voluntary relinquishment by the bio parent. Whether or not you need an attorney for that depends entirely on the state. Some states have forms that you can pick up in your county that are a standard form and which (if the bio parent signs them) are easily filed in the courts. Here, there's no such thing. We seriously considered trying to write the papers ourselves by compiling the forms we found that other states used on the Web (I vaguely recall that Illinois and Florida have theirs online). However, in the end we determined that it was too complicated and the law here says that if consent is "improperly given" the bio parent can come back and contest it for 2 years after the adoption is final. Improperly given is one of those things that was nearly impossible to discern with all of our research, so we ended up deciding that the safest route, the one that would leave no loopholes to bite us in the butt 1 year and 11 months later, was to hire an attorney to dot the i's. It sucked, but that's how it is in our state.

If you're going to be doing complicated things like nullifying back child support or things like that, I'd definitely go with an attorney, because there's a fine line between what's perfectly fine and what's considered "child selling," which of course is illegal in every state and will lead to the sort of situation where bio dad can come back and contest it. Worse, if he can prove that you coerced him (ie, 'bought' the child) then he'll get back all rights and you will have permanantly lost any right to the back support he might otherwise have owed. I would absolutely hire an attorney unless your particular state has the exact papers you need for that mass prepared. Don't add or subtract anything or sign anything that your state doesn't prepare for mass distribution without an attorney. The cost of a lawyer to prepare the papers is infinitely low compared to the cost of proving that the adoption should not be overturned if, in fact, you try to go it alone, IMHO.

Abandonment should be fairly easy to prove in your case, I would think, but just to give you an idea of the various costs, in our case, our atty is doing the adoption with consent for less than 1k. If biodad hadn't consented, it would have cost 3-10k to prove abandonment, depending on how hard it looked like bio-dad was going to contest it (whether or not he got his own lawyer, showed up in court, etc).

In every state as far as I know, abandonment must show that the father has not had any contact with the children for x time and/or has shown a willful intent to abandon the children. Sometimes you can get a court to agree that the father shown willful intent to abandon them by never seeing them and trying not to pay child support, even if he's been forced by involuntary means by the state to pay child support. In other states, it matters not a whit that the $20 they managed to extract 3 months ago was like pulling teeth and he quit his job the next month, it counts as contact. Some states, that sort of distinction is clearly spelled out in the law, in others discretion is given to the judge. In our state, $1 child support or a post card within the previous 6 months, no matter what the circumstances counts as "contact." It's still possible to prove abandonment, but not due to lack of contact. I'm pretty sure that the same is true in every state, though the time frame is variable.

(On a personal note, I find this appalling. My dentist routinely sends 2 postcards a year to my kids telling them he can't wait to see them for their next checkup, pretty please call and schedule that. My dentist would qualify as a "father" if he had donated the sperm to the project! I understand the need to protect the rights of the bio parent, but please!!! A postcard every 6 months?? What kind of pathetic piece of turd father would that be!! Like you could parent a kid by postcard every 6 months!)

--Z