Kid stays with the adoptive parents and has visitation/some kind of relationship with the biological relatives.
If the bio relatives push for custody, adoptive parents get on a plane and go somewhere that doesn’t extradite.
That might work if they were wealthy, but they’re clearly not.
Related to this post, does it change people’s mind if the child was a little older when he was abducted? What if he was three? That’s three years of bedtimes and bath times and trips to the park, three birthdays and three Halloweens, three thousand kisses and hugs and snuggles. Having lost a child after all that, having mourned them and died a thousand times, how could any human being resist the chance to get them back? You might be willing and able to share, but it wouldn’t be–couldn’t be–enough to say “I will give up all legal rights and trust the adoptive parents to let me see him”. The need to have some sort of legal, recognized relationship with the child would be overwhelming. Otherwise, the fear of the adoptive parents up and moving away in the middle of the night, or cutting off contact, or whatever would eat you up. You’d be one philosophical difference away from losing your kid forever.
My son is eight months old. If I lost him now, I would ALWAYS want him back, and I don’t think I could ever be content to voluntarily sever my legal rights if he had been stolen from me in the first place, even if I hadn’t seen him in years, even if he didn’t understand it. I wouldn’t kidnap him from the adoptive parents in the middle of the night, I’d be willing to move next door to them, I’d be willing to have him stay there 50% of the time, but I’d never, ever, ever settle for Sundays/2 weeks in the summer type visitation. And I’d never stop fighting to have my parental relationship with him legally established.
Maybe if he’d been kidnapped before I ever held him it would be different. I really can’t say, because even then I gestated him, I felt his movements. Maybe for a father that’s different. But you can’t simply say “Well, if the child doesn’t know you, just accept you’ll never be his parent, you can just play a minor role in his life”. That just couldn’t be.
They managed to cough up 2 years’ salary to adopt the child; I’m sure they can figure out a way to come up with a few grand for plane tickets in an emergency. 
'Course the rich bio dad has enough money to chase them – that part kinda sucks.
I remember those books, I really enjoyed them. I see where you’re coming from, and the books certainly do a good job in illustrating the problems faced by the kid, the adoptive parents, and the birth parents, but HOLY COW, if someone kidnapped my baby, I would never stop trying to get her back, whether it was 15 minutes or 15 months or 15 years.
I would (I hope) have a lot of sympathy for the parents who adopted the baby in good faith, but I would want significant legal custody (either full custody or the most I could get the court to award). Then I would try to be as accommodating as possible to make sure she maintained a good relationship with the adoptive family, including visits, but like Manda JO said, I would never settle for occasional visits with me.
There’s also the issue that, if potential adoptive parents can “adopt” a baby from a shady-as-shit broker and are allowed to keep the kid as long as they manage to spend a couple years without getting caught, then they really have no incentive to not buy kids from whomever will sell them as long as they can plausibly deny that they knew what was going on.
I do understand wanting your child back, but at that point, the kid isn’t really your kid anymore. I mean, isn’t your only attachment the fact that someone tells you that they were once yours? If a lawyer/doctor/whoever suddenly said, “Oops–we made a mistake, that fifteen year old you thought was yours actually isn’t,” would the parents have switched their feelings off? I guess I just don’t understand having feelings of love for someone you haven’t seen since they were 3. I get loving the child that they were…but someone tells you, “This is your kid” and you suddenly feel emotions for them?
I don’t think that full custody or any kind of custody would work in the case of the Face on the Milk Carton books. Especially since the way they went about doing it was pretty creepy – calling the girl by her original name, completely cutting her off from her former life/family, wanting her to call her biological parents “Mom” and “Dad” even though she’d just met them, and then getting upset when it didn’t work out. And if you supposedly love someone, why put them through all that pain? It seemed like the family was a little psychologically off from losing their kid and it showed. Their reaction seemed way sicker than leaving her with the family she’d rather be with.
So let’s switch it around. YOU are now the adoptive parents. You’ve had this baby since he was eight months old. He is now fifteen. He is your kid and you love him to death and you’ve done everything you can for him.
Along comes a woman who has a rightful biological claim to the baby - can prove it. She demands you give the baby back RIGHT FUCK NOW. Your son clings to you and says “Momma, I don’t want to leave. You’re my momma. I don’t know her.”
Will you give up that child just because bio momma showed up?
I think the problem people have with this dilemma is wanting a just solution. There isn’t one. No matter what you do, you violate someone’s rights; no matter what you do, you harm someone who doesn’t deserve it. The choice you are making is whom to harm.
That’s why I agree with Mika et al. Even if you decide to consider the adoptive parents as a unit rather than two persons, you are doing less harm overall by allowing the child to stay with them than by awarding him to either the grandparents or the biological father.
See, the thing is, I know that if I have legal custody, I will do whatever it takes to create a fair and supportive relationship between my child and all their parents. I don’t know that they will do the same. So either way, I am going to fight to be the one with the power, and then graciously share it. Because that’s what is in the best interests of my child.
Are you answering from the point of view of the adoptive parent, or of the bio parent?
If the latter – what if the kid asks you to stop fighting for custody? I can easily imagine a kid being absolutely fucking terrified by such a custody fight, and I can’t see how subjecting the child to that is in her or his best interest (unless the adoptive parents were abusive or some such).
“I don’t believe you. I am the adoptive parent and I don’t believe you are going to fairly share the child for a moment. Why would I believe you? Why should I believe you?”
That is how the parents are going to think. And speaking as an adoptee, I most certainly would not appreciate being yanked out of my home by my biological mother. I don’t really care if she spent ten years searching for me or never cared a whit until she showed up. She is no longer my mother except in blood. And yes, my real mother took care of me until I was four, and then she gave me up - because she knew it was in my best interests.
I don’t think yanking the kid out of the family they are happy in is in any way in their best interests. Child support is not about punishing the absentee parent; it’s about making sure the child is taken care of. This is the same. Adults can live with heartache. Children don’t have the resources yet.
Not “suddenly”, no. I don’t know how many 3-year-olds you’ve been around, but they’re the same person they’ll always be. You make it sound like you’d just have to take someone’s word for it that it’s your kid. If I hadn’t seen my kid since she was 3 and then saw her again at 15, I’d recognize her in a second. At 12 she looks just like she did at 3 and she has the same personality. I’m not saying I’d just yank her away from the people she knew as her parents, but I’d have extremely strong emotions for her. It would be incredibly strange for any parent not to.
In a lot of cases, though, people do look different. I really doubt my parents would be able to recognize me if they hadn’t seen me in twelve years since I was three. If you can’t recognize your kid after that much time has passed, are you really going to be able to emotionally pick up where you left off? And they might have the same personality, but in twelve years they’re not the same person they were. They’ve had so many experiences that have shaped them.
Not exactly, because I would never STOPPED feeling emotions for my child so no, it wouldn’t be “sudden.”
The mistake switch reminds me of that real news story a while back about the little girls switched at the hospital, I believe the switch was an innocent (if horrific) mistake. The one girl turned out to have a genetic heart condition which is what led to the eventual discovery of the switch, I think she was about 10 at the time. As you say, it’s really a sad case for everyone involved, I’m not at all claiming that it’s easy on anyone and I agree the adoptive parents are in a bad position too.
I wouldn’t want to, but I would have to if the bio mother took it to the courts and was able to demonstrate she was in fact the mother, and that the child was removed from her illegally. Which is why I would be sure to take every legal route available to me if I was a bio mother in this situation. To protect myself and ensure that I ultimately gained legal custody of my child.
So, you would look after your best interests before that of your child? Because that’s what you would be doing.
If one presumes for a moment that the child has normal adoptive parents (not abusive or the like) they are just a normal kid like everybody else right now (except that they are adopted which probably doesn’t matter a whit to them). They go to school, come home to their family, have friends, yadda yadda.
You are saying that it would be in the best interest of the child that they be removed from that home and given over to the custody of a perfect stranger than to be left in their comfortable, loving home?
I will grant you that if by some sort of time-shift or dimensional event occurred and I had a biological child out there, I would want to find them and I would want to encourage that child’s parents to help me have a relationship with that child. A non-parental relationship. If they didn’t want to do so, I am pretty sure I would give it up. And it would devastate me. But disrupting the child’s life would be the wrong thing to do.
…Wow. That sounds like a very awkward situation. (And geez, the poor bio-aunt, who – obviously I don’t know the whole story, but man, from what you’ve said, seems to have gotten really shafted with the whole thing…)
IANAL. I think that the adoptive parents should keep the child, but that the biological father and grandparents should get visitation. I think that the biological father’s rights are about equal or slightly more than someone who donated sperm to a sperm bank.
Both. Either way, I’d be my kid’s parent and I’d want the legal right to them. I wouldn’t have to be the only parent–I could accept that my kid has more parents than me, but I could never accept that I wasn’t on the list. Joint legal custody would be fine. Me moving across the country so as not to disrupt schools and such would be fine. Moving in next door, having the kid live with his other parents 50% of the time, all that would be fine. But being just a semi-relative that doesn’t really matter and has no legal claim? Not going to settle for that.
I would almost certainly still fight. It might be miserable, but it wouldn’t be forever. Not having any rights would be forever if they felt threatened by me (as many adoptive parents do towards bioparents) and cut off all contact. What if the kid turns out to be gay, and they send him to a pray-away-the-gay camp and tell me they will cut off contact if I don’t condemn him with them? That’s not legally abusive. What if he gets cancer, and they don’t let me know any details of his care, let alone join in the decision making process?
Again, I could accept reality, that my kid had additional parents besides me. But not that I wasn’t still his parent, too.