I’ve been wondering about the adoption of stepchildren in more unusual setups.
In all adoptions obviously the child’s, um, prospective parent must want and consent to this.
I assume if both the current parents are alive, they must both consent? If one refuses, does that mean there’s no way for the adoption to happen?
Then there’s the child/children. I expect the relevant parent gives consent on behalf of infants and young children. OTOH, I know that older children can refuse to be adopted. I have a friend whose father died when he was 13 and whose mother remarried a couple years later. They had wanted him to be formally adopted and his name changed to the new father’s, but he refused because he felt it would be disrespectful towards his beloved father. Is there a formally set age at which the child’s consent becomes required? Or is this something up to a judge’s opinion on the particular case?
Are all legal bonds with the ‘discarded’ original parent automatically ended before/when the new parentage is established? Like child support payments, any responsibility for paying for college or medical bills? If the new couple of parents happened to die later, would the, uh, ex-parent be looked at as potentially taking charge of the child again?
But the actual original point I was wondering about was, is a child restricted to having only two parents at a time? With same-sex marriages now legal, could a child end up after a divorce/remarriage with two parents of one gender AND one of the other? Say the original marriage was male-female, they divorce, and the mother marries a woman. Would the creation of a second ‘mother-child’ bond require the end of the father-child bond? (And similarly, of course, if it were two father-child bonds formed, or if the first marriage was the same-sex one and the second male-female.)
Or is this all stuff that has yet to be worked out?
I can only speak for my state- but in NY, a child can only have two parents. Assuming both parents were previously in the picture, both must generally consent to the stepparent adoption and the one who is not married to the prospective stepparent must voluntarily surrender his or her parental rights. In certain circumstances ( such as abandonment) consent of that parent is not required and the court will terminate their parental rights. When the parental rights are surrendered/terminated so are parental responsibilities Both rights and responsibilities are effectively transferred to the new stepparent. The judge can talk to a child of any age regarding an adoption to determine if he adoption is in the child’s best interests, but consent of the child is only necessary if the child is older than 14.
In the UK you can only have two parents named on your birth certificate, and adoption means rescinding the parental rights of one or both parents. However, you can have extra people with court-assigned “parental responsibility.” That can be because the child needs to be looked after by someone else - an aunt, say, when the child’s parents aren’t able to provide care - but it is also used to be give third or fourth parents rights and responsibilities regarding a child (beyond four is highly unlikely, and four is very rare) in blended families.
Three mothers isn’t that uncommon in my experience. Two women have a child by donor insemination, they separate, and one of them has a new partner who is assigned parental responsibility. Two mothers plus a father is also not that rare - he’ll be the biological father, they’ll be a couple. I only personally know one lesbian couple where the gay male couple who donated the sperm were also assigned parental responsibility, but I assume there are more.
It tends to work out better than that complicated description makes it sound.
Straight step-families tend, IME, not to go down the formal parental responsibility route that often, but that happens too. It means the step-mother/father can make normal everyday decisions about the child - like signing a form for them to go on a school trip - but the other half of the divorced couple doesn’t lose any of their rights.
I’m it varies by the area, but it sort of depends what you mean by what is legally a “parent”. For example, here in my Canadian province my wife has a son with another guy. Since he won’t allow me to adopt the boy, he retains his “rights” as a parent so to speak, but those are dictated by the particulars of what the court decided upon the ugly breakup of those two. There was an assault conviction of him against her. Bio-dad retains the right to see the boy every other weekend and for a couple weeks during the summer, and him and mom must work together/agree on certain decisions regarding the boy. There is also a decision by the court that he is to pay child support, however he is on life-long disability and basically has no income, therefore isn’t required to actually pay anything.
After I married her and took the boy in and acted as his father for a certain amount of time, I sort of get some parenting rights. It doesn’t seem crystal clear because there are a lot of “it depends”. Sadly we are now divorcing, and I have the option to fight for my rights as a parent figure to have shared custody of the boy, despite not being his father. Realistically I raised him as my own for 9 years while bio-dad was an abusive no-show. However, mom can argue that I must pay child support for him as well, despite him not being my legal child and another man already being ordered to pay child support for him. It depends what kind of relationship the new parent has with the step-child, how long, and at a certain point the child’s age and wishes come into play as well.
So, if I really wanted, I could persuade the courts that I am this step-child’s father figure, provide the majority of support and stability for him, and can provide better than his biological father (which would be pretty easy), and basically be awarded more legal access than bio-dad. Does that count as being a legal parent to the step-child and the boy having 3 parents? Depends on definitions.
On the other hand, one can definitely legally sign away their parental rights. I was the donor for a same-sex couple. Prior to doing anything, we had a legal agreement drawn up which stated what I was donating for what purposes, and that any child that resulted would be the child of the mother and that I waive any legal rights to that child. Conversely, I had no obligation to the child and the mother could not come at me for any support. We both had lawyers who looked it over and agreed it would serve the intended purposes and we signed. Baby was born, and mom’s partner then legally adopted the baby become the second parent as I had waived any legal rights to be one myself. That was 8 years ago and it was relatively uncommon at the time. Don’t know how it would play out in court should the agreement be challenged… that’s the real test. But, this agreement is highly unlikely to ever be challenged, so the best I can say is I “think” it would hold up.
In your case with the sperm donation it sounds like it’s not so much the legal contract itself that protects you, but that the second mother adopted the baby, meaning you rescinded your legal rights and responsibilities. Your agreement was presumably used as evidence for you willingly rescinding your parental rights, but it was the adoption that actually made it legal.
I hope you get to continue to parent your son - the stepson who is your son all but genetically - even if the divorce is acrimonious.
No, it’s the other way around. The second mother was able to adopt because mike had renounced his parental rights, leaving a second “legal parent” slot available. But mike’s renunciation of his rights would have been valid whether there was someone immediately available to adopt the child or not.
California allows for more than 2 legal parents. Sometimes adoption isn’t even required; the court can recognize an additional parent who has held the child out as their own and received the child into their home, where it would be detrimental to that child not to recognize the third parent’s status.
Probably not the other way around - judges in the US do not generally allow someone to renounce their parental rights and responsibilities unless 1) there is someone waiting right there to assume the responsibilities or 2) both parents are surrendering their rights, freeing the child for adoption. Child support is considered to be a right of the child which the custodial parent cannot waive. The custodial parent of course doesn’t have to enforce it, but that doesn’t mean some other entity will not.
Even if Parent A wants to allow Parent B to surrender their rights and signs paperwork and all, that doesn’t mean a court has to recognize it. I remember reading about a case ( before same-sex marriage became legal legal throughout the US ) where a man informally donated sperm to a lesbian couple. The non-bio mother couldn’t adopt ( not legal then and there) , but the bio -mother and donor signed paperwork agreeing that the man would have no parental rights or any responsibility to support the child. Everything was fine - until the couple broke up and the bio-mother lost her job and applied for public assistance. At which point the state went after the sperm donor for child support, since the law only considered sperm donors not to be parents if their was a physician involved in the donation and there was none in this case. When I read about it, the court had ordered him to pay child support, although that may have changed later.
Yeah…on further thought, the contract between mike and his friend wouldn’t have constituted a legally valid renunciation of rights. There’s a form you have to file with the court for that, and as doreen says the court has the option of not accepting it; you can’t just decide to renounce in order to get out of child support.
However, at least in Illinois it is common for private adoption agencies to take over legal guardianship once the parents have renounced their rights; obviously their plan is to find a permanent home for the child, but it’s not necessary for a specific set of adoptive parents to be identified ahead of time.
In my kid’s case, the biological parents were not on good terms. Dad refused to sign the papers to renounce his rights, but also refused to make any effort toward actually seeing, much less parenting, the child. Mom refused to renounce her rights until he did, because she didn’t want any chance of him winding up parenting the kid. For a couple months, the baby was in legal limbo, in a private foster home affiliated with the adoption agency. Finally a judge got sick of Dad’s BS, ordered his rights terminated, and thereafter all was smooth sailing.
And this is where it’s complicated some places and perhaps simple in others. We are talking about different countries/states/provinces. There are probably 20 different yet correct answers to this question.
I honestly don’t know what would happen in our case, which will basically just not get tested. But each “side” hired their own lawyer who looked at the relevant legislation, talked to each other, even re-worded some things from the first draft, and understood the intent of what we (the clients) wanted. The lawyers worked more as a team rather than hostile adversaries. So, hopefully in my location this type of contract would hold up. We paid for professional advice (shrug).
I could speculate more about the whys and how’s, but that’s going beyond my actual knowledge and the bounds of factual questions, so I’ll just leave my examples there.
My state would not allow this third person to be a legal “parent” but has a sort of legal fiction in which it recognizes the third person as a “psychological parent” giving the person standing before the court to ask for visitation with the child in the child’s best interests–but would not ever be considered a legal parent.
Yeah, California is a real outlier that grants full parental rights in that situation. Here’s a scenario I’ve seen variations of play out multiple times. Woman and Man A have a baby. Maybe they’re married, or maybe he signs the birth certificate; either way, he gets solid legal status as the father. But the relationship ends and Man A becomes a background character, still visiting from time to time but not really being much of a dad. Woman gets serious with Man B, who raises the child as his own without formally adopting him. But then Woman develops, say, a meth problem, and the CPS gets involved. They won’t leave the child in her care, not until she finishes a drug program. Man A isn’t in a position to step up; he’s working two jobs and renting a room in a house with sketchy folks he wouldn’t leave alone with his pet rock. They could make Man B a foster caregiver, but there’s a whole hideous red tape approval process for that (home inspection, CPR classes, background checks, etc.), and meanwhile this poor kid just wants to sleep in his own bed and be cared for by the guy he’s been calling “dad” for the last 5 years. The dependency judge can do that. He can find, pursuant to Family Code sections 7611(d) and 7612(c) that Man B qualifies as the child’s legally presumed father and that it would be detrimental to the child not to recognize the relationship, and release the child to his father–Man B. And then, if Mom and Man A never get their acts together, the judge can eventually close the case with Man B having sole custody.
Thank you for all the interesting replies! It seems all the variations I was wondering about have already occurred – which I guess shouldn’t really surprise me, given that people vary so much.
It sounds like it can be confusing at times, but it’s probably better for a child to have extra people interested in their welfare than suffer for the lack of attention and care.
Perhaps it was the case I was reading about way back when - not sure if there was a formal agreement, but the situation was not a break-up; one of the couple developed (breast?) cancer, so they ended up using Medicare due to lack of funds. Michigan had the deadbeat-dad rule that Medicare did not apply unless the missing parent had been chased by the Welfare people to fulfill back child support payments. The welfare department, always putting the well-being of the child foremost, threatened the couple that if they did not name the father, they would lose government support, consequently be judged unable to care for their daughter and the child would be put into foster care - plus the sick parent would lose access to Medicare. As a result, some good Samaritan donor suddenly found himself suddenly on the hook for tens of thousands in back support payments. IIRC this was before the days when gay couples could formally adopt.
Canada has its Supreme Court decision going back several decades (90’s?). If someone cohabitating with a single parent takes on the role of parent, that emotional bond with the child is not something that can be broken on a whim or just because the couple break up. The rough rule of thumb is if the new “parent” acts like a parent then they assume that role and cannot arbitrarily end it. Examples cited included things like signing school permission slips, taking child to doctor appointments, etc. as proof of the relationship. The “men’s rights” crowd point out this could end up with the mother collecting full child support from multiple ex-partners.
A wrinkle nobody has talked about is inheritance. I think it was Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land even back in the 1960’s that offhand mentions a child is the legal offspring of a married couple, but biologically the child of a different father. Depending on the country’s laws where the fathers reside, the child therefore was entitled to an inheritance from all three (who had died). Presumably a “parent” could exclude a child in a will, but by failing to mention a child in a will, does biology come into play? Does renouncing parental rights to adoptive parents also implicitly remove the child’s claim to the parent’s estate?
Generally no, if the law recognizes that the child has (another) legal father. If not, then modern laws recognize the unmarried paternity of the father. At common law, a father had no rights to “bastard” children and did not exist if he wasn’t married to the mother.
In my state, and I think it is the rule everywhere, a child born of a marriage is presumptively (until proven otherwise) a product of the marriage. As you noted, this rule used to be absolute until very recently.
Yes, an adoption, for all purposes, makes everything as if the adoptive parent is the “real” parent and severs all legal ties with biological/other parents.
I’m pretty sure the Kansas case is the one I remember. I’m also pretty sure that every state has that rule where public assistance will not pay if there is a parent out there who can and should be paying child support. It is my guess that in these cases, the “problem” is that the mother* didn’t say “I have no idea of the father’s full name or how to contact him - he was just some guy I met in a bar” but rather waved the agreement and essentially said " Oh no, we agreed he didn’t have to pay child support"
It almost has to be the mother - if the father had custody and was applying for assistance, he would have at least some information about the mother, even if it wasn’t accurate.
I adopted my stepdaughters without the consent of each bio fathers. One had not seen her father since she was about 3, the other never saw her father. The judge allowed the adoptions to go through based on abandonment by their bio fathers. My now ex also never listed the bio fathers on the birth certificates. The eldest was born in California, the father part on her BC is blank. The youngest was born in Utah, her BC say unknown for the father. I consider this one of the best things that ever happened to me, especially now that I am a grandfather and great grandfather.
I believe a cousin of mine had to post in the newspaper “looking” for the bio father. It had to be done multiple times over a few month time period. They used any available tricks to make it small, unnoticeable, and in the smallest distribution papers that legally met the definition for legal notices. It was a pretty scary time period for her. Who wants to “invite” an abusive ex back into your family’s life just to get a signature. It worked, proved abandonment, and the judge signed off.