It’s likely they mentioned the arrangement in a early interview before realizing what the result would be. Bureaucracy and honesty or openness often don’t coexist well.
Interesting. I always wondered in the case of private adoptions which (allegedly) can cost tens of thousands of dollars, how it avoids the child trafficking laws. And… where all the money goes. Allegedly for the mother’s “expenses”?
IIRC, the case in Michigan mentioned that the exception for sperm donation only applied if it was done by a licensed physician from a registered medical sperm bank. A turkey baster DIY did not count.
I believe that in most states there are regulations regarding which expenses can be paid and for what period of time they can be paid - for example, in NY only 90 days of living expenses can be paid, in some states only certain specified expenses can be paid ( for example, you can pay rent but you can’t buy her a new car) and in most if not all states, the payments cannot be contingent on consenting to the adoption. IOW if she doesn’t consent, the prospective adoptive parents don’t get the money back - that’s how these arrangements get around being seen as baby-selling.
A lot of the money doesn’t go to the mother though. There are lawyers’ fees, ( possibly including a fee for the mother’s lawyer) , adoption agency fees if an agency is used , home study fees, advertising expenses etc.
Right. And in addition, in most states a mother cannot consent to an adoption until after the child is born. Any contract which said, “In exchange for $Y, I promise to put this child up for adoption if born alive” is null and void, and cannot be the object of recovery under any contract or unjust enrichment theory.
It is sort of a compromise as I remember the Baby X case from the 1980s where a hell of a lot of people thought that the whole idea of surrogacy should be illegal in all of its forms.
I assume you mean “…in exchange for $Y in expenses, …”
Adoption agencies definitely have legitimate expenses. The one we used had maybe half a dozen social workers, plus support staff and a largish office. We paid in the neighborhood of $20,000 and they do about 30 adoptions a year, so I don’t think anyone’s getting rich there. They also paid for the birthmother’s expenses, avoiding the potential ethical pitfalls of having the prospective parents involved in that negotiation.
Having said that, I think there is definitely some unethical stuff with private adoptions facilitated by attorneys (as opposed to agencies). There are some attorneys out there who appear to have a near-miraculous ability to quickly locate babies for anyone willing to pay two or three times as much as a reputable agency would charge.
Unless those multiple people have divergent attitudes about the appropriate welfare of the child and the child is used as a pawn…which is why the legal boundaries exist. As long as everyone is on the same page, there usually is no need to involve the legal system.
Bump.
Article in WaPo today on the subject.
My understanding of the child support rules in Canada - courts have ruled that should a person establish themselves as in a parental role for a time with a child, they cannot arbitrarily break that bond, even if there is no legal connection. A man who cohabits with a mother and child could find after 6 months or so, that he is obliged to pay child support should he move out.
My understanding of this rule is that it does not supersede other such arrangements, so the “men’s rights” complainers point out that a woman could assemble a large number of different men all paying child support; and that the charts for calculating this support amount do not take into account that others are also contributing, just the mother’s contribution.
It was maybe 20 or so years ago in the news that Quebec, for example, allowed the support arrangements for a child to be recalculated if the man also became liable to support other children. before that, once one level of support was established, it could not be altered.
Are you sure? I think it is a bit more nuanced than that. For example, if I move in with a woman and put up with her child but don’t act as a parent, then I am never on the hook for those expenses. I think, and maybe it is only my state thing, that if I move in an make a sort of declaration that, while we know that her real father is absent, I will act as your father.
Once I have made that statement and established that relationship…and all assuming that her real father is absent either through death or choice…I cannot then “back out” and just say, “Oh, I’m a legal stranger to this girl.”
In California, where we’re relatively quick to recognize non-biological fathers (when they wanna be), there was a fairly recent child support case that basically said “no, we’re not gonna disincentivize stand-up guy behavior by making dudes into fathers against their will.” County of Los Angeles v. Christopher W. (2019) 41 Cal.App.5th 827. TL;DR, mom’s boyfriend stepped up to help raise her kid by a deadbeat dad. He even posted some pics on Facebook where he called himself the kid’s daddy, which is the kind of thing I’d put before a judge as evidence of “holding the child out as his own” as required by statute if I were trying to get him paternity status. But this wasn’t a dependency case; it came in to court because the county went after the biological deadbeat father for child support, and he tried to claim that mom’s boyfriend should be considered the dad for child support purposes instead. And it almost worked–the trial court agreed, but the appellate court reversed. I wholeheartedly agree with the latter decision.