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- Xref: sparky soc.men:23239 alt.dads-rights:3498
- Path: sparky!uunet!gatech!asuvax!ncar!noao!arizona!bweiss
- From: bweiss@cs.arizona.edu (Beth Weiss)
- Newsgroups: soc.men,alt.dads-rights
- Subject: Re: adoption rules
- Message-ID: <30446@optima.cs.arizona.edu>
- Date: 25 Jan 93 18:22:35 GMT
- References: <1jkvmeINNkjs@gap.caltech.edu> <C181rH.2D6@cs.psu.edu> <1jnmblINNlqn@gap.caltech.edu> <C1BL79.9nz@cs.psu.edu> <1jss5tINNkd2@gap.caltech.edu>
- Sender: news@cs.arizona.edu
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- Organization: U of Arizona, CS Dept, Tucson
- Lines: 38
-
- peri@cco.caltech.edu (Michal Leah Peri) writes:
- |> Don, I've thought about it alot this weekend. I've concluded that
- |> the *good* of protecting the father's right to stop an adoption is not
- |> worth the *bad* of subjecting the mother and child to the risk of
- |> injury from an abusive father. Thus I cannot condone a legal
- |> requirement for paternal notification.
-
- I can support a requirement for paternal notification. I'm not sure
- what to do in those cases where the mother doesn't know (or claims
- she doesn't know) who the father is, though.
-
- Scenario: Woman has baby she knows she can't support, and wishes to
- give up for adoption. She claims she doesn't know who the father
- is.
-
- Now what?
-
- Options:
- 1) refuse to allow Mom to give up Baby, even though she doesn't want
- the baby, and that would make her (I would think) more likely to
- abuse the child
-
- 2) Force her to list all possible fathers and contact them all to
- see what they want to do. If a possible father wants custody if the
- child is his, then do DNA tests to see if he's really the father.
- If all possibles don't care if the child is put for adoption, then
- there's no problem.
-
- 3) Figure that if she doesn't know, whoever she names would likely
- be uninterested/disbelieving that they were the father.
-
- #1 seems as if it would leave to child abuse. #2 sounds fairest to
- me. #3 doesn't give men enough credit for decency.
-
- What other ideas?
-
- --Beth Weiss
- bweiss@cs.arizona.edu
-