Birth Fathers Getting Babies Adopted Out From Under Them In Utah
NumberSix spotted this and wrote:
I saw this on the NBC Nightly News earlier tonight and was properly horrified. Apparently Utah's laws on fathers' rights are making it a haven for women who want to give babies up for adoption without the agreement of the fathers.This kind of consent by default is much like how men in California "accept" financial responsibility for kids that aren't even theirs. In this case, fathers who want to raise the children have twenty days from notification to dispute the adoption.
The man in the video was sent a text message from his girlfriend, who contacted an adoption agency in Utah without telling him, saying she was giving the baby up for adoption. She did not tell him when she went into labor. He had twenty days from that text to file for paternal rights to the baby. That sounds nice and official, right? By the time he knew his baby was in Salt Lake City with an adoptive family, the deadline had expired.
The other man in the video had a girlfriend who lied about having a miscarriage, then later called him to say the baby was going to be born in Utah. A deadline he didn't even know he had was already looming. I thought you'd be interested in this sort of inversion of paternity fraud and how Utah is screwing men who want to raise their children. The local government doesn't seem to want to do much about it, either.
The short video is here. There is also a longer Dateline special here.
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