Ohio Man Seeks Return of His Daughter Taken in Adoption Try

www.fathersandfamilies.org ^ | 07/12/10 | Robert Franklin, Esq.

[fathers1]

Doss said the birth mother signed an affidavit stating that she didn’t know the identity of the birth father. “That was what she signed and what we believed,” she said. Several weeks later, she learned that Mills had filed a brief in court claiming to be the father. “We didn’t know if that were true or if he wanted custody,” she said. “The birth mother was adamant he wasn’t the father. It wasn’t until the end of September that we got the result of the DNA testing.”

And so began the heart-rending case of a little girl she named Vanessa, her father, Benjamin Mills and the woman who wants to adopt her, Stacey Doss. It was always a simple matter that became a tangled web for one reason only - Vanessa’s birth mother decided to place her for adoption and lie about her father. Genetic testing has proven that man to be Benjamin Mills of Ohio, but the mom swore to all and sundry that she didn’t know who the dad was.

Ohio has a Putative Father Registry, and Mills had filed the appropriate forms within the appropriate time. According to his attorney,

Before his daughter was one month old, Mr. Mills had registered with the Ohio putative father registry and filed a complaint for paternity and custody of his daughter. In fact, Mr. Mills had filed his complaint for paternity and custody before Ms. Doss was approved as the placement through the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children and before Ms. Doss and his daughter left the state of Ohio.”

In other words, everyone involved in the matter, including Doss, knew that there was a father who knew about his child and had done everything necessary to preserve his parental rights. But they went right ahead anyway. Doss took Vanessa to California and now she’s enraged that the courts have done what they’ve been required to do all along - decide the matter of custody. Benjamin Mills has rights to his child; he always has had.

What adoption expert Joe Kroll said about the “Baby Jessica” case is no less true of this one:

“The adoptive parents said, ‘we have raised this child from day one,’ but I’m sorry, the law was broken from day one.”

Kroll noted that it’s disingenuous for prospective adoptive parents to argue that the child shouldn’t be “taken from the only home they’ve known” if they’ve been fighting contested custody since the child’s infancy. He advised, “When you as an adoptive parent sees something that doesn’t look quite right, resolve it as expeditiously as possible. If something hasn’t been done right or by the book, don’t push on. Fighting it is a big mistake because you’ll probably lose in the end.”

The news media want us to feel sorry for Doss. This article, for example pulls every heartstring there is (Dayton Daily News, 7/4/10). But seen rightly, Doss shot herself in the foot. She apparently figured that she could take the child and, during the time it took for litigation to run its course, the courts would conclude that, while Mills’s rights were violated, it would be too traumatic for Vanessa to be separated from Doss. That used to happen all the time. But, as Joe Kroll said, “the law was broken from day one” and Doss helped to break it.

For his part, Mills is no prize. He’s got a criminal record. Apparently he’s fathered other children with whom he has little or no relationship. None of that speaks well for him, but under the law, it doesn’t mean that his children can be taken from him, no questions asked, either. But that’s exactly what Vanessa’s birth mother tried to do. She didn’t want the child and she determined that Mills wouldn’t have her either. (After all, if Mills got custody, she’d be stuck paying support for a child she didn’t want in the first place.) And as we see so often, the system of adoption complied with mother’s wishes.

But in this game, Mills holds a winning hand. He’s the father; he filed with the Registry and filed his paternity suit. He can’t have his parental rights terminated without a hearing. His rights can be terminated because he’s unfit or because he’s a danger to the child. As far as has been reported, he’s none of those things.

Meanwhile, Vanessa has no clue that anyone but Doss is her parent. By all accounts, she’s a lively little girl who won’t understand a bit if she’s suddenly removed from Doss and placed in Mills’s care. Of course that would be handled gradually, but the fact remains that the one to suffer the most heartache in all this will be the one least capable of doing so.

The whole reason for that is the birth mother’s deception - her attempt to unilaterally deny Mills his daughter. Adoption doesn’t have to be complicated. Doss and the adoption agency could have filed an adoption proceeding and notified Mills. If he resisted the adoption, someone would have had to prove that his rights should be terminated and that, as a practical matter would mean proving him in some way unfit. Whoever decided to take the back-stairs approach obviously didn’t think that was likely. So the birth mother lied, Doss went along with it and eventually, Vanessa will pay the price.

Predictably, the news media have been playing this as a story about the anguish of Stacey Doss. That is unquestionably real. As surely as Vanessa has bonded with her, she’s bonded with Vanessa. But there’s a much larger truth here. Every adult involved in this shady deal knew or should have known that there was the potential for this “adoption” to be contested by the father. Every adult involved decided to try to circumvent the father’s rights. That proved to be the wrong decision.

As unhappy as Stacey Doss surely is, she should get together with the birth mother and the adoption agency and take a long look in the mirror. If they want to find out how this went wrong, they’ll find the answer there.

[Persevero]

Fair enough, perhaps your stats are more recent than mine.

Some of those “married” women may be separated or whatever.

[sitetest]

Dear Persevero,

“Some of those ‘married’ women may be separated or whatever.”

Actually, that group comprises roughly another 15% or so of women obtaining abortions.

Never-married women, according to these sources, comprise about two-thirds of women obtaining abortions.

sitetest