Adoption Act: Uniformity

For five years, lawyers with the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws have been drafting a uniform adoption act to untangle the mass of conflicting rules in various states.

In Michigan, for instance, private placements are barred and consents must be executed in court before a judge.

In Iowa, birth mothers may not consent to an adoption until 72 hours after birth, and private placements are permitted.

New York requires an out-of-court consent with legal representation for both birth and adoptive parents. Birth mothers in New York and California have 45 days to withdraw their consent, which triggers a “best interest” hearing. In best interest hearings, the longer the adopted parents have had custody, the more likely they are to prevail, said UC Berkeley law professor Joan Heifetz Hollinger, who is helping to draft the Uniform Adoption Act.

Few states agree on how to deal with fathers’ rights, whether records should be open or closed, or whether adoptive parents should be screened before or after they adopt.

The Uniform Adoption Act is expected to be completed next year, and then sent to state legislatures for consideration.

It proposes to protect birth parents by requiring that their consent be given through a court or their own legal representative. The birth mother would have five days to revoke her consent. In the event of a conflict between birth and adoptive parents, the criteria would lean toward the birth parents’ legal claims and psychological capacity to parent. The act also would:

* Prevent policies that require racial and ethnic matching.

* Keep adoption records closed but enable birth parents to confidentially provide adoptive parents with medical and genetic information to help them care for the child. It would also enable neutral intermediaries to search for birth parents and ask if they would be willing to disclose their names to the child at age 18.

* Encourage strong efforts to notify fathers. Those who want to claim paternal rights must respond to notification within 30 days. If not, their rights would be terminated.

* Require pre-placement evaluation of adoptive parents. Neither marital status, age, nor sexual orientation would be a criterion.

“We think the act provisions would do a lot to prevent the fiasco that created the DeBoer case,” said Hollinger.