Florida Wants All the Details From Mothers in Adoption Notices

MIAMI — Can a woman be compelled by law to publish details of her sex life in the newspaper, including the names of the men she has been intimate with? In Florida she can, if she is offering her child for adoption.

The law, intended to give biological fathers a greater say in the adoption process, has stirred controversy nationwide. Opponents call it a latter-day “scarlet letter” meant to shame promiscuous women. Even the state senator who championed the measure admits that it has had unintended results.

“The law is anti-adoption, anti-family, anti-child, anti-woman,” contended Nashville attorney Bob Tuke, president of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys. “There is no other law like it in America.”

Jeffery M. Leving, a Chicago attorney and advocate for fathers’ rights, countered: “I like the law because it recognizes that fathers are parents too. It recognizes that they should have notice before a child is given away forever.”

Under the law, if a Florida mother seeks to give up her child for adoption and a search has failed to turn up the father, she is required to publish a legal notice giving her full name, height, weight and coloring--plus the names or descriptions of every possible father and the dates and places of their sexual encounters.

The ads are supposed to run once a week for four weeks and must appear in newspapers in any city or county where the child might have been conceived.

“This is such an intrusion of a woman’s privacy and of the privacy of the men who were involved with her,” said Charlotte H. Danciu, a Boca Raton, Fla., attorney who specializes in adoptions and has gone to court to challenge the law. “And the men named in the newspaper may not even be the father.”

The goal of the law, which was passed overwhelmingly by the Florida Legislature last year, is to locate as many biological fathers as possible and prevent the bitter, drawn-out battles that can break up adoptive families after children have been placed.

But when told of the statute’s publication clause, some pregnant women have walked out of Danciu’s office and had abortions, the lawyer said.

On July 24, in response to a suit brought by Danciu, Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Peter Blanc ruled that the law should not apply to rape victims. The lawyer is representing six clients, including a 12-year-old rape victim, who want to offer their offspring for adoption but haven’t been able to locate the fathers or don’t know their identities. Danciu plans to appeal to have the law declared unconstitutional for adults and minors alike.

“Under the judge’s ruling, if there was consensual sex, which in the case of one of my clients involves a 14-year-old who slept with numerous men and boys in her school, she would have to put these ads in her hometown newspaper, with their names, plus their descriptions: eye color, hair color, weight, height,” Danciu said. “It’s repulsive. I refuse to do it.”

The law’s chief sponsor was state Sen. Walter “Skip” Campbell Jr., a Democrat from Broward County. Even he has acknowledged that when lawmakers in Tallahassee approved the measure, they weren’t mindful of all of the possibilities--including preteen girls becoming mothers. In a letter to the president of the Florida Senate last week, Campbell said that a “well-intentioned” reform had had “significant unintended consequences.”

He suggested that Senate committee staff members be convened to find a remedy.

Members of Campbell’s staff said he is on vacation and unavailable for further comment. The senator previously had appeared on television to defend the law but failed to sway some of the state’s opinion makers. The Daytona Beach News-Journal, for instance, denounced the legislation in its editorial columns as “ignominious.”

Other critics wonder whether the measure wasn’t, in the final analysis, futile. Typically, legal announcements are printed in minute type on the back pages of newspapers. “To assume that a man sits around reading the legal notices, well, is that what men do?” Tuke asked. “The law is foolish and ineffective.”

Danciu said she was aware of only one advertisement so far in accordance with the law, following the birth of a girl this year in Altamonte Springs. The mother’s name and description were given in the notice printed in the Tallahassee Democrat, but the woman was unable or unwilling to provide any information about the father--including his name, age or race. The notice, addressed only to “an unknown male,” advised him his parental rights would be terminated forever if he didn’t take legal action.

The measure became law in October without the signature of Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, who has noted numerous problems with it. Officials in the governor’s office say he supports an alternative way of protecting fathers’ rights--one already in use in many other states. Called fathers’ registries, this system permits men who believe they may have fathered a child to place their names on a confidential list, which must be checked during adoption proceedings.

“We should be making adoption easier, not more difficult, and not stigmatizing women who are trying to do the right thing,” Bush spokeswoman Elizabeth Hirst told reporters in Tallahassee.

According to Tuke, who helped draft the 1996 revision of Tennessee’s adoption code, at least 30 states maintain fathers’ registries. “They work and are constitutional and confidential and give the birth father the power to do something affirmative. He doesn’t have to sit by passively and expect that someone is going to publish something.”

Leving, the Chicago attorney who founded the Fatherhood Educational Institute, said the registries are no miracle solution.

“We have one in Illinois, but it’s ineffective. You have to register as the father within 30 days of the birth or you can lose all rights to your child. But there’s no requirement that you be informed of the birth,” he said.

Florida’s adoption law was born of the painful controversy over one child, known as Baby Emily, which is still very much on legislators’ minds.

The girl became the object of a three-year custody battle after her father, a convicted rapist, opposed her adoption. The dispute was settled in 1995 after the Florida Supreme Court ruled in favor of the adoptive parents while instructing lawmakers to set a deadline for challenging adoptions. The 106-page law approved in 2001 prohibits anyone from contesting an adoption after two years.

Danciu, who went to Tallahassee to lobby against some of the law’s provisions, recalls a distinct misogynistic tinge to some legislators’ pronouncements.

“I heard the comment made, ‘If she is sleeping around, what kind of reputation does she have to protect anyway?’ It didn’t click that it was going to affect men too,” she said.

“Obviously, it will be embarrassing to some women, but people need to take responsibility for their actions,” Leving said of Florida’s law. “If women and men engage in indiscriminate recreational sexual activity, they have to accept the responsibility.”