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player ready...After four years of heartbreak and anger, the legal tug-of-war known as the “Baby Richard” case finally appears to be over.
But could such a mess happen again?
Of course it could. No law can safeguard against every conceivable situation.
But it is less likely to occur again because of a rush of new state laws that make it harder for adoptions to turn into long and painful court battles where everyone-especially the children-emerges a loser.
In fact, cases like “Baby Richard” represent a tiny fraction of adoptions. Yet, they carry incredible weight in the public’s mind, largely because of scenes like the one Sunday outside the boy’s adoptive home in Schaumburg when the wailing 4-year-old was turned over to the biological father he had met the hour before.
Despite state law reforms prompted by the rare Richard-type case, some potential parents refuse to take even the smallest risk. Instead, they increasingly are turning to international adoptions where because of distance, language and often unknown birth parents, the chance of winding up in court is almost non-existent.
The truth is families are fairly unlikely to end up in court anyway.
“I don’t think there’s anything that will guarantee that everything is perfect,” said Marilyn Panichi, executive director of the Adoption Information Center of Illinois. “All we can do is make the system better and better. . . . What we have now works.”
The “Richard” case prompted the Illinois legislature to pass a law last year that would allow adoptive parents to keep custody of a child, even if an adoption were invalid, should it be in the child’s best interest to stay with them.
That law’s impact is uncertain, and it’s currently undergoing its first legal challenge in a Cook County case where a woman is seeking to adopt a child she has had temporary custody of for 18 months.
The law also created a registry for unmarried fathers to establish their parental rights. Last week, the state Senate approved a bill that would substantially strengthen that measure by requiring single mothers to list the fathers of their children with the registry except in cases of rape, incest or if the mother felt it would put her in danger.
Many other states have instituted similar laws, legal experts say.
“It’s fair to say there is a trend to start defining what actions an unwed biological father needs to take to preserve his rights to a child,” said Rita Meiser, an adoption attorney in Phoenix. “The trend is to start requiring some accountability. What exactly should we expect from an unwed father to preserve his rights?”
In Indiana, which has one of the strictest guidelines for biological fathers, those men who don’t sign the state’s registry are assumed to have given their consent to any pending adoption. In Illinois, those fathers could still establish their parental rights through other means.
The Illinois law is “not an unreasonable approach,” said Steven Kirsh, an adoption attorney in Indianapolis, who helped draft the Indiana law. “But it creates uncertainty.”
Because state law varies so much, some advocates are promoting measures that would establish consistent adoption guidelines throughout the country.
Chief among these is the Uniform Adoption Act, a controversial plan by a group of legal scholars called the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws.
Six states (not Illinois) are currently considering the uniform adoption act, which was approved in February by the American Bar Association House of Delegates.
The 172-page document covers the full gamut of the adoption process, but among its most controversial proposals are those that would limit the time during which someone could challenge an adoption.
“Whatever appeals rights you have run six months after the adoption is decreed,” said John McCabe, the national conference’s legal counsel and legislative director.
Some birth parents’ rights groups, however, have opposed the uniform adoption act because they feel it favors adoptive parents.
“With good legislation it’s possible to make these cases rare, but I don’t think its possible to eliminate them entirely,” McCabe said.
Even the smallest risk of losing her child was too much for Christine Thatcher. “I was unwilling to take that chance,” she said.
Instead, Thatcher and her husband, David, of Grayslake, opted for adopting Russian brothers, Oleg, 7 and Maxim, 4, whose alcoholic parents lost custody of the boys in their hometown of Vladimir.
“Now-with biological parents getting the children back at age 4-that would kill me,” said Thatcher, referring to the “Richard” case.
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“People are becoming more and more afraid to adopt in the United States because they do not trust the courts and the state legislatures that their adoption will hold together,” said William Pierce, president of the National Council For Adoption in Washington.
This certainly is true for Peoria’s Cathie Trent, whose 11-month-old daughter, Savannah, peered happily from her mom’s backpack. “I didn’t want any complications, any messes at all,” said Trent, who adopted Savannah from China in a process that took only four months from start to finish, when Trent and her husband journeyed to China to pick up their new daughter.
“I’ve heard a lot of them (adoptive parents) verbalize this to me. `It was a real rough trip, but at least I don’t now have to worry about someone taking them back. No one is going to knock on my door,’ ” said Margaret Ann Cole who runs the European Adoption Consultants in Cleveland that places about 100 children a year from 11 foreign countries.
Other experts said that fear of losing a child is just one in a list of reasons that Americans choose to go to foreign countries to adopt. “Concern about private (U.S.) adoptions not being as firm or as irrevocable as they would like,” is one reason, said Charlotte Vick, assistant director of the North American Council on Adoptable Children in St. Paul, Minn.
But, a more often mentioned reason, she said, is that often it takes less time and that older couples or single parents are not frowned upon, as they often are in domestic adoptions.
Reliable numbers are hard to come by, but a small survey of 200 families by the Immigration and Naturalizaton Service in 1991, before the Jessica and “Richard” cases got nationwide attention, showed 10 percent of the families questioned said that concern about “birth parents’ rights” as a reason to choose foreign rather than domestic adoption.
That number would likely be higher now, experts say.
Numbers compiled by the National Council For Adoption on intercountry adoptions over the last 10 years show large fluctuations from year to year, depending on policies of various countries. For instance, the number of Korea-born children adopted by Americans in the survey varied from a high of 6,188 in 1986 to a low of 1,765 in 1993.
Overall, foreign adoptions in 1994 were 8,195, almost the same as the number for 10 years earlier (8,327) but the trend is on the increase in the last several years with 1994’s number larger than 1993 (7,348) and 1993 larger than the 6,536 tallied in 1992.