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9/21/2015 Surrogates and Couples Face a Maze of Laws, State by State The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/18/us/surrogatesandcouplesfaceamazeoflawsstatebystate.html?_r=0 1/9
http://nyti.ms/1r0hoTF
U.S. | PREGNANCY FOR PAY
Surrogates and Couples Face a Maze ofLaws, State by StateBy TAMAR LEWIN SEPT. 17, 2014
When Crystal Kelley, a Connecticut woman who had signed a contract to bear a
baby for a couple in her state, was five months pregnant, a routine ultrasound
showed that the fetus had a cleft palate, a brain cyst and heart defects. The
couple for whom she was carrying the baby asked her to have an abortion,
offering to pay her $10,000 to do so.
But instead, Ms. Kelley, a single mother of two, fled to Michigan, where
surrogacy contracts are unenforceable. So in June 2012, when she had the
baby there, Ms. Kelley was listed on the birth certificate as the mother,
although she had no genetic connection to the infant, made with the husband’s
sperm and an egg from an anonymous donor. The little girl was adopted by a
family that had other specialneeds children.
While surrogacy is far more accepted in the United States than in most
countries, and increasing rapidly (more than 2,000 babies will be born
through it here this year), it remains, like abortion, a polarizing and charged
issue. There is nothing resembling a national consensus on how to handle it
9/21/2015 Surrogates and Couples Face a Maze of Laws, State by State The New York Times
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and no federal law, leaving the states free to do as they wish.
Seventeen states have laws permitting surrogacy, but they vary greatly in
both breadth and restrictions. In 21 states, there is neither a law nor a
published case regarding surrogacy, according to Diane Hinson, a Washington,
D.C., lawyer who specializes in assisted reproduction. In five states, surrogacy
contracts are void and unenforceable, and in Washington, D.C., where new
legislation has been proposed, surrogacy carries criminal penalties. Seven
states have at least one court opinion upholding some form of surrogacy.
California has the most permissive law, allowing anyone to hire a woman
to carry a baby and the birth certificate to carry the names of the intended
parents. As a result, California has a booming surrogacy industry, attracting
clients from around the world.
Seeking Middle Ground
In many states, surrogacy remains a political third rail, drawing
opposition from antiabortion groups, opponents of samesex marriage, the
Roman Catholic Church, some feminists, and those who see surrogacy as an
experiment that could have unforeseen longrange effects.
The issue has produced some strange bedfellows: In several states, for
example, Kathleen Sloan, an abortion rights advocate who is a board member
of the National Organization for Women, has worked with Catholic and
conservative groups to oppose surrogacy because she sees it as a form of
exploitation. But most other feminists have backed off.
“It’s rarer than it was in the ’80s and ’90s to see feminists flatout
opposing surrogacy,” said Sara Ainsworth, director of legal advocacy at the
National Advocates for Pregnant Women. “But it’s complex and there’s a lot of
discomfort surrounding the issue, so many women’s groups have not taken a
formal position.”
9/21/2015 Surrogates and Couples Face a Maze of Laws, State by State The New York Times
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In Louisiana, Minnesota and New Jersey, after the state legislatures
handily passed bills in the last few years allowing surrogacy in some situations,
Republican governors vetoed them.
Many states are now considering certain limits and trying to find middle
ground.
“My sense of the big picture is that we’re moving toward laws like the one
in Illinois, which accepts that the demand for surrogacy isn’t going away but
recognizes the hazards and adds regulations and protections,” said Joanna L.
Grossman, a family law professor at the Hofstra University law school.
The Illinois law requires medical and psychological screenings for all
parties before a contract is signed and stipulates that surrogates be at least 21,
have given birth at least once before and be represented by an independent
lawyer, paid for by the intended parents.
The law allows only gestational surrogacy, in which an embryo is placed in
the surrogate’s uterus, not the traditional kind, in which the surrogate provides
the egg. In addition, it requires that the embryo created in a petri dish must
have either an egg or a sperm from one of the intended parents.
“That eliminates some of the concerns about designer babies,” Professor
Grossman said.
Lawmakers in New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere are
considering measures to allow surrogacy.
But not all states are moving in that direction. In Kansas, for example,
there was a hearing in January on proposed legislation that would have
imposed a $10,000 fine, or a year in prison, on those entering into a surrogacy
contract. The proposal was shelved after a hearing that was packed with
supporters of surrogacy, including women who had been surrogates and
parents who brought their children through surrogacy, arguing passionately
9/21/2015 Surrogates and Couples Face a Maze of Laws, State by State The New York Times
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for the benefits.
“Allow us to create life where there would otherwise only be absence and
loss,” testified Lynlee Weber, who bore six children — including two sets of
twins — in four surrogacies.
Another supporter, Dr. David Grainger of the Center for Reproductive
Medicine, referred to the Bible, saying that the bill would have criminalized
“the most important pregnancy the world has known” — Mary’s pregnancy
with Jesus.
Only three people testified against surrogacy.
Women who have been surrogates described the rewards of helping
someone start a family, earning money through an arrangement that allows
them to stay home and raise their own children (prices vary by region, but
surrogates usually receive $20,000 and up), and maintaining relationships
with the babies they brought into the world and the couples raising them,
through visits and letters.
Like Ms. Weber in Kansas, some are eager to be surrogates as often as
their doctors will let them: Six pregnancies is a common limit. Ms. Weber, 32,
who has a 12year old daughter, first carried a baby for a single man in Europe.
Then came a couple in the East Village of New York City, then another in Los
Angeles.
“The whole process of growing new people is cool, even if it’s not
particularly comfortable,” Ms. Weber said. “My daughter’s grown up thinking
it’s really cool that Mommy can grow a baby for someone who can’t have
babies.”
Her surrogacies provided a social network, too, through a support group
of other women in Wichita carrying babies through the same surrogacy agency.
“We’d get together and talk,” she said, “and when somebody’s intended
9/21/2015 Surrogates and Couples Face a Maze of Laws, State by State The New York Times
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parents came to town, they’d take us all out to dinner.”
With her last surrogate pregnancy, in 2009, Ms. Weber had complications
and knew it was her last. So she went back to school for a master’s degree in
social work, with the aim of counseling on fertility issues.
Weighing the Risks
One of the strongest opponents of surrogacy is Jennifer Lahl, president of
the Center for Bioethics and Culture in California, who testified for the Kansas
legislation and lobbied Gov. Bobby Jindal to veto the Louisiana bill.
She sees the practice as rife with risk: Informed consent, she said, is not
really possible in a relatively new field. So little is known about the risks of the
hormonal stimulation undergone by egg donors and surrogates, she added. In
addition, the emerging field of epigenetics is yielding new discoveries about
how conditions in the womb affect a child’s later development.
“This is part of the American entrepreneurial approach,” Ms. Lahl said.
“We design things, put them out there, they can be dangerous, and then have
to ratchet them back to add safety limits. I see assisted reproductive
technology, which is relatively new, as a space where we’re starting to see the
harms.”
Ms. Lahl’s new film, “Breeders: A Subclass of Women?” features four
women who served as surrogates describing wrenching experiences. One is
Gail Robinson, a Texas woman who agreed to carry a baby for her brother and
his partner. In the course of the pregnancy, she had a serious fallingout with
her brother and suffered lifethreatening eclampsia. Ms. Robinson, who had
never had a child of her own, ended up seeking custody of the twin girls she
carried and was declared a legal parent, along with the partner, despite her
lack of genetic connection to the twins.
In Louisiana this spring, it seemed that there would soon be a law allowing
9/21/2015 Surrogates and Couples Face a Maze of Laws, State by State The New York Times
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some couples to use a surrogate to carry their baby — but only heterosexual
couples who did not need donor eggs or sperm.
After drawnout negotiations between State Representative Joseph P.
Lopinto III, a Republican from Metairie, and the Louisiana Family Forum, the
state’s leading conservative group, both sides told a legislative committee in
March that they had a workable compromise. Even the Catholic bishops, who
sat in on the negotiations, said they would not seek a veto because the law was
so narrow.
“Sure, I personally would have liked something broader, but Louisiana is
never going to be California,” Mr. Lopinto said. “We weren’t trying to start a
surrogacy industry here. I just don’t think it’s right that people in Louisiana
should have to go out of state to start a family.”
Surrogacy was not an obvious cause for Mr. Lopinto, who votes with the
Louisiana Family Forum so often that his office is festooned with awards from
the group. But he and his wife had struggles with infertility; they used in vitro
fertilization for their two children.
“Infertility can hit anyone, and I want people to know it’s not something to
be ashamed about,” he said. “You think you have this perfect life, and then,
suddenly, you’re talking Clomid,” he said, referring to a common fertility drug.
One Lopinto pregnancy, he said, came around the time that a friend, State
Senator Gary Smith, and his wife, Katherine, were expecting a child with an
outofstate surrogate, so the two couples went through the process together.
Mr. Smith had introduced his own surrogacy bill last year, bringing his two
children — one from a woman in California, the other from a Nevada surrogate
— to the Capitol to help make the issue real to his colleagues.
“We’ve never been secretive about it, and we feel blessed to have our own
biological children,” Mr. Smith said. “We call our surrogates aunts, and we will
never forget the gift they’ve given us. I just think it’s a shame that we couldn’t
9/21/2015 Surrogates and Couples Face a Maze of Laws, State by State The New York Times
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do it in Louisiana.”
The Louisiana bill, like some others, would only have allowed “altruistic”
surrogacy, in which the surrogate, usually carrying a baby for a friend or
relative, receives no compensation beyond the reimbursement of expenses.
Some legislators favor that approach, feeling that it avoids
commercializing the market for babies, and some woman are eager to carry a
child for an infertile sibling or close friend. But many lawyers and doctors say
such arrangements are actually the most likely to fall apart, given the difficulty
of maintaining comfortable boundaries and the risk of intrusiveness, or
coercion, souring relationships that seemed solid.
“It crosses a lot of lines to bring family members into your reproductive
life,” said Dr. Michael Feinman, a Los Angeles fertility doctor. “If the surrogate
or the donor is a relative and something goes amiss, it can affect family
relationships forever after.”
Mr. Lopinto said he was trying to reach a compromise everyone could
support, even if it opened the door to surrogacy just a crack.
“It was just a start,” he said. “I tried to meet all the objections. One
sticking point was whether you could use an egg donor, and I understand their
position that surrogacy makes a twoperson relationship into a threeperson
relationship, and if you add an egg donor, that’s a fourperson relationship,
and that’s too much,” he said. “I said, ‘If we agree to that, will you support the
bill?’ And they agreed.”
For gay couples, who always need egg donors, his bill would have been
worse than none: Without the law, a surrogacy contract that involved an egg
donor would have been unenforceable, but not illegal. The bill, though, would
have prohibited any surrogacy outside the narrow bounds of the compromise.
“I understand their unhappiness, and I wish we could have been more
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inclusive,” Mr. Lopinto said.
Political Choices
But that was not what doomed the legislation. Rather, it was the politics of
abortion: As Governor Jindal positioned himself as a possible presidential
candidate, national groups like the Family Research Council lobbied against
the bill. In a letter asking the governor to veto it, the council said it had “a
significant lack of prolife protections” for embryos created through in vitro
fertilization.
“The bill would provide state sanction for the laboratory creation of living
human embryos, such creation being an integral part of the stipulated
surrogacy process, but without legal protections for the young human beings
who are created,” it said.
And the weekend before the legislative session ended, when Mr. Jindal
asked Gene Mills, president of the Louisiana Family Forum, whether he would
advise a veto, Mr. Mills said he would. Mr. Jindal vetoed the bill, just as he had
Senator Smith’s bill the previous year.
“Despite the good intentions and hard efforts of the author, this legislation
still raises concerns for many in the prolife community,” his veto letter said.
“Thus I cannot in good conscience sign the bill.”
At the hearing in March, Mr. Mills had announced that he and Mr.
Lopinto had “found territory we can agree on” and that in the future, the law
might be celebrated as a wise policy compromise.
Asked about this after the veto, Mr. Mills said he had not broken his
agreement with Mr. Lopinto, but had learned that the legislation was flawed.
“My counsel said there were problems with the bill, and I have to listen to
counsel,” Mr. Mills said. “The legal community throughout prolife America
thought we had not done what we intended. There was disagreement about
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whether we had actually limited compensation enough, and concerns about the
creation and destruction of excess embryos.”
Mr. Lopinto had a different view of Mr. Mills’s turnabout.
“At the end of the day, he was being a good soldier,” Mr. Lopinto said. “He
did what he had to do to give the governor the way out he wanted.”
A version of this article appears in print on September 18, 2014, on page A1 of the New York editionwith the headline: Surrogates and Couples Face a Maze of Laws, State by State.
© 2015 The New York Times Company
9/21/2015 A Father’s Struggle to Stop His Daughter’s Adoption The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/paternityregistry/396044/ 1/31
C hristopher Emanuel first met his girlfriend in the fall of 2012, when
they were both driving forklifts at a warehouse in Trenton, South
Carolina. She was one of a handful of women on the job; she was
white and he was black. She ignored him at first, and Emanuel saw it as a
P O L I T I C S
A Father’s Struggle to Stop His Daughter’sAdoption
In the United States, when an unmarried man has a baby, his partner cangive it up without his consent—unless he happens to know about an obscure
system called the responsible father registry.
K E V I N N O B L E M A I L L A R DJ U L 7 , 2 0 1 5
Christopher Emanuel / The Atlantic
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challenge. It took multiple attempts to get her phone number. He says he
“wasn’t lonely, but everybody wants somebody. Nothing wrong with being
friends.”
Emanuel, who is now 25, describes himself as a non-discriminatory flirt. He
was popular in high school and a state track champion. According to the
Aiken High School 2008 yearbook, he was voted “Most Attractive” and
“Best Dressed.” Even his former English teacher Francesca Pataro describes
him as a “ray of sunshine.” Emanuel says he’s “talked”—euphemistically
speaking—with a lot of women: “Black, Puerto Rican, Egyptian, and
Vietnamese.” But before he met this girlfriend, he says, he had never
seriously dated a white girl.
Emanuel’s girlfriend didn’t respond to multiple interview requests, so some
details of their relationship remain difficult to confirm. But her affidavits and
her text-message exchanges with Emanuel align with the key elements of his
story: Their relationship began in February 2013, after months of friendship.
When her parents were away for the summer, his girlfriend invited Emanuel
to stay at her house for a while. And in May, she took a home pregnancy test,
which came out positive.
Emanuel says they were happy as they made a doctor’s appointment and
began to plan a life together. But his girlfriend’s parents were still out of
town, and she had yet to tell them about the pregnancy or the young man
sleeping at their house. Still, he says, they settled into a routine, sharing the
cost of doctor’s appointments and attending them together. The baby was
due in mid-February of 2014, and when a sonogram revealed that it was
going to be a girl, they decided to name her Skylar. Over the summer,
Emanuel says he helped his girlfriend apply for Medicaid and for time off
under the Family Leave and Medical Act. He still had not met any of her
family.
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Emanuel’s girlfriend repeatedly promised him thatshe would never put their child up for adoption. Buthe couldn’t erase the possibility from his mind.
One evening in August, Emanuel says his girlfriend called him, sobbing. Her
mother had returned from vacation and a neighbor had told her about the
pregnancy. She had confronted her daughter and, according to Emanuel,
told her, “You’re pregnant by a nigger. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Emanuel’s girlfriend repeatedly promised him that she would never put their
child up for adoption. But he couldn’t erase the possibility from his mind. So
he posed the question to her, “If you ever had to give your baby up for
adoption, you’re going to give it to me, right?” She said she would, but
insisted that she had no plans to give the baby away. He says they made plans
for her to move in with him permanently at the end of the year.
It was around this time that Emanuel’s half-sister, Chelsea McKnabb, and
her best friend, Jill Thomason, started having misgivings. When they met her
for the first time at Boo-Yah, the bar and grill Emanuel’s mother owned north
of town, Thomason found Emanuel’s girlfriend “distant” and felt that
“something was off.” “I think she’s going to give the baby away,” she told
McKnabb.
After the encounter, Thomason started researching paternity rights on her
own. That’s when she learned about the South Carolina Responsible Father
Registry, which, according to the state’s Department of Social Services,
“gives a man who has fathered a child with a woman he is not married to the
right to be notified when an adoption or a termination of parental rights
action occurs.” Without the registry, his girlfriend could put the baby up for
adoption without telling Emanuel about it. Registering with the state
wouldn’t guarantee him custody of Skylar, but at least he’d be notified and
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U
have a say in court.
But Emanuel insisted that he didn’t need to register. Even though his
girlfriend feared being cut off by her parents, he couldn’t imagine that they
would actually make their daughter choose between staying in the family and
giving her child up for adoption. The act of registering felt disloyal to him. He
didn’t anticipate a battle, and he didn’t want to feel as though he were
sharpening his sword.
ntil 1972, single men like Emanuel had no rights to children they’d
fathered outside of marriage. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Stanley
v. Illinois changed that. The case centered on Peter Stanley and his
partner, Joan, who had lived intermittently with Peter for 18 years. Stanley
had fathered three children with Joan during that time. Upon her death, the
state took their three children and gave them to court-appointed guardians.
In Illinois, as in other states, the father’s non-marital status was taken as a
sign that he was uninterested in his children and lacked the capacity to care
for them on his own. Because the law categorically denied due process to
Skylar on a shopping trip (Chris Emanuel)
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unmarried fathers, the Court ruled it unconstitutional.
In 1983, another Supreme Court case, Lehr v. Robertson, determined that it’s
not biology alone that entitles fathers to rights. In that case, a biological
father tried unsuccessfully to block his daughter’s adoption by her stepfather.
The Court ruled against the biological father because he had not actively
established himself in her life and that his reliance on the biological
connection alone was insufficient reason to disrupt the adoption. This
“biology plus” doctrine established an ethic of responsibility: Fathers have
rights, but only if they are earned.
Lehr’s most persistent legacy is that it established the importance of the
putative-father registry. A dissenting opinion, written by Justice Byron White
and joined by Thurgood Marshall and Harry Blackmun, pointed out that Lehr
and his girlfriend had lived together before and during the pregnancy, and
she’d “concealed her whereabouts” from him for two years after the baby’s
birth. By the time Lehr had located her and the baby, she was married to
another man. She’d refused to let him visit, turned away his child support,
and threatened to have him arrested. Lehr had filed a paternity suit to
establish his rights, but he hadn’t added his name to New York’s putative-
father registry.
In the end, this omission was all that mattered. The majority pointed out that
the registry had been designed specifically for cases like Lehr’s: to allow
biological fathers to “demonstrate [their] intent to claim paternity of a child
born out of wedlock,” entitling them “to receive notice of any proceeding to
adopt that child.” The Court noted that he could have registered “simply by
mailing a postcard.”
One lawyer describes the registries as a “‘check box’so the adoption can go ahead and get the pesky fatherout of the way.”
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out of the way.”
Today, 33 states have putative-father registries. Some require mail-in forms.
Others, including South Carolina, allow men to register online. They simply
need to create an account and enter some basic information about
themselves and their partners, listing the child’s place of conception, its race,
and its approximate date of birth. There is no national registry, which means
a man must register separately in each state where the mother might possibly
give birth. (No state requires a pregnant, unmarried woman to divulge the
name of the father, and she can give a false name if she chooses.)
Despite the Supreme Court’s endorsement, critics often argue that the
registries do the opposite of what they’re supposed to do. “It sounds like a
good thing,” said Erik Smith, an Ohio family law attorney who tries to
educate men about the issue, “but it’s the only way that an unwed father can
secure his right to notice.” Shannon Jones, a prominent lawyer in Charleston,
South Carolina, has called for the abolition of the registries. She describes
them as a “‘check box’ so the adoption can go ahead and get the pesky father
out of the way.”
In fact, the registries were designed primarily to protect adoptive couples and
the children they bring home. Adoptive couples are in an increasingly
vulnerable position. Waitlists for domestic adoptions are getting longer and
longer. The combined costs can easily exceed $30,000, and the process is
emotionally fraught. Couples often turn to adoption after years of infertility
treatments, and in the case of domestic adoptions, the birth parents are
usually never entirely out of the picture. According to a 2013 report, 95
percent of all domestic adoptions are open to some degree, whether that
means allowing the birth parents to access information through the agency or
requiring the adoptive parents to send regular photos and updates until the
child turns 18.
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When the birth father isn’t involved in the initial arrangements, as is often
the case, there’s always the possibility that he might try to gain custody after
the adoption is complete. In many cases, the adoptive parents might fear that
he’ll genuinely want to raise the child as his own. In others, they may worry
that he’ll leverage his position to get money or other benefits from the new
couple. Either of these scenarios could prove disastrous.
The 2010 act that established South Carolina’s Responsible Father Registry
begins with a simple declaration: “The State has a compelling interest in
promptly providing stable and permanent homes for adoptive children and in
preventing the disruption of adoptive placements.” James Fletcher
Thompson, the adoption lawyer who wrote the legislation for South
Carolina’s registry, noted that it was designed “in the interest of adoptive
parents” and adopted children.
From a birth father’s perspective, however, there’s a significant problem:
Hardly anyone knows that these registries exist. They aren’t advertised on
billboards, park benches, subway cars, or in the men’s bathrooms at bars and
restaurants. When asked about their advertising efforts, most state offices of
vital records point to their websites or to pamphlets made available in their
offices. Most departments say they don’t have funding for community
outreach. Virginia is an outlier: The state has advertised its registry through a
Facebook campaign and a partnership with the Norfolk Tides, a minor league
baseball team.
But the vast majority of states don’t do anything except wait for registrants
who rarely show. According to the most recent census, 43.9 percent of all
children in South Carolina are born outside of marriage each year. In 2014,
around 30,000 children were born to unmarried women. Emanuel was one
of 279 men who added his name to the state’s putative father registry that
year.
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I
Figures from 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, show
similar trends in other states with putative father registries. In Ohio, where
56,278 babies were born to unmarried women, only 164 men registered. In
Florida, only 544 men registered while 82,746 unmarried women gave
birth. In Virginia, where 35,491 babies were born outside of marriage, 111
men registered. Can a state say that the registry is a success when the
response rate is in the double digits for every 10,000 men? The system
brings to mind Justice Antonin Scalia’s description of the way Nero
promulgated laws in the Roman Empire: post them high on pillars so they
could not be read, and punish offenders when they inevitably transgress
them.
n September, Emanuel’s girlfriend told him that her mother wanted to
meet him. This seemed like progress to him. It had been a month since
her mother had learned about the pregnancy, and Emanuel thought he
would finally have a chance to win his girlfriend’s parents over and articulate
his intentions toward his girlfriend and the baby. But she kept pushing the
introduction back, telling him her parents were “out of town” or “busy,”
Emanuel said.
Three weeks passed before they set an actual date. When Emanuel and his
mother, Natasha Emanuel, came in the door, his girlfriend’s father wasn’t
there. But Emanuel embraced the mother and she didn’t recoil. They all sat
down and he explained his plan for supporting his girlfriend and Skylar.
Then, as Natasha recalled, the mother interrupted Emanuel: “You may be a
nice fella, but [my daughter] knows it’s forbidden to date a nigger.”
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Emanuel says he and Natasha exchanged stunned glances. “How do you
think society is going to look at you?” his girlfriend’s mother continued. She
told them the shock was going to make her husband start drinking again.
When the phone rang at one point, Natasha says his girlfriend’s mother held
her finger up and shushed everyone while she talked to her husband on the
phone. It was clear that he knew about the meeting taking place in his home:
At one point, his wife said, “Yes, yes. I’m handling that. I’m taking care of
that now.” She hung up and immediately told the couple that their only
option was adoption. His girlfriend then told her mother she’d give Skylar to
him if it went that far, Emanuel said.
Emanuel left the meeting feeling reassured that his girlfriend had stood up
for him. They were in love, he thought, and would carry on with their plans of
moving in together and waiting for their daughter. And as Emanuel drove
away with his mother, he got what appeared to be a reassuring text from his
girlfriend.
He read the message out loud and exchanged yet another bewildered look
with Natasha. “My mom likes you,” it said.
Emanuel and Skylar (Chris Emanuel)
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A fter that encounter, Emanuel and his girlfriend continued to see each
other daily. Emanuel says she spent half-nights at his house,
returning home only when she knew her parents were asleep. By this
time, his girlfriend was six months pregnant. Then, in the beginning of
November, Emanuel says she told him her father had stopped speaking to
her. Her visits began to drop off, but Emanuel continued to clear space for
her to move in, and text-message records show that they communicated
every day. The texts usually ended with a “mwah” or “luv ya.” After his
girlfriend’s doctor diagnosed her with gestational diabetes, Emanuel texted
her three times a day to check her blood sugar levels.
The visits dropped off even more in December; his girlfriend told him it was
because of her constant diabetic fatigue. There were no more sleepovers or
social calls, but he says he accompanied her to a doctor’s appointment on
December 26. That was the last time he saw her pregnant.
In January, Emanuel said, his girlfriend told him he didn’t have to come with
her to doctor’s appointments anymore—her mother would go with her
instead. They still texted daily, and she assured Emanuel that he could be in
the delivery room with her.
At the same time, Emanuel’s half-sister and her friend continued to badger
him about joining the South Carolina Responsible Father Registry. Their
persistence aggravated him, but he soon changed his mind.
On February 1, Emanuel’s family, friends, and neighbors arrived at Boo-Yah
for a “diaper bash,” the Southern male version of a baby shower. His
girlfriend’s friends and family hadn’t wanted to host a baby shower or party
for her, but she told Emanuel she’d attend the bash his mother was throwing
for them. The guests brought armloads of gifts: clothes, bottles, wipes, toys,
and other typical cute, bouncy things for babies. There was food, music, and
joy. His girlfriend never showed up.
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Around the same time, Emanuel learned that his girlfriend had lied about the
date of her most recent doctor’s appointment. He began to wonder: If she
was trying to keep him from finding out about a doctor’s appointment, how
could he be sure she would let him attend the birth?
He finally signed up for the Responsible Father Registry on February 4, the
Tuesday after the diaper bash. But he kept making efforts to see his
girlfriend. He tried to drop off all the gifts from the party, along with a breast
pump he’d bought at Walmart, but each time he texted or called, his
girlfriend told him she was busy and would pick them up herself later.
The next Monday, February 10, a devastating ice storm hit South Carolina,
and 364,000 homes lost power. The storm caused an estimated $54 million
in infrastructure damage and $360 million in damage from fallen trees. The
hardest-hit areas were around Charleston and Aiken.
In spite of the brutal weather, Emanuel decided to go out and finally deliver
the gifts. With the due date only five days away, he says he had a growing
Chris Emanuel
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feeling that “there could be something going on.” But his girlfriend wasn’t
home, so he parked at the end of the road and waited for her. Three hours
passed and she still didn’t return.
Later that day, his girlfriend texted him, “you know I love you, right?” He
thought it was “random” that she was putting so much emphasis on love at
that particular moment. Emanuel called her several times, but she picked up
just once, and only briefly. She told him she’d been in and out of the
bathroom because she was constipated.
He returned home with all the gifts and started making phone calls. He
suspected his girlfriend might be in labor, so he called the doctor and hospital
multiple times. “[If] you go into delivery or in labor, please do not forbid me
from seeing my child,” he texted her. When he finally got through at Aiken
Hospital, they told him she wasn’t there.
fter the ice storm, Emanuel continued to communicate with his
girlfriend, mostly through text messages. Their conversations,
according to the records, were relatively banal at first:
Emanuel: “Wyd?”
Girlfriend: “Watching TV”
Emanuel: “K ima call u shortly”
She texted him that she would be induced on the 24th if she hadn’t gone into
labor by then. At 9:00 a.m. on February 19, she texted a photo of herself,
smiling and hugely pregnant with one knee resting on a settee at the foot of
her parents’ four-poster bed. She told him the picture had been taken “the
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other day.” He responded that it brought tears to his eyes to see her so far
along. “The love I have for u n sky no man can take away, always and
forever!” he wrote to her.
Their conversation continued:
Emanuel: “I’m the father I will not be a dead beat dad or let
someone hold me back from my child OHHH hell naw. I mean I
can only tolerate but so much.”
Girlfriend: No one ever said you couldn’t see her!
Emanuel: Baby, I can’t even see u! Lol. Hell shit might already be
born on da down low lol idk.
Girlfriend: wow
They exchanged no further communications that day. Two days later, on the
21st, his girlfriend told Emanuel she was going to talk to her doctor about
induction. She signed her message, “mwuah.”
The next day, on Saturday, February 22, a private investigator showed up at
Emanuel’s home and served him with notice papers. “An adoption
proceeding was filed in Greenville County on February 19, 2014, and you
are the putative father of a Caucasian/African-American female child born at
Aiken Hospital on February 11, 2014,” the papers stated. His daughter had
been born the day after the ice storm. The notice did not give any specifics
about the adoption—he didn’t know who had his daughter, or where they
were. Just the day before, his girlfriend had texted, “The baby is still in my
belly.”
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Emanuel said he “flipped.” He sent her a text message:
Emanuel: YOU MISLED ME! YOU PLAYED ME! YOU LIED TO
ME! NUMEROUS TIMES!
Girlfriend: I can’t take back what I’ve done. I’m sorry.
Emanuel: Didn’t you say I was gone be there?
Girlfriend: Yes. I’m sorry!
Emanuel: So why in the hell did you mislead me and say Sky was in
your stomach after she was born??!!!!
Girlfriend: I really don’t know. I feel like shit. I know I’m a horrible
person but I’m sorry.
Emanuel: I don’t think you wanted to honestly. I feel you were
forced to do something you didn’t want to! You had no choice but
to accommodate your family decisions!!
Girlfriend: It was just so much shit but no I didn’t want to at all.
n Monday, February 24—the next business day—Emanuel drove two
hours to file his objection to the adoption. Normally, the objection
would have been filed in Aiken County, where Skylar was born. But
the couple who wanted to adopt Skylar had chosen an attorney, Raymond
Godwin, who had his office in Greenville.
Emanuel registered his handwritten pro se objection at the Greenville
County Court at 1:09 p.m. His statement was brief and direct: “I am
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contesting the adoption proceedings … my girlfriend said she had not dilated
and would be induced … we talked on a daily basis … she advised me the baby
was in her stomach … a private investigator served a summons paper … I was
unaware of the proceedings.” Afterwards, he drove to Godwin’s office to
hand deliver a certified copy of his objection. He took a picture of the agency
sign to prove that he had been there.
Godwin declined to comment on any of the specifics of Emanuel’s case,
citing attorney-client privilege. But the records he filed with the court include
a printout of Emanuel’s registry dated February 13, indicating that he was
aware by that point that an interested father could interfere with the
adoption. On February 19, the adoptive couple filed legal documents without
Emanuel’s half-sister Chelsea (right) and her friend Jill play with Skylar. Their research and insistencewas what propelled Emanuel to add his name to the responsible father registry. (Chris Emanuel)
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naming Emanuel as a party.
On February 20, Godwin signed Emanuel’s notice of adoption proceedings,
informing him that he had 30 days to register his objection at the Greenville
County Court. That same day, the adoptive couple’s request for an out-of-
state adoption was approved by South Carolina officials, meaning they could
take Skylar home.
odwin’s law office sits in a brick ranch house on Wade Hampton
Boulevard. It feels more like a family home than a business, which
suits the nature of Godwin’s practice. On his website, he estimates
that he has facilitated over 1,500 “miracles of adoption.” (In a recent email,
he said that number has now exceeded 2,000.) The office sits at the edge of
Bob Jones University, the private Christian college where Godwin received
his diploma in 1979.
Godwin and his wife, Laura Beauvais-Godwin, are themselves the parents of
two adopted daughters, and they have been deeply involved in the adoption
world for decades. Bouvais-Godwin heads the South Carolina branch of
Nightlight Christian Adoptions, a pro-life nonprofit that counsels expectant
mothers to choose adoption over abortion. The group’s mission statement
includes “recognizing and advocating the personhood of pre-born children.”
Her workspace is located in the same brick house as her husband’s.
The Godwins share bylines as well as office space. In their coauthored how-
to guide, The Complete Adoption Book, they offer detailed advice on how to
deal with birth fathers. One chapter begins with a story of a birth father who
threw “a wrench in the works” by demanding his baby back after its new
parents had already taken it home. The story ended unhappily for everyone:
The adoptive couple lost the baby, the birth father proved unfit to raise it, and
the birth mother ended up foregoing college in order to devote herself to
raising a child she hadn’t wanted in the first place.
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Throughout the chapter, the Godwins generally advise adoptive couples to
keep the birth father informed. “Once he learns of an adoption plan, he may
be relieved, or he may express renewed determination to be a father. In
either way, everyone knows prior to birth,” they write. “The adoptive couple
can move on, and the birth mother can adjust her expectations as to her
future.”
In cases where the man has made it clear that he has no interest in raising his
child, they give somewhat different advice: “It may be wiser to contact him
after birth and placement; this tactic presents the adoption as a ‘done deal,’
thus making sure that he does not feel he has found new leverage—not to
parent his child (his actions show otherwise) but to either get back at the birth
mother or to get her back to resume the prior relationship!” But the Godwins
emphasize that this approach will only work “if the birth mother’s honesty
can be relied on” and the birth father truly has expressed a lack of interest.
The Godwins have been pitted against birth fathers in a number of legal
battles, most famously in the complicated case of Baby Veronica. The birth
mother engaged Nightlight’s help while Godwin represented the adoptive
couple. Veronica’s birth father, a member of the Cherokee Nation of
Oklahoma, insisted that he had not been properly informed about his
parental rights, and he tried to invoke the Indian Child Welfare Act to
recover his daughter. (The adoptive parents won the case when it reached the
Supreme Court.) Godwin’s firm also represented the adoptive parents in the
case of Baby Deseray, another Native American infant who was adopted by a
white family despite objections from the birth father. In that case, the birth
mother had stopped communicating with him during her seventh month of
pregnancy, and his search for her was unsuccessful until two days after the
baby was born. The father eventually regained custody of the child.
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In September 2013, when both cases were in the news, the Charleston Post
and Courier quoted Godwin’s explanation for why these babies had been
adopted without permission from their biological fathers: “Just because the
birth father is a sperm donor and has that biological link does not under the
law establish his parental rights.”
In an email, Godwin noted that this quote had been a paraphrase of the
Supreme Court decision. As he put it, a father’s rights “can start to evaporate
before birth in South Carolina if he does not take certain actions such as
support the birth mom or live with her for six months prior to birth or hold
himself out as the birth father. In those cases, a judge can hold that he has
abandoned his parental rights during the limited window of time he has to
assert those rights.”
he adoptive couple declined to be interviewed for this story. Based on
legal records, they are in their 30s. He is a tall, sandy-haired
businessman; she is a petite, dark-haired homemaker. They are solidly
religious and middle class, with a household income slightly above the
median. But they had one thing in common with Emanuel and his girlfriend:
They were interracial.
Emanuel’s house in Aiken, South Carolina. Through his text-message records, Emanuel was ableto show that his girlfriend had spent several nights there, a claim she’d denied. (Chris Emanuel)
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Later, the couple would write to Emanuel, telling him their story: Both came
from large families and belonged to a tight-knit church community where
virtually everyone else had children. But their own attempts had failed.
Conceiving naturally had not worked. Neither had fertility drugs. Numerous
IVF treatments had proven costly and unsuccessful. Meanwhile, the wife was
approaching the reproductive doomsday age of 40.
So they’d turned to adoption. Through a private church-based adoption
agency, they’d created an online profile telling their story, complete with
joyful pictures, tales about their marriage, and information about where they
lived (in a new townhouse). Birth mothers were able to find them by
searching for “education of adoptive couple” or “racial background of
adoptive couple.” Other search terms were “mother’s employment after
placement” and “willing to adopt a child with an unknown father.”
Four different birth mothers had chosen this particular couple, then changed
their minds and kept their babies. The couple later wrote to Emanuel that
they’d understood and respected each mother’s ultimate choice: Their faith
called for compassion and understanding, but each time, the disappointment
was excruciating.
They had almost given up when Emanuel’s girlfriend wrote them an email.
She told them that she liked that they were interracial. She liked that they
lived by the beach. She liked that they were a traditional married couple with
a wife at home. She also liked that they lived far away from South Carolina.
That email launched a series of busy exchanges between the adoptive couple
and their agency, beginning in late August. On September 5, the
communication records show there were 20 calls, emails, and letters
between 7:32 a.m. and 1:32 p.m. One week later, on September 11, the
couple had a joint adoptive interview.
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That meeting had already taken place by the time Emanuel first met his
girlfriend’s mother.
According to an affidavit, Emanuel’s girlfriend told the couple that she was
unable to parent the child herself but that she wanted to maintain post-
adoption contact—an open arrangement that would permit communication if
everyone agreed. She didn’t name a birth father; she told the adoptive couple
that he wasn’t around and hadn’t supported her financially or emotionally
during the pregnancy. She said that she’d known him briefly from her job and
that he was black. She described his family as athletic and outgoing.
The couple proceeded cautiously, even though the birth mother appeared
enthusiastic and the birth father seemed uninvolved. The birth mother told
them her due date was February 15, and the adoptive couple made plans to
be there.
Emanuel and Skylar at Boo-Yah, the pool hall ownedby his mother. (Chris Emanuel)
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The arrangement still faced a major legal hurdle: The adoptive couple was
from another state, and South Carolina does not permit out-of state
adoptions. The prohibition originated from South Carolina’s troubled history
with adoption. In the 1980s and 1990s, South Carolina gained a reputation
as an “adoption mecca” for wealthy out-of-state couples seeking children.
The lack of protective laws drew prospective parents who sought quick, easy,
and uncontested adoptions. An infamous March 1984 Time magazine article
featured a “loving, financially secure college-educated couple” that placed a
personals ad in a local paper for a “white newborn,” promising vacations and
expenses paid for an expectant mother who wanted to “LIVE LIKE A
QUEEN.”
The same month that the Time article was published, The New York Times
found that doctors and lawyers privately arranged many adoptions, with little
oversight from state agencies. Judges often approved adoptions with few
questions under the assumption that children fared better in adoptive homes.
At the time, no state law prohibited the open sale of children.
There was one loophole in South Carolina’s out-of-state adoption law:
Couples from other states could adopt in cases of “unusual or exceptional
circumstances.” This made allowances for hard-to-place children, including
those who were older, disabled, members of a sibling group, or “of mixed
racial heritage.”
Emanuel’s girlfriend told the adoptive couple that thebirth father wasn’t around and hadn’t supported herfinancially or emotionally during the pregnancy.
Godwin and his clients entered their order for exceptional or unusual
circumstances on January 21, 2014. This set in place the interstate
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mechanisms that would allow the adoptive couple to take custody of the
newborn. On February 4, Emanuel’s former girlfriend signed a sworn
statement asserting that she was unable to provide for the child. “I do not
wish to name the Birth Father,” she wrote. “He has not supported me
emotionally or financially throughout this entire pregnancy.” A Greenville
county court signed the order on February 7, finding his the stated
circumstances “unusual” and “exceptional.”
The court records show that Emanuel’s former girlfriend communicated with
the adoptive couple every week. They traveled to South Carolina to meet her
and her parents right before her due date. Everyone in her family, including
her father, was pleased with the placement. The doctor decided to induce her
that same day. The next morning, the baby was born and the couple took
custody.
It was only after they were back home with the baby that Emanuel received
his notice of the adoption on February 22. According to the putative-father
registry statute, the attorney representing adoptive parents must serve the
putative father within 10 days of “receipt of the registrant’s name.” Emanuel
was served on the ninth day. (According to court records, Godwin received
notice of Emanuel’s registration on February 13.)
By 4:50 p.m. that same day, the adoptive couple had changed their adoption
papers to say that Emanuel had “registered,” but they did not name him as a
party because they had no proof that he was the actual biological father.
On March 20—almost four weeks after the investigator served Emanuel with
notice papers—Godwin informed the Aiken-based judge in a letter that upon
his “return from vacation,” he would draw papers to verify whether Emanuel
“was indeed the birth father.”
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O n the evening of April 3, Emanuel sat on his back porch, waiting for a
message from his attorneys. Shortly after filing his complaint at the
courthouse, he’d visited Jennifer Mook’s solo law family law practice
in Aiken. She now says it was “one of those cases you have to take.” For help
with the Greenville court, Mook had teamed up with Kimaka Nichols-
Graham, the managing attorney at South Carolina Legal Services in
Greenville. Now all three of them were waiting for news.
Emanuel still remembers the moment just before the text message came in.
He was sitting outside, breathing in the still, calm South Carolina spring. He
remembers looking up and seeing a lone owl perched on a great oak bough
above him. Owls were rare in those parts, so he took it as a sign. That’s when
his phone buzzed. “Paternity test is back,” Mook texted. “You are Skylar’s
father.”
Through his text-message records, Emanuel was ableto prove that he’d been deeply invested in thepregnancy and enthusiastic about raising his child.
Things moved quickly after that. On April 7, Emanuel and his attorneys
showed up for an emergency hearing at the Aiken County Courthouse. The
adoptive couple participated via speakerphone. His ex-girlfriend was present
in the building, but she chose to stay outside of the courtroom. Instead of
speaking in person, she presented her case through an affidavit, signed by
Raymond Godwin.
To a large extent, the judge had to weigh his ex-girlfriend’s word against
Emanuel’s. She swore that he had never contributed to her medical bills.
Emanuel swore that he had given her money toward two doctor’s visits and
then helped her get onto Medicaid. She insisted that he was financially
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unable to provide for the baby. He provided a sworn financial declaration,
along with testimonies from relatives who promised to serve as a support
network for the little girl.
But Emanuel had one piece of solid evidence: his text message records.
Through these exchanges, he was able to prove that he’d been deeply
invested in the pregnancy and enthusiastic about raising his child. He could
show that he’d checked in on his then-girlfriend multiple times a day to make
sure she was checking her blood sugar levels. And he could demonstrate the
extent of her deception.
Ten days later, on April 17, the judge handed down her ruling. Emanuel
would gain custody of the baby.
On April 27, Emanuel’s ex-girlfriend sent a letter to the judge, expressing her
Emanuel with his lawyers after being named Skylar’s sole parent (Chris Emanuel)
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disappointment about the decision and reiterating the claims she’d made in
her April 7 affidavit. In conclusion, she wrote, “I would never have entered
into adoption if I thought Chris would ever have any rights. I would never
want the adoptive parents to experience such pain. I would never want to rip
a child from the only mother and father she has ever known. I would never
want my baby to experience such a trauma. Chris’s home is the least stable
place for her … It will take a lifetime to deal with the pain and sorrow of the
devastating outcome.”
hortly after the judge’s decision came down, Emanuel received his
first email from the adoptive couple (paraphrased here to preserve
privacy). The adoptive parents told him that birth fathers had not
been involved in their previous adoption attempts; it had always been the
mother, not the father, who had wanted the baby back.
They went on to describe their new daughter’s daily routine and how they’d
comforted her through bouts of colic and acid reflux. Emanuel learned that
she was a happy and smart baby who recognized their faces. They let him
know that they truly loved her, and that she was in a comfortable home with
her mother and father. They wanted him to know that she’d made them the
happiest they had ever been in their lives.
They told him it was anguishing to realize that yet another adoption had
fallen through— even harder this time because the baby had become such a
joyous part of their lives. They thought of the empty nursery, the unused
strollers, and the abandoned swing that would still be in their home once she
left. But they concluded that their abject sorrow could not keep them from
denying a father his right. Expressing sincere remorse for the conflict, they
told him would bring the baby back to Aiken on May 3, just as the court had
ordered.
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The adoptive couple said they hoped that Emanuel’slove for the baby would inspire him to change hismind.
But a few days before the couple returned to Aiken, they wrote to him again.
This time, it was an emotional plea, calling on Emanuel to do the “right
thing.”
The adoptive couple told Emanuel that had a lot of power in the situation,
even comparing him to God, and said they hoped that Emanuel’s love for the
baby would inspire him to change his mind. They questioned whether he had
“fully grasped the responsibility of fatherhood.” Then, calling the baby
Skylar—the name her birth parents had chosen, rather than the new name
they’d given her—they assured Emanuel she would be raised in a religious
home with graduate-degree-holding parents. She would receive the best
education. Most of all, she would have a mother. By letting Skylar stay with
the only parents she had ever known, they told him, he could pursue his own
dreams with the knowledge that he had chosen to give his daughter a better
life.
Emanuel knew the adoptive couple meant it with open hearts and no
judgments. Those arguments were all they had. But he never responded to
the adoptive couple’s email. Skylar would be home in three days, and that
was all he wanted.
arcia Yablon-Zug, who teaches family law at the University of
South Carolina, said a woman in the position of Emanuel’s ex-
girlfriend faces very real pressures and often has a “perverse
incentive” to pursue adoption. Relinquishing custody to the father could
make her liable for paying child support—or worse, being condemned as a
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“bad mom,” Yablon-Zug said. In contrast, adoption is seen as a “noble
sacrifice.”
According to Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy, an activist for birth-mother rights, a
vulnerable woman often gives her child away after being told that “the only
way she can be free and clear is adoption.” On her website, Musings of the
Lame, she offers advice for birth parents who feel they have been wronged by
the adoption process. “Girls are desperate to hold on to anything that will fix
the problem,” she said in an interview, “and adoption becomes the lifeline
that will fix everything.”
In a case like Emanuel’s, a birth mother has the added incentive to distance
herself from a biracial child. In South Carolina, anti-miscegenation laws
stayed on the books until 1999—more than 30 years after the Supreme Court
made them legally unenforceable in Loving v. Virginia. Aiken has its share of
interracial couples today, including Emanuel’s father and stepmother, but
many locals continue to scorn biracial families. His girlfriend’s parents
happened to be among them.
Chris Emanuel
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Whatever the particular pressures, there’s no question that an unmarried
pregnant woman faces a different set of concerns than her male partner does.
She’s the one who must carry the baby for nine months and suffer through
the labor and delivery. And far more often than not, she knows she will be the
one left caring for it if the couple breaks up. Many women have to contend
with men who are abusive or otherwise unfit to care for a small child. Other
women know they’ll have to rely on support payments that may not come
through.
The American legal system is set up with these scenarios in mind. As a result,
states view unmarried fathers as sources of financial support rather than
caregivers. States expect men to be persistent, aggressive, and proactive in
offering money even when the mother rejects it or refuses contact. Take the
case of Abernathy v. Baby Boy, decided by the South Carolina Supreme Court
in 1993. An unmarried woman put her baby up for adoption after rejecting
the father’s marriage proposal and “kind of hiding away from him,”
according to court documents. The father was able to gain custody of the
child, but only because he could prove that he’d offered to support the
woman and pay for her education during and after the pregnancy, even
turning over his bank account and car to her while he was on active duty with
the Navy.
“Even though we’ve had progress in the active role that men take in their
children’s lives, the state still defines breadwinning as the definitive
component of fatherhood,” said Deborah Dinner, an associate professor of
family law at Washington University. Staying in good standing can mean as
little as an automated direct deposit, but anything less than an actual offer of
money is considered by law to be “vague and conditional.” Even if the
woman disappears or issues a restraining order, the man’s potential support
must be tangible and ready, like escrow. Registering as a responsible father
gave Emanuel the right to be notified of the adoption, but in order to actually
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Egain custody of Skylar, he had to persuade the judge that he could provide for
her.
manuel says his first months with Skylar were as challenging as
anyone would expect: sleep deprivation, teething, and other new-
parent adjustments. It was mostly typical parent stuff, and he thought
of himself as both mom and dad. His income was modest—he was working as
a customer-service representative through a temp agency—but he was
earning enough to support his daughter, a happy child with cherubic cheeks
and bows in her curly black hair.
The judge’s final opinion expressed concern “aboutthe ignorance and racism exhibited by the Defendantand the Defendant’s family.”
In January 2015, Emanuel showed up at the county courthouse wearing a
blue-and-black repp bowtie. The baby’s mother wasn’t there, but the hearing
had been convened to terminate her parental rights. At first, there had been a
looming possibility that she might try to gain custody of Skylar. In her April 7
affidavit, she told the court that she would rather take the baby herself than
let Chris have her. “If there is any reason that [the adoptive couple] are not
able to keep custody of Skylar, I think it would be better for Skylar to be with
me than to be with Chris.”
But she never followed through. On December 9, she came to the office of
Jennifer Mook, Emanuel’s attorney, to inquire about signing a consent form
to terminate her parental rights. “She did not ask any questions about Skylar
or even mention her,” Mook said. She did go on to sign the consent form,
though with another attorney in a different office.
At the final hearing, the judge condemned Skylar’s mother and her parents.
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“The court is very concerned about the deception of the Defendant in
denying the Plaintiff his parental rights,” the judge said. “The court is
concerned with the Defendant’s deception to the court … The conscious and
continuing deception of the Defendant is very concerning. The court is also
concerned about the ignorance and racism exhibited by the Defendant and
the Defendant’s family.”
Although Skylar no longer had a legal mother, she now had a vast network of
grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. About
20 of them came to the courtroom that day. Like Emanuel, most of them
were dressed formally. On other occasions, they could be seen wearing
matching t-shirts emblazoned with the hashtag #teamskylar. A court-
appointed advocate had spent time with them and reported back to the judge,
who then made her final ruling.
“The Plaintiff is fit and proper to be the parent of this child,” the judge
declared. “He is able and willing to care for the child and provide for the
child’s welfare. He has a plan of guardianship in place should he be unable to
care for the minor child because of death or incapacity. He has strong and
good female role models within his familiar system that the minor child has
relationships with.”
With that, the judge ordered the court to remove his ex-girlfriend’s name
from Skylar’s birth certificate, and the case was sealed.
Ashley Nicole Jacoby and Danielle Burgo contributed research assistance to this story.
A B O U T T H E A U T H O R
KEVIN NOBLE MAILLARD is professor of law at Syracuse University.
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