XV. The Law, Page 4
Contested Adoptions
You may have noticed the term “contested adoption” earlier. This means that the birth parents refuse to consent to the adoption, and you and the agency have to fight them in court. The agency will have done its best to avoid involving you in the situation by persuading them to consent or by getting a freeing order (which does not involve you; it’s strictly between the agency and the people with parental responsibility). Often this is done before you even meet the child. Once there is a freeing order the parents no longer have any legal say in the adoption — their rights have been terminated and given to the agency. (Freeing orders are often granted with the co-operation of the birth parents because it means they no longer need to be involved and can get on with their lives.)
One of the questions you will be asked during your assessment is whether you can cope with a contested adoption. Some people can’t deal with the stress.
Some birth parents genuinely believe that their child should be returned to them and contest the adoption on that basis. But if the child was originally taken into care or is now the subject of a care order they have to prove that they are fit parents, and frankly, by this stage the cards are heavily stacked against them.
Other birth parents fight the adoption because, even though they know they can’t care for the child satisfactorily, they feel they are somehow betraying him if they give in without a fight, or they want the child to know when he grows up that his parents fought to keep him, as a sign of their love for him. Again, they have little hope of winning.
In fact, it is rare for birth parents ever to regain custody of a child once he has been taken into care by a local authority because of neglect or ill-treatment, unless the local authority itself is willing. Once social workers make up their minds that rehabilitation is not in the child’s interests there is little chance of the birth family getting him back, and even less once the child is placed for adoption. So there is really very little reason for you to be worried about the eventual outcome of a contested adoption, unless there has been a sea-change in the birth parents’ lives in the meantime and they have fully exercised their contact rights during the time the child has been in care.
The real problem with contested adoptions is their cost. Lawyers are always involved and they can be very expensive, as can the travel involved. Very occasionally contested adoptions wind up in the House of Lords. It is quite normal for the agency to pay all the legal fees in such cases, but you need to get written assurance from the agency first to that effect, because a contested adoption could ruin you financially. Otherwise you should look into the possibility of legal aid.
We nearly had a fit when we discovered at our first child’s adoption hearing that there was uncertainty about the validity of his birth father’s consent. The three hours it took to clear it up to the court’s satisfaction were probably the worst of our married life. By our last child we were quite blasé about her birth mother contesting the freeing order, simply leaving the agency to get on with it, while we looked after our new daughter.
Other Legal Complications
There are a very few cases where other legal problems arise. These include foundlings (where strenuous efforts have to be made to find the birth mother), cases where someone with parental responsibility disappears before signing consent forms, where there is a question as to whether everyone who needs to has given informed consent, whether the consents have been properly obtained, etc. The agency should foot any legal costs involved, but again, you should have an undertaking to that effect or ask for legal aid.
Adoption orders are sometimes accompanied by contact orders.
But I really want to emphasise that while legal complications do arise in a significant minority of adoption proceedings it is quite rare for them to cause a placement to abort and the child to return to care or to the birth parents. The agency will have tried to sort out any such problems before you become involved. And the longer the child is with you and shows he is happy with you, the stronger the “attachment factor” weighs in your favour. Courts generally don’t like to move a child from a family where he has become settled and is loved and well cared for, even if the move is back to the birth family.
Things are different in some other countries, where the fact of biological parenthood is considered much more decisive than it is by our courts. Inasmuch as this is an important component of the child’s best interests, and all such court decisions have to have the child’s best interests as their primary consideration, time is on your side. So don’t worry.
Next: Chapter XVI: After the Adoption Order
© Roger Ridley Fenton
