The case reported here is more egregious than most (Deseret News, 7/30/09).  It vividly shows the power our laws grant to mothers in adoption cases at the expense of fathers' parental rights and children's rights to their father.  As the case amply demonstrates, if a mother wants to place a child for adoption, she can, pretty much regardless of what a father desires or what he does.  To find out more about the case, click here.

Cody O'dea and Ashley Olea had a brief sexual relationship when they lived in Wyoming.  At age 18, she turned up pregnant.  Cody immediately told her that he wanted to help raise the child.  A few months later, Ashley told Cody that she had miscarried.  They split up and he moved to Idaho.

Still more months later, a friend informed Cody that Ashley was then eight months pregnant and making plans to place the child for adoption.  She was still in Wyoming, but working with an adoption agency, LDS Family Services, in Montana.

Cody immediately contacted Ashley and reasserted his desire to have custody of the child.  He also filed the appropriate form with the Wyoming Putative Father Registry.  He also filed with the Montana Putative Father Registry.  He wrote a letter to the adoption agency telling them that he would not waive his parental rights.

Cody spoke with two people including a supervisor at LDS Family Services, informing them of his intention to get custody of the child.  Eventually, LDS decided to not continue with the adoption process and wrote Cody a letter saying so.

On July 15, 2006, Cody received a strange call from Ashley which, according to him, went as follows:

Ashley: You will listen and you will not speak. First of all I want you to stop harassing me and that includes your mother. I am in Utah. You will not father this child. You will pay child support until the child is in College. You will never see this baby. Do you understand?

Cody: No, I do not understand, does this mean you are planning to keep the child?

Ashley: Do you understand what I’m saying?

Cody: No, I don’t understand, does that mean you are keeping the child and not giving it up for adoption?

Ashley: If you understand what I have told you, that is all I have to say.

Then she hung up.  Notice that she mentioned nothing about placing the child for adoption.  In fact she strongly suggests the opposite.  And the ruse worked.  Cody thought that, since he had filed with the registries of Wyoming and Montana, and gotten LDS to back off, that he had successfully blocked the adoption.  To him, Ashley's phone call meant that she'd changed her mind and would keep the child.

But that was wrong.  Ashley's call was almost certainly prompted by an attorney.  Her statement that she was in Utah constituted legal "notice" to him that, perhaps an adoption would occur there.  Therefore, he then became obligated to file with Utah's registry and begin paternity proceedings.  In fact, unknown to him, he had only 20 days to do so.

Despite Cody's repeated efforts to comply with the law and assert his parental rights, a Utah court approved the adoption in 2006.  A different agency, the Adoption Center of Choice, provided the adoptive parents.  Neither they nor Ashley notified Cody that the adoption had taken place.  The Adoption Center of Choice contacted the Wyoming Putative Father Registry and ascertained that Cody had registered there and was asserting his parental rights.  Apparently, that made absolutely no difference to the Adoption Center of Choice.

Cody then filed a paternity suit in Utah, but it was too late.  His twenty days had passed.  The Supreme Court of Utah has just ruled that all his efforts to be a father to his child were meaningless.  It was solely his failure to comply with Utah's 20-day period that destroyed any hope he had.  He will never see his child; he will never be her father in more than the biological sense.

The United States Supreme Court has called parental rights "far more precious than property rights."  But when it comes to a father's rights, those are mostly just words.  In the real world of family law, in this case, adoption law, they have next to no meaning.

Let's look at what happened in the Cody O'dea case.  His child's mother decided she didn't want the child with whom she was pregnant, so she lied to Cody, telling him that she had miscarried.  That Cody discovered her lie, was, for Ashley, an inconvenience, but little more.  She shopped for an adoption agency in one state, abandoned that idea and located another in another state.  The new agency was willing to overlook the fact that it knew perfectly well that there was a father who wanted custody.

In short, a few well-placed lies, an unscrupulous adoption agency, an unscrupulous attorney combined with a young father who failed to know the laws of an anti-father foreign state, added up to the denial of his parental rights.  You remember those; they're the ones that are "far more precious than property rights."  But when those rights are placed, not in the father's hands but in the mother's, abrogating them turns out to be simplicity itself.

I've written before about adoption laws in this country.  We bend over backwards to deny fathers even the most minimal opportunity to assert their rights.  The "due process" that is routinely accorded fathers in adoption cases would be laughed out of criminal court.  The most heinous mass murderer receives far more due process than the most upstanding father.

Can you imagine a DA explaining to a judge why a murder defendant isn't in court for her trial, "Judge, it's OK for her to not be present.  We called her last night and used the word 'Utah' in our conversation, so she's been notified of the proceedings against her."  The judge would never stop laughing (or screaming), but that's basically what happened to Cody O'dea.

As I've said before, when a child is adopted who has a father who desires to- and is capable of- caring for it, another child who needs adoption is denied parents.  That's because there are far more children in the United States and in the world who need adoption than there are qualified adoptive parents.  So the Utah courts, by forcing adoption on a child who didn't need it, denied parents to another child who did.

If you're still not convinced that the adoption of Cody O'dea's child was an outrage, consider Ashley Olea's myspace profile.   What did she list as her occupation?  "Baby Seller."

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 9th, 2009 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Adoption. You can trackback from your own site.