“‘These cases are very difficult because what usually happens is that the adoptive parents will hold onto the child as long as they can,'” Sacks says.
“‘And then by the time it winds its way to a decision, they say, ‘How can we rip the kid from the only family they’ve ever known and give him to his biological father?’
“Sacks says he thinks there’s an enormous amount of prejudice against biological fathers who want to raise their kids. ‘People say, ‘Gee, could he really raise a kid on his own like that? But when motivated fathers have a chance to raise their kids, they’re usually very effective, and the research bears that out.'”
Fathers and Families Executive Director Glenn Sacks, MA was quoted in the AOL.com front page article Adoptive Parents Ordered to Surrender 3-Year-Old to Biological Father (9/28/10) concerning the Ohio Benjamin Wyrembek adoption/child custody battle. F & F Board Member Robert Franklin, Esq. covered the case in a recent post here.
To comment on AOL reporter Honey Berk’s article, click here. According to Franklin:
Benjamin Wyrembek had a brief affair with a married woman. She became pregnant in 2007 and, along with her husband, decided to place the child for adoption. Wyrembek had no way of knowing if the child was his or not and possibly neither did the woman, although neither the article nor the opinion says. But he timely filed his claim of paternity with the Ohio Putative Father Registry and brought suit in juvenile court in December, 2007 to establish paternity. In January, 2008, the adoptive parents, Jason and Christy Vaughn, filed their suit to adopt the child.
Genetic testing determined that the child is Wyrembek’s and every court has since ruled in his favor. Basically, he’s the biological father who’s done every legal thing in his power to get custody of his son and every court has ruled that the adoption can’t go forward…[yet] adoption attorneys for many years have understood that when they’re caught trying to force adoption on a child who doesn’t need to be adopted because it has a fit father who wants it, the best thing to do is to stall…
Years of litigation often mean that fathers run out of money and give up…courts have ruled that, whatever the law on fathers’ rights may be, after a certain amount of time has passed, the best interests of the child demand that the dad butt out and the child remain in its adoptive home…
…the Vaughns were served with an order from Lucas County Juvenile Court to hand over the nearly 3-year-old boy named Grayson to Mr. Wyrembek,…everyone in the case knew almost three years ago that Wyrembek was the boy’s father. Then, or at any time since then, they could have done the right thing and turned the boy over to him, but they didn’t. The attorney kept filing motions, kept filing appeals and, the judicial system being what it is, time passed – a lot of it.