[Note: Reader Robert Franklin, a retired business attorney, is joining the blogging team at www.glennsacks.com. All of Robert’s posts are available here.–GS]
Boise, ID–Another father has learned about putative father registries the hard way – by forever losing his rights to and contact with his son.
An Idaho man, Tyson Sherwood, was engaged to be married. His fiancée was pregnant and, for unknown reasons abruptly broke off the relationship and refused further contact with Sherwood.
He called the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare to find out what he could do to preserve his parental rights. Their answer: “Nothing until the child is born.’ That turned out to be false.
What he could have done, indeed the one thing he HAD to do, was file a form with the state”s Putative Father Registry claiming paternity of the child. Care to guess which Idaho state agency is responsible for maintaining its Putative Father Registry? If you said the IDHW, go to the head of the class. Why the IDHW lied to Sherwood about a matter clearly within its knowledge is one of the many mysteries of this case.
What happened in this case is what happens in so many adoption cases; the mother decided she didn”t want to keep the child and she didn”t want the father to have him either. So she refused to tell the adoption agency Sherwood”s identity or whereabouts and, since he hadn”t filed with the Putative Father Registry, no notice of the adoption was given him. The child was adopted by parents unknown and Tyson Sherwood will never see his son.
For more about this case, click here.