More than three years after a Utah judge ruled he had failed to protect his parental rights, Rob Manzanares is still fighting for custody of his now nearly four-year-old daughter.
He has met her just once. The girl’s adoptive parents brought her to a court hearing in December 2009 and, before it began, Manzanares stood in a tiny meeting room and held his daughter for the first time.
"I didn’t want to cry too much," he said. "I didn’t want to scare my daughter."
At that meeting, Manzanares said he was offered a deal: Drop the legal fight and "there’s an opportunity to have visitation." He refused and, more than a year after a hearing before the Utah Supreme Court, is still waiting a decision in a case that highlights how competing interests of unwed fathers and social policy can complicate adoption.
"It is my flesh and blood, she’s my child," said Manzanares, 34, of Colorado. "I should have a right to raise my child first, over anybody."
Related story • Stopping an adoption: In Utah, fathers rarely win • http://bit.ly/uT51Tc
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Published Feb 22, 2012 05:12:03PM
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Related story • Would-be Utah dad says misplaced trust cost him his son • http://bit.ly/tFaA2J
That is not the way the law sees it, as a Utah Supreme Court justice argued bluntly in 2007:Men who father a child outside of marriage must take steps to assert a legal relationship to a child or "risk losing it altogether."
That "biology plus" view is enshrined in a handful of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, as well as adoption laws in Utah and numerous states. Utah’s adoption law explicitly puts men on notice that sex outside of marriage may result in a pregnancy and an adoption. It is up to him alone, the law says, to protect any claim to a child born in those circumstances.
Perhaps it is due to a lack of awareness, financial resources or simple disinterest, but few do. Some men who have tried to follow Utah law say the state purposefully makes it difficult to comply.
"It is these rare cases where you have a mom who, for whatever reason, wants to cut dad out of the decision making and a very active dad who wants to participate that makes the news and makes the law," said Lisa Kelly, a University of Washington Law School professor and co-author of an adoption law textbook.
They may be rare, but such cases have surfaced with surprising frequency recently in Utah, where marriage is widely seen as a sacred institution and, in adoption cases, rights of unmarried fathers are narrow.
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