Legally Binding Contact?

I don't know, and am going to look it up, but I believe it's the state in which the adoption was finalized.

There are approximately twenty-two. The States that permit enforceable contracts include Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Indiana (for children over age 2), Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont (stepparent adoptions only), Washington, and West Virginia.It is in the state that the adoption was finalized. So, not based on where people "live" as people move around quite often.Note that they all vary in how they can be and are enforced with many leaving no way for anything to be done about it; just basic legalease on the books to make the state look more birth parent friendly.

You really do need to look closely at the law of the individual state. I know Florida often appears on lists of states with post-adoption contact, but as a practical matter, it is very limited. It is available only for kids who are adopted through the state (that is, out of foster care). The relevant provision is section 63.0427, Florida Statutes. All it does is tell the court that the court has to "consider" allowing post-adoption contact with siblings or, with the consent of the adoptive parents, birth parents and/or other biological relatives. In practice what it often means is that siblings can keep visting each other, which hopefully has been happening while they're in foster care anyway. It does NOT set up open relationships between adoptive and birth families. A birth parent making a voluntary adoption plan in Florida should be advised that any agreement for contact will be unenforceable. Barbara

"A birth parent making a voluntary adoption plan in Florida should be advised that any agreement for contact will be unenforceable." I am not so sure that this is true. When our son was adopted (in 2001, so it may be different now), if an open agreement was included in the final judgement of adoption, it was legally enforceable.

childwelfare site In short? Domestic adoptions are NOT addressed in the state of Florida under post-adoption agreement statutes. Meaning that even if an agreement was signed in Florida, a known state to be unfriendly towards birth parent rights, the judge does not have to honor it in any way, shape or form since the wording of the statute covering the subject is speaking solely of those biological parents who have lost a child to state custody. It speaks NOTHING of birth parents who voluntarily relinquish. This is a loophole that I believe is purposeful though it may be an oversight. However, this is the loophole used to get out of said agreements.FURTHERMORE, as you can see, the statute itself sides solely with the adoptive family by giving them AND ONLY THEM the ability to have the courts readdress the communication/contact order. AND, as it states, it is not addressed whether or not the contract is "legally enforceable," once again leaving birth parents without any ACTUAL recourse if the adoption is suddenly closed.

Thanks! The sentence that limits this to kids adopted from foster care is the following: "A child whose parents have had their parental rights terminated and whose custody has been awarded to the department pursuant to 39.811, and who is the subject of a petition for adoption under this chapter, shall have the right to have the court consider the appropriateness of postadoption communication or contact..." The reference to ǧ 39.811 is a reference to the dependency statute. A child who is placed voluntarily never comes within the scope of Chapter 39, and so this entire section of Chapter 63 does not apply to that type of placement. Billysmommy, I am not aware of open adoption agreements ever being enforceable in FL. Our son was born in 2003 and it was clear that our agreement for contact was not enforceable. If you adopted out of foster care, that's a different story. My personal view is that they SHOULD be enforceable. But that's another thread -- I just wanted to caution anyone reading this thread that even states with some "open adoption" provisions do not necessarily recognize voluntary agreements between birth parents and adoptive parents as enforceable later. In FL, I do not believe this is an oversight. I think the law was passed primarily to deal with the situation where groups of siblings in foster care have to be split up for purposes of adoption. Most people will agree in that situation that the kids should be able to stay in touch with each other, but unfortunately, people tend to see that as a completely different issue from creating an adoption that is open from the beginning. Barbara

I placed in Florida, and open adoptions, semi-open adoptions from the domestic infant adoption stand are NOT legally binding and if you know my story you know that I know that from a very personal standpoint.

I had read a post in a step-parent adoption forum about this topic and it's interesting to me because I had never read much about these adoption agreements. I would caution very much no matter what state you live in about open adoption if you wish to have contact to your child (this goes actually for anyone that is a bparent or the aparent letting another adopt - the latter is very uncommon but does and can happen). I would think it is VERY difficult in any state to enforce agreements post adoption. The reason? Simply because in order for adoption to take place the current legal parents (it doesn't matter if they are birth or adoptive) have to be terminated. By definition this termination and the subsequent adoption makes another person the legal parent. You can only legally have one mother and one father in the US. Now there might be statutes that allow for enforcement in certain situations (for example as mentioned above with regard to foster care). I know for a fact that with step-parent adoptions this is 100% completely impossible no matter where you live as long as you live in the US. The fact is if you live in the US you can only have 1 mother and 1 father. Bottom line. In some cases, for example, in step-parent adoptions (this was our case - I adopted my wife's bio son), the statutes specifically state that you cannot have wording to allow for any form of post termination contact in an affidavit to terminate rights (not just with that person but with any member of that persons family). Now, that is not to say you can't do it out of the goodness of your heart but you can't actually put language in the document to that effect and have it be legally binding. Again, the reason is simple: that person (whether aparent or bparent) is terminating their rights and by definition this means they have no right to the child. Seems virtually impossible to me that any court could ever rule in favor of the terminating parent. Parental rights are so protected in this country that (very hypothetically speaking) if for some reason my wife and I were to divorce, for example, and by some miracle she were to reunite with bparent again he would have to ask me to sign a termination document (just like he did) and then proceed to adopt.I find it amazing that open adoption agreements exist, in fact. I guess there is a lot variance from state to state with regard to how government or adoption agencies can handle the situation. Maybe specific statues exist to handle these agreements?I would just say be very careful about that whole issue.

Centraltxdad~ It appears to me that you see "Open adoption" as co-parenting and honestly, that is the furthest thing from the truth. The bottom line isn't that children only have 1 mother and 1 father, the real bottom line is that children have 1 set of parents, but actually adoptive children do have 2 mothers and 2 fathers. I guess it is all in how you want to see it.

Step-parent adoption is vastly different from domestic infant adoption.

Mommy24 - Oops. Sorry I didn't mean to make it sound bad. I was just trying to offer a bit of insight and maybe find out a little myself about open adoption. Jenna-Yes, I have realized now since going through a step-parent adoption and after reading posts here about domestic infant adoption that they must be vastly different. I've just been curious as to how and why mostly. I know in step-parent cases is it basically as simple as the fact that the rights of the current legal parent are severed (this includes that person and anyone in that persons family). It follows that any "agreement" post termination would be void and null and could not possibly be binding because it is impossible to make an agreement to enforce something that is by definition not enforceable (ie. you can't enforce the rights of someone who doesn't have rights).I've been curious how this works with domestic adoptions through agencies or foster care because I read a lot about the legal code during our adoption and I never read anything that would allow for such agreements. But..... I suppose I was only reading relevant information to our family situation and not a domestic infant adoption. Obviously the statues must exist for those special cases; it just seems very odd the whole thing.

Hi CentralTXDad, I don't think stepparent adoption is all that different, actually. The big difference is that the child is keeping one existing parent. But, as you said, our legal system recognizes one set of parents (although there are states that recognize two mothers or two fathers rather than one mother, one father). So, in a stepparent adoption, the non-custodial parent loses all rights and becomes, for most purposes, a legal stranger to the child. I would guess that, in many situations, this does not happen unless there is some type of estrangement or abandonment of the parental role (note, I'm not saying all). In other words, if you have a non-custodial parent who is still an involved parent and who contributes financially to the child(ren)'s upbringing, it would be unlikely that the custodial parent would try to terminate their parental rights. So there would have been no perceived need, at least under the mind-set that has prevailed in adoption in recent decades, to have visitation or contact with the absent parent. The laws were not drafted to preserve those relationships, because if the relationships were strong, stepparent adoption would be less likely. As pointed out earlier, the statutes that deal with open adoption were NOT all written with domestic infant adoption in mind. In FL, and I'm pretty sure in CA, along with at least some other states, they were really aimed at children who were already in state care -- children who might be older, who might have existing family ties or sibling relationships. So the reason for at least some of these laws was not so much creating any rights for the former parents, but giving children the right to have existing connections maintained -- particularly relationships with other children, who were easier to see as blameless in the whole situation. But in some places, open adoption laws seem to be an attempt for the law to deal with the reality that some degree of contact before or after an adoption has become more and more normal. A few years ago, in the context of grandparents' rights, the US Supreme Court said pretty clearly that parental rights will not be infringed on by forcing parents to agree to visitation with third parties, unless there is some harm that would result from denying the visitation. (This is really summarizing broadly; there was more to the opinion than that.) I'm not aware of any open adoption statutes being tested against that principle, but I think any such statute would have to be very carefully drafted to survive. Having said that...most current open adoption statutes do not really force adoptive parents to agree to visitation. They allow adoptive parents to agree to visitation, and as part of the agreement, the adoptive parents sometimes also agree to mediate before changing the visitation or other contact (such as exchanging pictures). There is no statute anywhere in the US that would require adoptive parents to agree to visitation against their wishes, and no statute anywhere that would nullify or reverse an adoption just because the adoptive parents changed their mind about promised visitation. Enough with the legalese. I think Mommy24 made a very important point, which is that open adoption agreements do not necessarily result in co-parenting or an "odd" relationship -- any odder than any other family relationship, anyway. What is odd to me, as an adopted person and an adoptive parent, is that I would be allowed to meet a young woman at one of the most vulnerable and emotionally draining points of her life, make a promise to her that she would be able to know how her baby is, and then simply walk away from that promise.

Yea, the biggest reason step-parent adoption is vastly different than other forms of adoption (not just from a legal standpoint but a moral standpoint) is that as you mentioned if there were a good relationship in the first place stepparent adoption would not be taking place. In almost all cases where a step-parent adopts there is probably a very bad situation involving the absent bparent. While it is possible that this is not "always" the case I would venture to say it is the case virtually 100% of the time.Very rarely I would expect to ever see a step-parent adoption take place where the absent parent is involved in the family. That is one of the reasons in my other posts I have had such strong opinions about the topic (because I have that very circumstance). My son's bparent will never have contact with him even if he begs me on his hands and knees later down the line (at least not until K is an adult and wishes to pursue that himself). He is a scumbag (for lack of the ability to curse at him) that doesn't care about anyone but himself and he will never be given that privelage. That situation is not the same as a birthmom, for example, who allows her child to be adopted out of the goodness of her heart and wanting better for her child. That is far different than abandonment, putting your baby in dangerous situations, and not being able to parent your baby for reasons such as drug addiction, criminal activity, etc.... Those are usually the type of things that cause stepparent adoption to take place. So, legally, the issue of terminating rights is still the same (as I mentioned before you can only legally have 1 mother and 1 father) but the reasons triggering the adoption from a stepparent are almost always, by definition, the result of a bad parental situation. The court normally won't even allow the adoption to take place if that is not the case in a stepparent adoption. I could never do it myself but, yea, I get that it's not the same thing as co-parenting. It does seem harsh I suppose. The problem is in the fact that you have to terminate parental rights and this action leaves little room for recourse. We would have to acknowledge a person as having more than 1 set of parents to even begin the idea of supporting a legal recourse for bparents. Frankly, I don't really ever see this happening. There are enough problems just having a 1 legal mom and 1 legal dad (obviously marriages can and do end over disagreements about children). If you were to legally acknowledge more people than this (and you would have to in order to support the notion that you could legally require a person visitation) then you only make things even more complex. Now there would potentially be as many as 4 people involved having some level of "rights" to the child in question.It does suck (I agree) that people can make these agreements and not follow through but I don't see any happy way to make it so that it cannot happen. I would never make that promise to someone; but then again I would never entertain the idea of an open arrangement in the first place (that's just me).