soapboxdiner

Check and Balance or Invasion of Privacy?

Has anyone else read this article off the AP?

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) - A handful of women are challenging a Florida law that requires mothers who don't know who fathered their children to detail their sexual past in newspaper notices before they can put the children up for adoption.

What kind of throw-back to the puritanical, inquisitional, medievally repressive and penitentiarial misogynistic times is this! Roe v. Wade in question, women worry about their safety when undergoing one of the most devastingly difficult decisions they can face. Prolific propaganda on safe sex, alternative family planning, give a loving family a chance to love a child, et cetera ad infinitum, and NOW women in Florida have this laid before them?

Granted, none of the options are easy. Personally, I think it would be infinitely more difficult knowing there is a person, a part of me, living out there who I didn't know. But now this thing, adoption, an immeasurably difficult decision to give another family that person who is a piece of what you are - gets CHALLENGED?

Yes, I understand a biological father's right to raise his offspring. But to force a woman stand before society and give intimate details of her sexual history? So a *potentially* interested man *may* find her name in the paper and realize that he has the *option* to #1 come forward or #2 do nothing? Is this not just a little too invasive and punishing to the woman to be deemed a responsible way to conduct the process?

Devil's advocate here, but #1. A woman who has had multiple partners and #2. cannot definitively identify the father #3. ALREADY has to notify those she can identify, apparently. Furthermore, #4. If that same woman has had casual partners she cannot identify, #5. the relationship could not have been very binding to begin with. Why should her privacy have to be sacrificed to give the father the option, if he even sees the notice, to come forward? Is her privacy less sacred than his right?

And in the instance that a woman becomes pregnant, wants to keep the child, and wants to have genetic testing done on various men, is HIS name published in the Times telling him to come forward for testing? Is the woman given exhaustive state resources to locate all the potential fathers? Yes, I understand the irony that the Y chromosome here, who DOESN'T want to be a father, has very little legal say in that woman's ultimate decision. Yes, it is a real bummer that despite the fact that he doesn't want to be financially (and otherwise) responsible, he is. But at the same time, he isn't put up to public revelation and subsequent judgment.

The article states that this is a measure the state is taking to ensure that all parties to the adoption have their positions heard. This to ensure that adoptions are not later contested.

I'd be interested in knowing the number of standing contested adoptions this law effects versus the number of women putting their children up for adoption. On top of that, I'd like to know the number of men who were casual encounters and therefore could not be contacted privately.

Let's discuss this. I, personally, am outraged. What are your thoughts?

10:07 am - 08.15.02
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