For years I have heard people say that a father who does not stay in contact with the mother after having a relationship with her to determine the status of a pregnancy deserves no say in the adoption of his biological child. This case proves that that notion is simply an excuse to eliminate fathers according to mothers' wishes. Here, the father did everything he could do to inquire. The court still concluded that the father had not followed the statutes by legitimating, supporting, or consistently caring for the child after suspecting the mother had lied. Obviously, inquiring and staying in contact was not enough. The father still needed to predict the mother was lying and find the ultimate truth.
That is the very catch-22 I have been discussing for some time: Where one requires the father claim paternity and another law lets the mother keep the father from gaining the information he needs to make the claim. One answer, which I have voiced in several interviews, is establishing a putative father registry that does not require paternity claiming while also eliminating the abandonment question where the mother works against the father.
Instead, we have a replay of Baby Richard, where the mother told the father that the child had died and the father searched for the truth. The father in Baby Richard was given custody four years later after the court found that the father had done all he could reasonably do given the mother's actions. After that case, there was an outcry for enacting putative father registries, wherein fathers could make their interests known without having to claim paternity or overcome the mother's dishonesty. Like Illinois in Baby Richard, North Carolina did not have a putative father registry.
This case simply proves that even where a father inquires, cares for, and stays in contact with the mother, he will still be judged on whether he learned the full truth regardless of what he did to inquire or what the mother did to mislead him.
