FORT LAUDERDALE — The state won’t defend a court challenge of an adoption law that requires some women who want to put their babies up for adoption to detail their sexual pasts in local newspapers.
Arguments are scheduled for Thursday in front of the 4th District Court of Appeal in West Palm Beach. The Attorney General’s Office declined in December to send a representative, and the state didn’t hire outside counsel to defend the adoption-notification requirement.
The decision not to appear was made before Attorney General Charlie Crist took office, spokeswoman JoAnn Carrin said. The office is not legally required to fend off all constitutional challenges, Carrin said.
Adoption attorney Jeanne Tate of Tampa speculated that the state’s decision not to appear at the hearing may be “a tacit concession that the law is unconstitutional and not worth defending.”
Enacted in 2001, the law requires a birth mother to take out legal notices in a newspaper when she is unable to track down a birth father to notify him about adoption proceedings. She has to list her name, describe herself, name or describe the possible father, and list the date and city of conception.
Adoption attorneys blame the law for a 17 percent decrease in adoptions statewide for the first half of 2002. They said some of their prospective clients have opted to get abortions rather than endure the humiliation of publishing details about their private lives.
Charlotte Danciu, the Boca Raton attorney representing four women contesting the law, said she has never heard of a situation in which the state doesn’t even attempt to ward off a constitutional challenge.
“I’ve also never heard of such a ridiculous law in the history of the state of Florida,” she said.
The state senator who spearheaded the sweeping revisions to Florida’s adoption statutes that included the notification provision now is seeking to get rid of the requirement. State Sen. Skip Campbell, D-Tamarac, had pushed through the revisions in an attempt to make adoptions easier and avoid messy custody cases.
He said a bill is being drafted for the upcoming legislative session that will eliminate the notification requirement. He said he wants it to be one of the first pieces of legislation passed this year.
“It was a problem, and we had to fix it,” he said. “Unfortunately, like many laws, there were unintended consequences.”
He said the bill also will create a registry that a birth father could use to claim parental rights. Campbell vowed that the proposal — crafted with adoption attorneys’ input — will be a model for the country.
The newspaper-notification requirements received worldwide attention in August because of Danciu’s efforts to get a Palm Beach County circuit judge to set them aside. Among Danciu’s clients were a 14-year-old girl who had sex with numerous classmates and a woman who had been slipped a date-rape drug.
Circuit Judge Peter Blanc ruled that the notification requirements were unconstitutional invasions of privacy of women who were forcibly sexually assaulted, but he said in all other cases, including those involving statutory rape, a woman would have to take out newspaper notices if she couldn’t find the birth father.
The law has had a chilling effect on adoptions by grandparents and stepparents, said Susan Stockham of Sarasota, past president of the Florida Adoption Council.
A stepfather recently came to her wanting to adopt his two stepdaughters, ages 11 and 14, whom he has helped raise for the past decade. What was supposed to be a happy event turned into tears when they were told their mother’s sexual history would have to be published in a newspaper, Stockham said. They decided not to go forward with the adoption.
Tate estimates she has had 75 clients take out newspaper notices. No prospective birth father has responded to any of them, she said.
