Photo courtesy foxnews.com
A dozen men are suing the state of Utah in federal court because of a law that allows mothers to put their babies up for adoption without the biological father’s consent, or sometimes even knowledge. The civil rights lawsuit claims the Utah Adoption Act has resulted in what amounts to “legalized fraud and kidnapping.”
Wes Hutchins, the attorney for the men, says he is very pro-adoption, having served as a president of the Utah Adoption Council and currently serving as president of the Utah Council for Ethical Adoption Practices. But, he said, “adoptions need to be done ethically, legally and constitutionally. And above all, they need to be done with the consent and the knowledge and the awareness of both biological parents.”
Some of the plaintiffs shared their emotional stories with Fox News.
“Well, I thought I was going to have a son,” Nikolas Thurnwald recalled. He said he was thrilled by the idea of being a father while he and his live-in girlfriend, in 2004, waited for their child to be born. “We were together all the way up until the last couple of days before the birth.”
Then Thurnwald called his girlfriend, “to see if she maybe wanted to go to the movies, and her co-worker answered the phone at the department store that she was working at and basically let me know that she was in the hospital having our baby.”
Thurnwald immediately called the hospital. “They patched me through to her … and I asked her if she was giving our son up for adoption. And she said, ‘Kinda.’ I said ‘there is no kinda, what are you doing? Why are you doing this?’ And she says, ‘Look I gotta go.’ I dropped to my knees, dropped my phone that I was holding and just started crying. A grown man on a construction site crying his eyes out.”
He immediately drove to the hospital where he was told his girlfriend was not a patient. He explained that he had just spoken to her on the phone, “and they said, ‘Sir, you need to leave before we call the police’.”
After 10 years and more than $30,000 in legal fees, Thurnwald lost his bid to gain custody.
Court filings in the civil rights suit charge that Utah’s laws have prompted women from all over the country to move to Utah so they can give birth and secretly place the baby up for adoption.