Adoption apartheid - Archaic laws skewed against fathers and men who seek to adopt children into common-law homes

Jamaica’s adoption laws should be overhauled because they prejudicially disenfranchise men and overwhelmingly favour would-be moms, a senior official overseeing state adoptions has charged.

Maxine Bagalue, adoption coordinator at the Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA), has outlined three aspects of Jamaica’s Children Adoption Act, enacted in 1958, that are in drastic need of amendment.

The stipulations, she explained, are causing unnecessary suffering to men in particular, and also for adopted children who later on yearn to know and establish a relationship with their biological parents.

According to the act: “An adoption order shall not be made in respect of a child who is a female in favour of a sole applicant who is a male, unless the court is satisfied that there are special circumstances which justify as an exceptional measure.”

“But we allow females to adopt both genders. Why then are we stipulating that a male cannot adopt a female?” questioned Bagalue during an interview with The Sunday Gleaner last Friday.

“… And the exceptional circumstance is usually where a man is raising a child who is not his, and he decides to migrate and they (embassy) ask him to do a DNA test. That is when he finds out that the child is not his,” she said.

“So although that child has the father’s name, lives all their life as the father’s child, that father realises now that he has to adopt that child,” continued Bagalue, relaying painful stories of fathers who have been given ‘jacket’ children unknowingly.

In the meantime, while the act allows single women to adopt children in Jamaica, Bagalue said it disallows men from adopting children into common-law unions.

“Common-law couples are not allowed. You have to be either married or single,” explained Bagalue.

“This law is not in sync with other laws that govern common-law unions ... . But you have to understand that this act is from 1958, and it has not been changed,” she stressed.

According to the CPFSA, it has been struggling to meet demands from would-be parents for babies below three years old, and who have no medical illnesses – including even the slightest trait of sickle-cell disease.

The agency said that more than 516 adoption cases have been reviewed and concluded by the Adoption Board since 2016, and that 373 of those cases were concluded within six months.

Nonetheless, while the adoption applications flow in, the agency said it only has 22 hearty children available for adoption.

Twenty-four other children are awaiting adoption, but they are sick with illnesses such as cerebral palsy and are being overlooked by potential parents.

In the meantime, Bagalue said the CPFSA has had to be extremely vigilant in its screening of adoption cases as some mothers try to put their children up for adoption without the consent of the fathers.

Other men, she said, do not even know that they are the father of a child up for adoption, while others send money and support their children only to find out that they have been given up for adoption.

In most cases in Jamaica, she explained, children are adopted by a relative or a friend of the child’s mother. Sometimes both the mother and the adopters falsify claims on the agency’s 17-page-long adoption form, aiming to circumvent the process.

In some instances, she added, the agency has had to demand death certificates as mothers falsify funeral programmes and other documents to support lies that the child’s father has died.

Additionally, later on in life, some adopted children or their biological parents contact the CPFSA for information on their well-being, identity or whereabouts.

That information, however, cannot be shared because Jamaican laws dictate that all adoptions, once completed, are closed and their details guarded.

“The law does not allow for us to openly give them information on it because their records are closed,” Bagalue revealed.

corey.robinson@gleanerjm.com