Law Commons^™

Prenatal Drug Exposure As Aggravated Circumstances, Frank E. Vandervort

Articles

In Michigan, "a child has a legal right to begin life with sound mind and body." Yet the family court may not assert Juvenile Code jurisdiction until after birth. In re Baby X addressed the question of whether a parent's prenatal conduct may form the basis for jurisdiction upon birth. It held that a mother's drug use during pregnancy is neglect, allowing the court to assert jurisdiction immediately upon the child's birth. In deciding Baby X, the Court specifically reserved the question of whether parental drug use during pregnancy might be sufficient to permanently deprive a parent of custody. …

Fathers And Feminism: The Case Against Genetic Entitlement, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

This Article makes the case against a nascent consensus among feminist and other progressive scholars about men's parental rights. Most progressive proposals to reform parentage law focus on making it easier for men to assert parental rights, especially when they are not married to the mother of the child. These proposals may seek, for example, to require the state to make more extensive efforts to locate biological fathers, to require pregnant women to notify men of their impending paternity, or to require new mothers to give biological fathers access to infants.

These proposals disregard the mother's existing parental rights and …

A Liberal Dilemma: Respecting Autonomy While Also Protecting Inchoate Children From Prenatal Substance Abuse., Andrew J. Weisberg, Frank E. Vandervort

Articles

Substance abuse is a significant social problem in America. It is estimated that some eighteen million Americans have an alcohol abuse problem and that almost five million have a drug abuse problem. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, substance abuse costs some $700 billion per year Substance abuse is a major contributor to child maltreatment. It is estimated that between one- and two-thirds of cases in which children enter foster care are linked to parental substance abuse. Unfortunately, this may be an underestimate as recent research suggests that many cases, particularly cases in which children have been exposed …

Mothering As A Life Course Transition: Do Women Go Straight For Their Children?, Venezia Michalsen

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In this study, qualitative, in-depth interviews were conducted with 100 formerly incarcerated mothers to explore the relationship between attachment to children and desistance from criminal behavior. Exploratory data analysis revealed that mothers do believe that children play important roles in their desistance, consistent with the tenets of life course theory. However, children were also described as sources of great stress, which may in turn promote criminal behavior. Women also related desistance to reliance on self and a higher power, and to a desire to avoid future involvement with the criminal justice system. The article concludes with a call for more …

Advocating For The Constitutional Rights Of Nonresident Fathers, Vivek Sankaran

Articles

Months after a child welaare case is petitioned, a nonresident father appears in court and requests custody of his children who are living in foster care. Little is known about the father, and immediately, the system-judge, caseworkers, and attorneys view him with suspicion and caution, inquiring about his whereabouts and his prior involvement in the children's lives. Those doubts, in turn, raise complicated questions about his legal rights to his children. As a practioner working in the child welfare system, you're likely to face this scenario. The largest percentage of child victims of abuse and neglect come from households headed …

Noncustodial Fathers' Involvement With Their Children: A Right Or A Privilege?, Janice Laakso, Sheri Adams

Social Work & Criminal Justice Publications

This study explores the key determinants of noncustodial fathers' involvement with their children. The stereotype that fathers have little interest in parenting their children is contradicted. The findings reveal that fathers are committed to parenting; however, actions on the part of the mothers and what the participants perceive to be bias on the part of the courts prevent fathers from having the relationship with their children they desire. Even fathers who have been committed early in the relationship to their children, pay child support, and give no justification for being denied parental rights do not necessarily get to spend time …

Newfound Religion: Mothers, God, And Infanticide, Susan Ayres

Faculty Scholarship

This essay focuses on cultural constructions of infanticide and psychosis, especially cases in which the mother heard delusional commands to kill her children. Part I examines the background of the Yates, Laney, and Diaz cases. Part II explores whether these mothers can be seen paradoxically as feminist subjects of empowerment rather than as victims. This essay argues that psychotic mothers have been disempowered and silenced, so their acts cannot be seen as subversive feminist gestures. Part III, however, arguest that the legal trials of Laney and Diaz demonstrate a possible subversion through trial strategy. These two trials more fully told …

Placing The Adoptive Self, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

[A]doption law and practices are guided by enormous cultural changes in the composition and the meaning of family. As families become increasingly blended outside the context of adoption – with combinations of blood relatives, step-relatives, de facto relatives, and ex-relatives sitting down together for Thanksgiving dinner as a matter of course – birth families and adoptive families knowing one another may not seem so very strange or threatening at all. There will simply be an expectation across communities that ordinary families will be mixed and multiple. With that in mind, we should hesitate before establishing embeddedness as the source of …

Child Care In The Postwelfare Reform Era: Analysis And Strategies For Advocates, Rebecca L. Scharf, Jo Ann C. Gong, Alice Bussiere, Jennifer Light, Marc Cohan, Sherry Leiwant

Scholarly Works

Adequate child care is essential to enable poor women to support their families with work outside the home. In 1994 the U.S. General Accounting Office found that offering a child care subsidy to poor mothers increased the likelihood by 15 percent that the mothers would work. An Illinois study found that 20 percent of parents who left public assistance for work returned to assistance because of child care problems. In Minnesota a study found that lack of child care caused 14 percent of parents awaiting child care subsidies to leave their jobs and rely on public assistance. These studies confirm …

Court-Created Boundaries Between A Visible Lesbian Mother And Her Children, Susan J. Becker

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This essay identifies some of the boundaries and obstacles imposed by the courts on a "visible" lesbian mother striving to maintain a healthy relationship with her children. The term "visible" is used to describe a mother whose lesbian sexuality has been revealed to a court empowered with defining her future contact with her children. The primary focus here is on children who were conceived through a heterosexual relationship, and where a heterosexual parent, grandparent, or other person is challenging the lesbian mother's right to custody of, or visitation with, her own children. Court created boundaries are identified and discussed in …

Fathers, The Welfare System, And The Virtues And Perils Of Child-Support Enforcement, David L. Chambers

Articles

For half a century, Aid to Families with Dependent Children ("AFDC")' -the program of federally supported cash assistance to low-income families with children-has been oddly conceived. Congress has chosen to make assistance available almost solely to low-income single-parent families, not all low-income parents with children. At first many of the eligible single parents were women whose husbands had died. Over time, a growing majority were women who had been married to their children's father but who had separated or divorced. Today, to an ever increasing extent, they are women who were never married to the fathers of their children.2

Commentary: Meeting The Financial Needs Of Children, David L. Chambers

Articles

Those who drafted the equitable distribution statutes adopted in New York and elsewhere wanted to help assure women and children an acceptable level of financial well-being after divorce. Marsha Garrison has shown that divorcing couples rarely possess enough resources to attain financial well-being even when they live together as a couple, let alone when they live in two separate households. She has also shown that, even in the cases of couples with substantial assets, the broad and general language of the equitable distribution statute did not lead (and could not have been expected to lead) to consistent distributions that assured …

Stepparents, Biologic Parents, And The Law's Perception Of 'Family' After Divorce, David L. Chambers

Book Chapters

The drama of divorce always contains at least two characters, a woman and a man, and often a third, a child born to the woman and the man. If you have read the other chapters of this book, you have rarely encountered any of the other persons who may be affected by a divorce, such as the children of either person from a prior marriage, or later spouses or partners of either party, or later born children of either party-all the persons who are or become stepchildren or stepparents. You have not encountered them because, in this country, with minor …

Surrogate Motherhood From The Perspective Of Family Law, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

One of the things that I find most puzzling about the question of surrogate motherhood is how easily many people answer it. One of the things that I have most admired about today's comments is their tone of constraint and their sense of complexity. I myself am sympathetic to the argument that the unhappiness of infertile couples is profound and that surrogacy contracts offer them the hope of an equally profound happiness. And I am prepared to believe that many surrogate mothers perform their part of the bargain without grief and even with gratification. Yet these benefits of surrogacy are …

The Abuses Of Social Science: A Response To Fineman And Opie., David L. Chambers

Articles

Martha Fineman and Anne Opie have written an article on the misuses of social science research by those who are recommending policies for the placement of children after divorce.' The subject is important. When Professor Fineman told me that she and Opie were using an article I wrote about child custody2 as an example of some of the problems they discussed, I anticipated a useful exchange on the subject. Having read their article, I have decided against an exchange on the merits of the larger issues they raise. I have so decided because their article, which refers extensively to my …

The 'Legalization' Of The Family: Toward A Policy Of Supportive Neutrality, David L. Chambers

Articles

The word "legalization" has conflicting meanings. One, intended to sound the theme of this conference, conveys the notion of government regulation permeating some area of human activity. The other-as found, for example, in the phrase "the legalization of marijuana"-is a near opposite: the process of making legal or permissible that which. was previously forbidden, taking government out of that which it had previously controlled. The recent history of government's relationship to the family amply displays both sorts of legalization, both government's intrusion and its withdrawal, and reveals a paradoxical relation between the two-that as government frees people to live their …

Rethinking The Substantive Rules For Custody Disputes In Divorce, David L. Chambers

Articles

A few states, mostly in the West and South, still retain a preference in custody disputes for placing young children with their mothers. In most other states, legislatures or courts have replaced the maternal presumption with a rule directing courts to be guided solely by the child's "welfare" or "best interests." A few legislatures have created a new preference for joint custody, directing courts to consider favorably requests by a parent for such arrangements, even over the objection of the other parent. This Article argues that the trend away from the maternal presumption is sensible, but that the current best-interests …

The Coming Curtailment Of Compulsory Child Support, David L. Chambers

Articles

Absent parents ought to contribute to the support of their minor children and states can appropriately invoke the force of law to compel them to do so. Stated so generally, even absent parents behind in their payments would probably agree. Since so many others agree as well, and since the numbers of single-parent children have mushroomed, systems of governmentally compelled support in this country have grown enormously. By the early part of the next century, if current laws remain in force and current population trends continue, most of America's children on any given day will be entitled to support from …

Men Who Know They Are Watched: Some Benefits And Costs Of Jailing For Nonpayment Of Support, David L. Chambers

Articles

Suppose that by some mysterious process the police in your town received each Monday a list of all the robberies and burglaries committed during the preceding week and the names of the persons who committed them. Suppose further that the list itself was admissible in evidence at trial and generally led to conviction. And suppose finally that persons considering committing offenses knew that the police had such a list and used it, relentlessly tracking down the miscreants named on it. Under such circumstances, one would probably expect that many potential offenders in the town with the magical list would resist …