Understanding the Child Adoption Process
Are you looking to adopt a child and you have some questions? My name is Carl Birkhead. I’m a child adoption attorney with Wirth Law Office in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I want to help you make law easy by giving you just a couple of adoption tips, just kind of explaining the process to you a little bit.
So I’m going to keep this strictly within a legal adoption. I say legal adoption. I’m going to keep this strictly with an adoption that’s not going through an adoption agency. It’s not going through DHS. It’s basically if somebody is coming to me and saying, hey, I want to terminate these parental rights, have this person adopt my kids, or I want to terminate these parental rights and I want to adopt these kids.
Common Scenarios in Private Adoptions
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a stepparent adoption, although that is the most common. I’ve seen a lot of situations where aunt and uncle get guardianship or maybe the grandparents get guardianship of the child and they ultimately decide that guardianship isn’t the way that they want to go and they want to adopt the child instead.
It all comes down to the same thing. You have to be looking at if for 12 out of 14 months before filing the petition for adoption, the parents whose rights you want to terminate, have either failed to establish and maintain a positive relationship with the kids or have failed to provide support to the children either according to a child support order or according to their means.
There are other grounds for it, but those are the two most common, so I’m just going to kind of stick with that for what we’re talking about here because what you’re looking at for the process is you’ll file the petition. You’ll go ahead and serve the parents with that petition.
Navigating the Legal Steps
If the parents decide that they’re going to fight the case, the court is likely going to appoint an attorney to represent the child for the duration of the proceedings. If mom and dad are going to fight it the whole way through, you have to have a trial to determine whether or not the adoption can go forward without the consent of the parents.
If you have that trial, obviously you’ll put on your witnesses, you’ll present your exhibits, and you’ll ask the court to go ahead and deem the child eligible for adoption without parental consent. Or if the parents want to go and consent to it, they can sign consents and you can present that to the court.
It goes in two stages. The first is the termination or the determination that the rights are eligible to be terminated. You would either have a hearing or the parents would consent. The other side is the actual adoption itself.
Preparing for Adoption Finalization
Sometimes if everything works out well, you can have that done the same day as the termination, or you’ll have to have a separate hearing set for that. By the time you’re ready to do the adoption, though, you’ll need to make sure that your ducks are in a row, your home study is done, and your background checks are done.
You’re going to have to have affidavits put in place saying that you’re not a lunatic and that you haven’t had protective orders filed against you. You’re going to have to have affidavits in place talking about the financial disclosures for what you have expended to get this adoption to happen.
It’s a relatively straightforward process if no one’s going to fight it. If someone is going to fight it, it just throws a couple of extra kinks in the works, but ultimately you’ll get the same result. If you have questions about this, please feel free to let us know.
Schedule Your Initial Strategy Session Today
I’m Tulsa family law attorney Carl Birkhead, and I’m here to make law easy. If you’re considering adoption and need guidance, call us today to schedule a low-cost initial strategy session at 918-879-1681.
