Adoption Lawyers: Their 3 Most Important Responsibilities?

Answer 1

Adoption lawyers run incredibly specialized practices and are primarily responsible for facilitating adoptions, helping couples locate surrogate parents and determining parentage.

There are two major kinds of adoptions that adoption lawyers process on behalf of their clients, and these comprise direct placement adoptions and relative adoptions. In direct placement adoptions, prospective parents are not already acquainted with the child they will eventually adopt, and the duties of the attorney representing the adopting parents will include matching the parents up with a suitable birth mother and obtaining signed Consent to Adoption forms from both the child’s birth mother and father.

In relative adoptions, the adopting parent is already acquainted with the child or children that he or she wishes to adopt, and this is the main difference between parental and direct placement adoptions. There are also two basic types of parental adoptions: stepparent adoptions and second parent adoptions, and, while stepparent adoptions involve a stepmother or stepfather adopting the natural children of their new husband or wife, second parent adoptions involve same-sex partners adopting their partner’s natural children. Relative adoptions can be either contested or uncontested and often present adoption lawyers with far more complicated cases than those relevant to direct placement adoptions.

A further field in which an adoption lawyer will practice is the location of surrogate parents - also known as gestational carriers - and here the adoptive parents will play a major role in selecting exactly who will bear their future child. In these cases, the lawyer will assist the adopting parents by preparing the required gestational carrier contracts and negotiating a suitable fee for the service that the birth mother is to render. Further issues to be looked at would include things like obtaining suitable medical insurance coverage.

Adoption lawyers are also instrumental in determining parentage in gestational carrier adoptions, and, here, determining parentage would be defined as recording the adopting parents as the child’s parents on the birth certificate. This ensures that the adoptive parents would have custody of the child from the moment of its birth, which greatly facilitates the adoption procedure.

Adoption lawyers are highly specialized professionals who are essential to the adoption process.