So You Can’t Adopt your Stepchild: Other Options in Michigan

Last week, we talked about the legalities behind giving a child three parents, and why it means that a loving step-parent can’t adopt their stepchild if the other biological parent doesn’t relinquish their parental status. First, let’s talk about why not.

Why Michigan Has Disallowed Three Parents
There are a few reasons why Michigan, along with many other states, have completely stuck with the two-parents routine:

• It’s the default. American jurisprudence goes back way past even the founding of the country, and the concept of a three-parent child simply hasn’t existed in any societally-recognized sense except for the last few decades. The judicial system doesn’t have the right to change the law — so until the Legislature does, we’re obligated to follow it as it is.
• It’s simpler if things go wrong. Three parents are great when everything is hunky-dory. But what happens if the three have a falling-out? Splitting custody three ways is much more than 50% more complicated, and having a child rotate between three parents means a much more chaotic upbringing. Not to mention the fact that three parents means a much higher chance of someone having a life event that will screw the plan up somehow.
• Having three parents is unfair to two-parent children in some ways. If you have three parents, you have three people worth of child support, three estates to inherit from, three sets of Social Security survivor benefits, and so on. This isn’t a big concern…but only because it isn’t happening anywhere. If it became normal, you can be assured, people would be screaming.
• Social pressure. Let’s be frank: Michigan isn’t California or New York. An attempt to go super-liberal on the definition of parenthood would probably be met with significant backlash, and the legislature just isn’t ready to fight that fight yet.

So unfortunately, because the notion of adopting your stepchild while your biological counterpart retains their rights is mixed up in this much larger set of issues, it’s currently an impossibility in the state of Michigan. But that’s doesn’t mean you have no options — it’s just that that none of the options are tried-and-true…or even tried.

They’re all new enough ideas that Michigan has yet to establish any rules (legal, procedural, or precedential) to deal with them.You would be treading new ground with any of them, and you’re quite likely to get brick-walled without any sort of reasonable explanation why. That said, here are a couple of ideas you could pursue without having every family lawyer you ask laugh you out of their office (though some will!):

The Post-Adoption Contract Agreement
This solution actually addresses the problem in the other direction, by allowing the biological parent a way of having legally-enforceable visitation rights even after they’ve given up their rights as a legal parent. A PACA, sometimes called a “cooperative adoption contract” or “open adoption contract” is simply an agreement that says “After I adopt your child, you retain visitation rights,” and then lays out those rights exactly like a custody hearing would.

The Parental Responsibility Agreement
The PRA is a legal vehicle which has never seen use in the US — essentially, it’s a contract between a child’s existing parents and another party (usually the ‘third parent’) that extends parental responsibilities (and rights!) to that third person so long as the existing parents concur. It’s currently all the rage in the UK, and Michigan just recently passed a law establishing a contractual form of parenthood for surrogate mothers — so if you’re brave and you know a great lawyer, it’s possible to extend an argument that contractual parenthood exists, so why not a slightly different kind of the same?

Honestly, it’s not likely either one of these will go anywhere — not in the state of Michigan, at least. But who knows? Maybe they should. With the modern definition of ‘family’ undergoing serious revision with homosexual marriage, three-parent in-vitro fertilization, and more, we suspect that in a decade or two, we’ll start to see agreements like these cropping up more and more.