Terminating his parental rights...

I have a 3 year old daughter. I have never been married and am planning to marry a man who wants vary much to adopt my daughter. I have no idea on the location of her biological father and no way to contact him. He has not been in our lives since I was about 4 months pregnant... there has been no contact as he moved in secret and left no forwarding address. His name is not on her birth certificate. Do I need to "terminate his parental rights" legally...then procede to the "adoption" part? Will this be a difficult procedure? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I wish to procede without his consent as I have no way to reach him. Thanks! :-)

I reside in Washington State.

Originally posted by Monlithe
I have a 3 year old daughter. I have never been married and am planning to marry a man who wants vary much to adopt my daughter. I have no idea on the location of her biological father and no way to contact him. He has not been in our lives since I was about 4 months pregnant... there has been no contact as he moved in secret and left no forwarding address. His name is not on her birth certificate. Do I need to "terminate his parental rights" legally...then procede to the "adoption" part? Will this be a difficult procedure? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I wish to procede without his consent as I have no way to reach him. Thanks! :-)

I reside in Washington State.

I am in the same boat as you are with my two year old son. I have never been married to my baby's biological father and he is not on the birth certificate. My son's biological father left me when I was two months pregnant and I have not heard from him nor seen him since then. I met my husband when I was eight months pregnant and he took on the role of a dad to my son since birth and we recently got married. We have been looking into him adopting my son and everyone that I have talked to has said basically the same thing. It does not matter if the biological father has been around or not and it doesn't matter if he is on the birth certificate. They said that the biological father still has parental rights to my child. We have to go through a costly and lengthy process to try and locate the biological father and establish paternity even before we can start terminating his rights based on abandonment. This is all I have found out, if you here anything more let me know and I will also keep you posted on my findings.

I reside in the state of Wisconsin.
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