What are a birth father’s rights?
This episode really made me curious about the rights of birth fathers, because Cory was eager to take care of the baby and seemed to fight a lot with Lori about it. I wondered if he only wanted to keep Aidan under the condition that Lori live with him and help him take care of Aidan, or whether Lori’s family didn’t want him to take care of Aidan by himself and preferred adoption to that scenario. Cory went back and forth on the subject, first wanting to raise Aidan and then coming up with excuses why adoption was the better bet, so overall he was a sketchy character. After some research, it seems that birth fathers do have parental rights, but they carry some stipulations when it comes to adoption. First and foremost, a man has to know he has fathered a child in order to contest an adoption. Adoption agencies won’t run into trouble if they get the legal consent of both parents when going through an adoption and both parents sign over their parental rights. If they don’t bother to find
