Introduction
Adoption is said to be “forever”—longing parents fulfill their dream of parenthood and children get a “forever family.” While the legal system intends for adoptive parent-child relationships to be permanent, a happily-ever-after ending is elusive when adoptions are enabled to fail. In the United States, each state can set its own standard for when courts may grant a request to dissolve an adoption, as well as time limits within which a parent may ask the court to vacate the adoption decree. This legal loophole, known as adoption dissolution, has been met with controversy about the permissibility of parents giving up on their adopted child, especially as states do not provide this additional avenue of termination to biological parents. Nonetheless, the fact remains that, sometimes, dissolution could be in the child’s best interests.
This Note surveys how each state approaches adoption dissolution in order to uncover regulatory trends across the country. It finds that while adoption statutory schemes generally seek to effect permanence, many states retain dissolution statutes that vary as to the substantive and procedural ways to terminate the adoptive relationship. As such, this Note proposes a more uniform statutory scheme reframed around the well-being of the child rather than the needs or desires of the adult or the judicial nature of the adoptive relationship. When it comes to the legal procedures surrounding a child, the “best interests” standard should prevail, regardless of the adoptive or biological nature of the parent-child relationship.