FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE WEST PALM BEACH, FL - Denouncing the Sexual History Newspaper Requirement provision of Florida's adoption law as an egregious violation of privacy, the American Civil Liberties Union today filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the state's District Court of Appeal to strike the requirement.
""This provision serves no purpose other than to publicly humiliate those women unlucky enough to be covered under the law,"" said Mariann Meier Wang, an attorney with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. ""The law brands women with a scarlet letter and makes them vulnerable to all kinds of harassment.""
At issue is a provision of Florida's adoption law that requires a mother who wishes to place her child with a private adoption agency but does not know the identity or whereabouts of the father to make public her sexual history.
The law requires the mother to publish her name and physical description; her child's name and age; the names and physical descriptions, if known, of everyone with whom she had sexual relations during the year preceding the child's birth; the cities in which conception may have occurred; and the dates on which it may have occurred. The ad must run once a week for four weeks in a newspaper in every city where conception may have occurred.
""If Florida's right to privacy means anything, women in this state should not be subjected to this intrusive and punitive measure,"" said Randall Marshall of the ACLU of Florida. ""Women should be allowed to place their children up for adoption without being forced by the state to publicize intimate details about their sexual lives.""
In its brief, the ACLU suggests that a more effective means of protecting the rights of fathers would be to institute a confidential paternity registry that allows putative fathers to officially record their interest in their children without violating the privacy rights of mothers, children, or the men who may or may not be the father.
The case has been brought on behalf of four mothers who wish to place their children with private adoption agencies without publishing detailed private information about their sexual histories in order to do so. On July 24th, a lower court allowed the provision to stand except in those cases where women became pregnant as a result of forcible rape.
The case is G.P., C.M., C.H., L.H. v. State of Florida, No. 4D02-3410. Lawyers for the ACLU brief include Wang and Diana Kasdan of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project; Emily Martin of the ACLU Women's Rights Project; Marshall of the ACLU of Florida; and Philip L. Graham Jr., James Andrew Kent, Michael A. Cheah, and Kathrine M. Mortensen.
The ACLU brief is available online at: /reproductiverights/gen/12671lgl20021030.html
