“[R]esearch shows that many children who experience termination of their parents’ rights will suffer what is known as ambiguous loss, similar to grieving after a death but without the closure of knowing a loved one is gone forever.”
Termination of Parental Rights
Cases
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New York’s highest court ruled for the first time that parents' right to assigned counsel in Family Court proceedings necessarily encompasses the right to effective assistance of counsel in termination proceedings. FJLC filed an amicus brief in this case.
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FJLC filed an amicus brief in the Michigan Supreme Court arguing that orders terminating parental rights should be subject to be strict scrutiny, meaning such orders must be narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest.
The involuntary termination of parental rights is a court ordered legal process that permanently destroys the legal relationship between parents and their children. Once a parent’s legal relationship with their child is terminated, they lose the right to seek custody, visitation, and even communication with their child. Parents of children in foster care lose the right to direct the placement of their child with extended family and to participate in medical and educational decisions. And children whose parents’ rights are terminated lose the right to know and be cared for by the people they came from.
This state intervention is so extreme that it is colloquially referred to as the “civil death penalty.” Termination of parental rights turns children into legal orphans; around the country, more than 100,000 children have had their parental rights terminated yet languish in foster care without adoption. Notably, in private adoptions, terminations of parental rights are typically resolved with agreements that permit continued parent-child contact; in the foster system, however, children’s names are often changed and their relationships with parents, extended family, and communities cut off entirely. Black, Native American, and Hispanic families experience termination far more often than White families do.
Termination cases permanently destroy the fundamental rights of both parents and children. Accordingly, they should be subject to rigorous substantive and procedural protections. These include the requirements that the state prove its case by clear and convincing evidence and satisfy basic evidentiary standards, that parents be provided with effective assistance of counsel, and that courts carefully consider less restrictive alternatives to this most drastic intervention in a parent-child relationship. Yet across the United States, parents’ constitutional rights to their children are regularly severed in slipshod legal proceedings that do not meet these rigorous standards.