Legal Question in Family Law in Maryland

You ask multiple questions and, not surprisingly, there are multiple answers. Legal custody is the right to make decisions regarding material issues for the girls (e.g. education, religion, long-term health issues, childcare providers). If you have sole legal custody, the father has no right to make those decisions, although by statute a non-custodial parent is entitled to access to medical and educational records. In addition, a non-custodial parent may still make decisions in the event of an emergency or for routine, day-to-day issues. (For example, if your daughter falls off her bike and breaks her arm, dad can take her to the emergency room. If she has the sniffles, he can take her to the pediatrician.)

Abandonment has nothing to do with child support. Having minor children establishes the obligation to provide for their financial support. Furthermore, child support and visitation are not interdependent. (The lead case is Stancill v. Stancill.) The failure to pay child support does not require the forfeiture of visitation. Conversely, the payment of child support does not automatically confer the right to visitation. (Consider the case of the pedophile. He might not be permitted to visit with his children unsupervised, but he's still going to have to pay support.)

While there are circumstances under which a father or mother can have parental rights terminated (not really my area of expertise), the most common way to accomplish this is to have a new spouse adopt the children (usually with the consent of the legal parent giving up his/her rights, but in extraordinary circumstances, over the parent's objection). If parental rights are terminated, the birth parent ceases to be a parent . . . no more custodial rights, no more visitation, no more child support obligation.