Legal Question in Family Law in Maryland

Re: Parental rights

The court will not allow a parent to avoid child support by a voluntary termination of parental rights, unless the termination is a step in the process of another person adopting the child and assuming the child support responsibility. Since you are apparently not married, I assume there is no one anxious and willing to become an adoptive father. If it is truly harmful to your child to have visitation with the father, you can most likely produce evidence to convince a court that visitation should be limited and supervised. Apparently you are on good terms with the father's family, and they might be willing to cooperate with you in preventing unsupervised visitation. Furthermore, the father is probably not eager to pay the cost of hiring a lawyer to represent his interests in visitation, and he may be threatening you with visitation just to scare you off regarding child support. The cost to each of you of litigating visitation would not be cheap. One option for you would be to call his bluff and file for child support. Another option, if you really don't need the money and would rather do without it than worry about visitation, would be simply to not file for child support. The court will never intervene and order child support unless you file for it, so long as you are not receiving public assistance (which includes such things as food stamps and medical cards). So you have some choices to weigh. One more thing: I would recommend that you continue to maintain some relationship between your child and the father's family. In the long run your child will benefit from knowing his grandmother, even if his father isn't in the picture.

Re: Parental rights

If you really don't want child support and he is willing to terminate his parental rights then I would hire an attorney to draft the necessary paperwork and prepare for the hearing to terminate his parental rights. That way he will have absolutely no access to the child in the future.

If you don't terminate his rights, do keep in mind that courts are very reluctant to deny visitation of a father to his child unless you can show abuse, neglect or potentially real harm to the child. So in this instance it sounds like terminating his rights would be the best thing to do.

Give me a call if you have any questions.