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So let’s say that you’re a mother in Florida, who has gone through with the achingly difficult decision to put your child up for adoption. It’s a situation no-one would want to be in, but apparently Florida legislators have taken it upon themselves to make it even harder [CNN]. Under a law passed last year, Florida women putting children up for adoption are required to print an advertisement detailing their sexual history in their hometown newspaper.

Yes, that’s right. The bio-mother must publish a newspaper advertisement trying to find the bio-father of the child which lists the woman’s name, age, and description, along with descriptions of any men who might be the bio-father of the child. The ad has to be run in papers in every city where the woman has lived or traveled in the year before giving birth where the child might have been conceived, which is to say, her hometown and possibly the hometown of all the relatives and friends she went to visit. Privacy? What privacy? The law does not even make exemptions for survivors of sexual assault; unless you’re in Palm Beach County (where you are protected by a local court ruling), you will have to list your rapist if he is possibly the bio-father of the child.

This is one of those laws that is so utterly bizarre and senseless that it cries out for further explanation—how did anyone actually come up with this bill? Who thought it was a good idea? What committee put it forth as a step forward for the state of Florida?

The genius behind the bill is Democratic state senator Walter Skip Campbell, who has been described as the ultimate male chauvinist pig. It was claimed [SP Times] that the bill was introduced to clarify the rights and responsibilities of all parties involved in an adoption so that cases such as the custody battle over Baby Emily would not happen again. In the Baby Emily case, the bio-father of Emily, a convicted rapist, filed suit to contest her mother’s decision to place Emily up for adoption. It took three years of court battles for the Florida Supreme Court to finally rule that he would not have received custody. And when they did rule against him, they based their decision that on whether or not the bio-father had met technical requirements for abandonment of the mother under Florida law. They held that it did not matter whether or not Emily would be worse off from being placed in the custody of a convicted sexual predator; all that mattered was whether or not the bio-father could exercise his supposed biological rights to custody of the child.

Supposedly, this is supposed to prevent protracted court battles by establishing a process and a time limit for the bio-father to come forward. But, Christ, people. In order to avoid situations such as this, they could have:

1. Passed a law which says Rapists can’t contest the other bio-parent’s decision to put the child up for adoption
2. Passed a law enabling men who think they might be the bio-father of a child to submit their name into a registry so that they can be notified in case of adoption proceedings. The state could then ask the woman for names of men who might be the father and check it against the registry, without forcing her to publish this information in the newspaper.

Of course, even if they created such a system, the basic idea behind the Baby Emily case—that a bio-father can just come forward after years and assert a right to tear the child out of the home she grew up in, just because he happens to share 50% of her DNA, is bullshit. The Father’s Rights movement believes otherwise, of course. I suggest that they get over their mental roadblocks by chanting this daily mantra: My DNA is not a license of ownership; my dick is not that important. While we’re at it, I also suggest: I care about my child’s welfare, not my fatherhood rights.

The fact is that being a bio-father or bio-mother of a child means very little in the grand scheme of things. Who cares whether or not your reproductive organs work? Who cares whether it is the bio-mother’s fault or the bio-father’s fault that the bio-father wasn’t involved in the decisions about the child’s future? That may be a reason to take legal action against the bio-mother, but it’s no reason to tear the child out of her home and send her over to the bio-father who never had any relationship with her. What matters is the established relationships that the child has grown up in, and her welfare in a given home environment. If more people would realize this, then we’d need a lot fewer regulations of adoption in the first place.