Court Opinion

ID: 9715602
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 06:10:00.118793+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:36.131591
License: Public Domain

FORD ELLIOTT, J.,
concurring:
¶ 1 I concur in the result reached by the majority because I believe we are bound by our supreme court’s decision In re Adoption of E.M.A., 487 Pa. 152, 409 A.2d 10 (1979). In E.M.A., the court was unequivocal about the efficacy of qualified consents in adoption cases. The present state of the law is that the qualified consent of the natural parent is only effective in favor of a spouse.
By its express terms, section 503 [2903] is clearly limited to adoption by the spouse of a natural parent. This statutory provision is available only in private or family adoptions, upon the marriage or remarriage of the natural father or mother. Only in such intra-family adoptions may a natural parent execute a valid consent retaininy parental rights. And only in such a husband-wife relationship is the qualified consent legally sufficient for the spouse seeking to become an adopting parent.
Id. at 154-55, 409 A.2d at 11 (emphasis added) (footnote omitted).
¶ 2 The dissent advocates that 2903 is inapplicable to the instant case because appellants are not proceeding under this section. Were we writing on a clean slate, I might agree that 2901 could allow some flexibility in the adherence to statutory requirements.10 However, we are not free to ignore our supreme court’s statutory interpretation of an issue on an identical set of facts simply because the parties choose to avoid it, the sexual orientation of the proposed adopting party being irrelevant to the application of E.M.A.
¶ 3 The supreme court has already decided that a parent’s qualified consent to the adoption of his or her child by another who is not a spouse is ineffective under the Act. The E.M.A. court was also emphatic that the Adoption Act was to be strictly complied with, and that exceptions to the Act may not be judicially created where the legislature did not see fit to create them. E.M.A., supra at 154, 409 A.2d at 11. I would therefore find that the issue *745of qualified consent outside of marriage must either be re-addressed by the supreme court or returned to the Legislature for further consideration or amendment.

. I would, however, proceed with some trepidation. While the Legislature may not have intended the very narrow interpretation of qualified consent enunciated by E.M.A., it is probably safe to say that in drafting the Adoption Act, it also never anticipated the type of adoption proposed in either E.M.A. or the instant case. Therefore, it is somewhat incongruous that the Legislature would draft extensive statutory requirements as prerequisites to an adoption for the protection of the rights of both the natural parents and the child and then allow trial courts broad unfettered discretion to ignore those prerequisites based on the facts of any given case.