Court Opinion

ID: 9627052
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 08:31:51.731276+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:27:05.748333
License: Public Domain

Hill, J.
(concurring)—I concur in the majority opinion, and have signed it. I do desire, however, to pinpoint what is to me the area of disagreement.
I am not concerned with a controversy as to whether judges know more than social workers about the placing of children for adoption, or vice versa. It is true, as the dissent, in effect, insists, that even if the social workers are right, the judges have the muscles. The question, then, is should they use them on behalf of estimable people who file an adoption proceeding, or for the welfare of the child or childred whose adoption is sought.
I am concerned with whether an approved child-placement agency, which has spent time and money in preparing a plan for a child or children placed with it for adoption, is *131to be put on the defensive every time parties who desire to adopt the child or children win a race to the court house and start adoption proceedings.
(The Pellands never intimated to the Washington Children’s Home Society that they would like to be considered as adoptive parents; they waited until the society tried to arrange for Janette to be seen by the couple the society had considered to be desirable adoptive parents for Janette and her twin sister, and then commenced an adoption proceeding limited to Janette only—later amended to include her twin sister.)
In my opinion, the basic thesis of the majority opinion is that, in such a situation, where the approved child-placement agency selected by the court refuses to consent to the adoption, and urges that it has developed its own plan for the future of the children, the burden should be upon the petitioners to show that the ultimate welfare of the children will be furthered by abandoning the plan developed by the court-appointed agency and in permitting the adoption by the petitioners. If that burden is sustained, the trial court is warranted in dispensing with the consent of the agency to the adoption.
Here, the trial court apparently proceeded upon the theory that immediately upon the Pellands having won the race to file an adoption proceeding, the only issue was whether the Pellands were fit and proper adoptive parents and able to support and care for the children. The burden was placed on the Washington Children’s Home Society to prove to the contrary. Any plan they had for the children was regarded as more or less irrelevant.
The trial court found the Pellands to be fit and proper adoptive parents, and able to support and care for the children; and, on those findings, entered its decree of adoption. There is no finding one way or the other as to the desirability of the society’s plan.
The majority insists, and I think correctly—and this, incidentally, is the heart of this emotionally surcharged controversy—that the trial court may only dispense with its *132own agency’s consent to an adoption, if it finds that it is in the best interest of the child or children concerned to do so.
I recognize that had it applied this test, the trial court might have arrived at the same result; and that it may do so on a rehearing, where the emotional appeal on behalf of the Pellands will be re-enforced by the lapse of time, and the fact that the Washington Children’s Home Society may now have no plan available for the children because of the uncertainties inherent in the situation. Nevertheless to abandon the test of the welfare of the child or children in favor of the qualifications of the fleet of foot, is to bring chaos into the field of child placement and adoption.
Weaver, C. J., and Foster, J., concur with Hill, J.