Court Opinion

ID: 9427551
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:21:08.705458+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:18:06.788199
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Stewart,
dissenting.
For reasons similar to those expressed in the dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Stevens, I agree that § 111 (1)(c) of *395the New York Domestic Relations Law (McKinney 1977) is not constitutionally infirm. The State's interest in promoting the welfare of illegitimate children is of far greater importance than the opinion of the Court would suggest. Unlike the children of married parents, illegitimate children begin life with formidable handicaps. They typically depend upon the care and economic support of only one parent — usually the mother. And, even in this era of changing mores, they still may face substantial obstacles simply because they are illegitimate. Adoption provides perhaps the most generally available way of removing these handicaps. See H. Clark, Law of Domestic Relations 177 (1968). Most significantly, it provides a means by which an illegitimate child can become legitimate — a fact that the Court’s opinion today barely acknowledges.
The New York statute reflects the judgment that, to facilitate this ameliorative change in the child’s status, the consent of only one parent should ordinarily be required for adoption of a child born out of wedlock. The mother has been chosen as the parent whose consent is indispensable. A different choice would defy common sense. But the unwed father, if he is the lawful custodian of the child, must under the statute also consent.* And, even when he does not have custody, the unwed father who has an established relationship with his illegitimate child is not denied the opportunity to participate in the adoption proceeding. His relationship with the child will be terminated through adoption only if a court determines that adoption will serve the child’s best interest. These distinctions represent, I think, a careful accommodation of the competing interests at stake and bear a close and substantial relátionship to the State’s goal of promoting the welfare of its children. In my view, the Constitution requires no more.
The appellant has argued that the statute, in granting *396rights to an unwed mother that it does not grant to an unwed father, violates the Equal Protection Clause by discriminating on the basis of gender. And he also has made the argument that the statute, because it withholds from the unwed father substantive rights granted to all other classes of parents, violates both the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. I find the latter contention less troublesome than does my Brother Stevens, and see no ultimate merit in the former.
A
The appellant relies primarily on Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U. S. 645, in advancing the second argument identified above. But it is obvious that the principle established in that case is not offended by the New York law. The Illinois statute invalidated in Stanley employed a stark and absolute presumption that the unwed father was not a fit parent. Upon the death of the unwed mother, the children were declared wards of the State and in Stanley’s case were removed from his custody without any hearing or demonstration that he was not a fit parent. Custody having been taken from the father by a stranger — the State — the children were then transferred to other strangers. Stanley, who had lived with his three children over a period of 18 years, was given no opportunity to object. And, although the statute purported to promote the welfare of illegitimate children, the State’s termination of Stanley’s family relationship was made without any finding that the interests of his children would thereby be served.
Here, in sharp contrast, the unwed mother is alive, has married, and has voluntarily initiated the adoption proceeding. The appellant has been given the opportunity to participate and to present evidence on the question whether adoption would be in the best interests of the children. Thus, New York has accorded to the appellant all the process that Illinois unconstitutionally denied to Stanley.
*397The Constitution does not require that an unmarried father’s substantive parental rights must always be coextensive with those afforded to the fathers of legitimate children. In this setting, it is plain that the absence of a legal tie with the mother provides a constitutionally valid ground for distinction. The decision to withhold from the unwed father the power to veto an adoption by the natural mother and her husband may well reflect a judgment that the putative father should not be able arbitrarily to withhold the benefit of legitimacy from his children.
Even if it be assumed that each married parent after divorce has some substantive due process right to maintain his or her parental relationship, cf. Smith v. Organization of Foster Families, 431 U. S. 816, 862-863 (opinion concurring in judgment), it by no means follows that each unwed parent has any such right. Parental rights do not spring full-blown from the biological connection between parent and child. They require relationships more enduring. The mother carries and bears the child, and in this sense her parental relationship is clear. The validity of the father’s parental claims must be gauged by other measures. By tradition, the primary measure has been the legitimate familial relationship he creates with the child by marriage with the mother. By definition, the question before us can arise only when no such marriage has taken place. In some circumstances the actual relationship between father and child may suffice to create in the unwed father parental interests comparable to those of the married father. Cf. Stanley v. Illinois, supra. But here we are concerned with the rights the unwed father may have when his wishes and those of the mother are in conflict, and the child’s best interests are served by a resolution in favor of the mother. It seems to me that the absence of a legal tie with the mother may in such circumstances appropriately place a limit on whatever substantive constitutional claims might otherwise exist by virtue of the father’s actual relationship with the children.
*398B
The appellant’s equal protection challenge to the distinction drawn between the unwed father and mother seems to me more substantial. Gender, like race, is a highly visiblé and immutable characteristic that has historically been the touchstone for pervasive but often subtle discrimination. Although the analogy to race is not perfect and the constitutional inquiry therefore somewhat different, gender-based statutory classifications deserve careful constitutional examination because they may reflect or operate to perpetuate mythical or stereotyped assumptions about the proper roles and the relative capabilities of men and women that are unrelated to any inherent differences between the sexes. Cf. Orr v. Orr, 440 U. S. 268. Sex-based classifications are in many settings invidious because they relegate a person to the place set aside for the group on the basis of an attribute that the person cannot change. Reed v. Reed, 404 U. S. 71; Stanton v. Stanton, 421 U. S. 7; Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U. S. 677; Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, 420 U. S. 636; Orr v. Orr, supra. Such laws cannot be defended, as can the bulk of the classifications that fill the statute books, simply on the ground that the generalizations they reflect may be true of the majority of members of the class, for a gender-based classification need not ring false to work a discrimination that in the individual case might be invidious. Nonetheless, gender-based classifications are not invariably invalid. When men and women are not in fact similarly situated in the area covered by the legislation in question, the Equal Protection Clause is not violated. See, e. g., Schlesinger v. Ballard, 419 U. S. 498. Cf. San Antonio Independent School Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U. S. 1, 59 (concurring opinion).
In my view, the gender-based distinction drawn by New York falls in this latter category. With respect to a large group of adoptions — those of newborn children and infants— unwed mothers and unwed fathers are simply not similarly *399situated, as my Brother Stevens has demonstrated. Our law has given the unwed mother the custody of her illegitimate children precisely because it is she who bears the child and because the vast majority of unwed fathers have been unknown, unavailable, or simply uninterested. See H. Clark, Law of Domestic Relations 176-177 (1968); H. Krause, Illegitimacy: Law and Social Policy 29-32 (1971). This custodial preference has carried with it a correlative power in the mother to place her child for adoption or not to do so.
The majority of the States have incorporated these basic common-law rules in their statutes identifying the persons whose participation or consent is requisite to a valid adoption. See generally Note, 59 Va. L. Rev. 517 (1973); Comment, 70 Mich. L. Rev. 1581 (1972). These common-law and statutory rules of law reflect the physical reality that only the mother carries and gives birth to the child, as well as the undeniable social reality that the unwed mother is always an identifiable parent and the custodian of the child — until or unless the State intervenes. The biological father, unless he has established a familial tie with the child by marrying the mother, is often a total stranger from the State’s point of view. I do not understand the Court to question these pragmatic differences. See ante, at 392. An unwed father who has not come forward and who has established no relationship with the child is plainly not in a situation similar to the mother’s. New York’s consent distinctions have clearly been made on this basis, and in my view they do not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. See Schlesinger v. Ballard, supra.
In this case, of course, we are concerned not with an unwilling or unidentified father but instead with an unwed father who has established a paternal relationship with his children. He is thus similarly situated to the mother, and his claim is that he thus has parental interests no less deserving of protection than those of the mother. His contention that the New York *400law in question consequently discriminates against him on the basis of gender cannot be lightly dismissed. For substantially the reasons expressed by Mr. Justice Stevens in his dissenting opinion, post, at 412-413, I believe, however, that this gender-based distinction does not violate the Equal Protection Clause as applied in the circumstances of the present case.
It must be remembered that here there are not two, but three interests at stake: the mother’s, the father’s, and the children’s. Concerns humane as well as practical abundantly support New York’s provision that only one parent need consent to the adoption of an illegitimate child, though it requires both parents to consent to the adoption of one already legitimate. If the consent of both unwed parents were required, and one withheld that consent, the illegitimate child would remain illegitimate. Viewed in these terms the statute does not in any sense discriminate on the basis of sex. The question, then, is whether the decision to select the unwed mother as the parent entitled to give or withhold consent and to apply that rule even when the unwed father in fact has a paternal relationship with his children constitutes invidious sex-based discrimination.
The appellant’s argument would be a powerful one were this an instance in which it had been found that adoption by the father would serve the best interests of the children, and in the face of that finding the mother had been permitted to block the adoption. But this is not such a case. As my Brother Stevens has observed, under a sex-neutral rule — assuming that New York is free to require the consent of but one parent for the adoption of an illegitimate child — the outcome in this case would have been the same. The appellant has been given the opportunity to show that an adoption would not be in his children’s best interests. Implicit in the finding made by the New York courts is the judgment that termination of his relationship with the children will in fact promote their well-being — a judgment we are obligated to accept.
*401That the statute might permit — in a different context — the unwed mother arbitrarily to thwart the wishes of the caring father as well as the best interests of the child is not a sufficient reason to invalidate it as applied in the present case. For here the legislative goal of the statute — to facilitate adoptions that are in the best interests of illegitimate children after consideration of all other interests involved — has indeed been fully and fairly served by this gender-based classification. Unless the decision to require the consent of only one parent is in itself constitutionally defective, which nobody has argued, the same interests that support that decision are sufficiently profound to overcome the appellant’s claim that he has been invidiously discriminated against, because he is a male.
I agree that retroactive application of the Court’s decision today would work untold harm, and I fully subscribe to Part III of Mr. Justice Stevens’ dissent.

New York Dom. Rel. Law § 111 (1) (d) (McKinney 1977) requires the consent of “any person or authorized agency having lawful custody of the adoptive child.”