Parents Rights

For weeks before Tuesday's election, backers of a controversial parental-rights measure in Colorado predicted that their efforts would ignite a national rebellion against meddlesome public officials and agencies. With support soaring among Coloradans before the election, organizers raised their sights to California, Texas and beyond. Sponsors in 26 states other than Colorado are pressing measures designed to establish the precedence of parents' rights in raising their children.

Backers of a ballot measure that would require parents to be notified before an abortion is performed on a minor acknowledged Friday that the 15-year-old on which "Sarah's Law" is based had a child and was in a common-law marriage before she died of complications from an abortion in 1994.

The Tennessee Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a Chinese immigrant couple should be reunited with their daughter almost eight years after she was placed in foster care with an American family. In a case that has prompted fierce debate about ethnic and cultural bias in the U.S. judicial system, the state high court unanimously overturned a 2004 decision by a Memphis judge who removed the parental rights of Jack and Casey He.

The Supreme Court on Monday strengthened the rights of the millions of parents who have children with disabilities, ruling they may go to court on their own to fight a school district's choice of a special education program. The unanimous decision opens a door that had been closed to these parents in many parts of the nation, where judges had ruled that they could not go to court unless they hired a lawyer to represent them.

An activist fathers' rights group said Wednesday that it was disbanding after a report that some former members had considered abducting Prime Minister Tony Blair's youngest son to draw attention to their cause. Matt O'Connor, founder of the group Fathers 4 Justice, said that some radical former followers had become a "dark underbelly" that made it necessary to break up the 3-year-old group that had fought for changes in Britain's family laws.

Michael Jackson's former wife, Deborah Rowe, won a round Wednesday in her battle over their two children, with an appeals court ruling that her parental rights were not properly relinquished under the law. The California 2nd District Court of Appeal ruling set the stage for further litigation between the former couple. The pop star, who has been living outside the United States since his acquittal on child-molestation charges last June, could further appeal the ruling.

John Lee Smith keeps a bag ready, just in case. It's packed with Spiderman watches, a dinosaur hairbrush, new clothes and action figures -- everything his three sons would need on a trip back home. Smith hasn't seen or heard from the boys in more than a year, since, he said, their mother, Francina Fernandez, abducted them and fled to the Philippines. Since then, his life has been frozen in place, his San Diego apartment a monument to their memory.

Standing just outside Pierce County Juvenile Court the other day, Todd Rogers conceded that it was probably wrong of Tina Marie Carlsen to have taken the couple's 9-month-old son, Riley, two weeks ago from a Seattle hospital, as the child awaited what doctors said would be lifesaving kidney surgery. But maybe not, he said. "It was all so confusing, I was 50-50 on whether we should do the operation," explained Rogers, 38, a construction worker.

There were plaudits all around last fall when a troubled teenager who spent 10 years in foster care was reunited with the father she had hardly known, thanks to what Los Angeles County supervisors described as a "groundbreaking effort" at family unification.

Two Los Angeles County supervisors called Tuesday for an investigation into why child welfare officials took 10 years to locate a foster child's father even as he continued to send the county child-support payments for his daughter. Supervisors Mike Antonovich and Don Knabe called on the Department of Children and Family Services along with the Child Support Services Department to better cooperate to prevent a similar case from occurring.