What did the law do?
The law in question was a 2001 overhaul of the state's adoption regulations. Bush
wrote shortly after the Legislature passed the bill that the law was intended to bring more "certainty" into adoptions. The goal was to "provide greater finality once the adoption is approved, and to avoid circumstances where future challenges to the adoption disrupt the life of the child."
One way to accomplish that was to balance the "rights and responsibilities" of both birth parents, as well as the adoptive parents, Bush wrote. To the end of preserving the rights of a birth father, the
law required a woman who didn't know who had fathered her child to put a notice in the newspaper so that a potential father could see it and respond before that child was put up for adoption.
The published notice would have to contain an extensive list of personal information, including potential cities and dates where the act of conception might have occurred, according to a 2004
Notre Dame Law Review article:
"The notice ... must contain a physical description, including, but not limited to age, race, hair and eye color, and approximate height and weight of the minor's mother and of any person the mother reasonably believes may be the father; the minor's date of birth; and any date and city, including the county and state in which the city is located, in which conception may have occurred."
And it wasn't a one-time ad — it had to run once a week for a month, at the expense of either the mother or the people who wanted to adopt the baby, as that 2004 article explains.
Because the law required women to put their sexual history on display, it became known as the "Scarlet Letter law," after the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel in which the protagonist must wear a red A on her dress to signify that she had committed adultery.
