[sbuchanan]

My daughters father has not paid child support nor seen her in 7 years. I am engaged and my fiancé wants to adopt her. I need to file abandonment against her biological father. I don't have lots of $ for an attorney. How can I file myself?

[Fr_Chuck]

You do not file abandonment. You can report this to the district attorney. Non payment of child support is a criminal offense and they may arrest him, they may take away his drivers license, or they may just put him on a list. What happens is up to the DAYou seem to be confused, this is not a physical abandonment and in Georgia, support and custoday and visitation and CHILD SUPPORT are not connected.Merely not paying support or seeing a child in Georgia is not reasons to take away his rights, so you can turn this over for criminal but that is all.You and your HUSBAND, in Georgia, you will need to be married for one year before you can file for your husband to adopt.So get married, save up money and then file for husband to adopt. No you will not be able to do this yourself, since first you will ask child's father to sign over his rights to allow the adoption, if he will not, then you will have to show in court good reason why adoption is in best interest of child.*** it is not as easy as it sounds, since they will want proof of a positive change in child, that an adoption would make.. Courts in Georgia are slow to take away a fathers rights.

[stinawords]

You need to start saving up for an attorney if you don't have money for one right now. You will need one for an adoption. You have time since you aren't even married yet so after you hit that one year mark you should have some in the bank to give the attorney. In the mean time you can go to court to have the support order enforced. You don't need to pay anyone to have that enforced. He will likely get an order to appear first to see why he hasn't been paying. The DA's office handles that. So you don't even have to show up at the hearing if you don't want.

This of course, does assume that you went to court to get an order for support to begin with. If not, there is nothing to enforce. He didn't abandon the child like you are wanting to charge him with. The child is safe in your care. So, have the order enforced, get married, save up money, and go to a family law attorney for adoption a year later.

[ScottGem]

As noted, you do NOT separate the termination of his rights from the adoption. You will not get his rights terminated for not seeing the child and especially for not paying support. The only way you will get his rights terminated is by your HUSBAND getting approved for adopting your daughter. If he is behind in his support then he will likely be willing to agree to the adoption because it gets him out of his support obligation.

Since you will need to be married for a year before the adoption can be approved, you have time to save up. You can start shopping around for an attorney to get an idea of how much you will need. You might want too check to see if the bio father will agree to sign because it will probably be cheaper that way.