Uh-Oh!!!

[Nowastepmom]

Brief background, there is a protective order keeping mom's boyfriend (drug dealing confidential informant) away from ss which has totaled almost 3 years now.  Mom constantly is trying to get order lifted and has so far been unsuccessful.

We just found out mom is pregnant.  My question is will this make it harder to keep ss away from mom's boyfriend since she is now pregnant?

[socrateaser]

It may, but at this point, the father has no statutory or constitutional legal right to visitation with the unborn child. It's actually a rather interesting legal question that I don't believe has ever come up before.

So, I think you're pretty safe, for the moment. Besides, how do we actually know that the informant is the father of this new child?

[Nowastepmom]

We only know that the confidential informant is the father because the mom says he is.  Our lawyer stated that before this he thought our chances of winning were every high, now though he said that we may want to reconsider, that the judge may not want to keep the dad away from his child just to keep another man's child safe.

What do you think?

[socrateaser]

Well, that's a risk, but I would argue that the father poses exactly the same risk to his new unborn child as he does to yours, consequently there are now TWO children's lives at stake, which gives greater weight to the argument that the informant should be restrained from being near the mother and the children.

Furthermore, the simple solution, if the court believes that the father's right to be near his child outweighs the risk of harm to your child, is to grant YOU temporary custody. That way the father gets to place his child at risk, and not yours. The mother can hardly argue that she would prefer to put both children at risk, vs. only one.

I think your case is actually better now than it was before.