The Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by Graham Stokes for Ohio Capital Journal. Republish photo only with original story.)
A bipartisan bill that would modernize Ohio’s adoption process unanimously passed the Ohio Senate last week.
House Bill 5 heads back to the Ohio House for concurrence. The House unanimously passed the bill last year and would head to Gov. Mike DeWine’s desk for his signature if the chamber concurs with the changes. The Ohio House’s next scheduled session is Dec. 4.
State Reps. Sharon Ray, R-Wadsworth, and Rachel Baker, D-Cincinnati, introduced the bill last year at the start of the General Assembly and this piece of legislation is personal to both of them. Ray was adopted as a child and Baker has three adopted children.
Ray and Baker worked with probate judges to come up with the bill. The state’s probate judges go through the Ohio Revised Code every few years to try to update various sections, including the adoption laws.
“Most of the changes are fairly minor, but it really will streamline the process for the adoption process in Ohio,” State Sen. Nathan Manning, R-North Ridgeville, said during last week’s Senate session. “It really will help those practitioners and those judges and those families that are going through this process.”
State Sen. Paula Hicks-Hudson, D-Toledo, said H.B. 5 is vital legislation that is long overdue.
“It is a good bill, and it does, what I think, will really shave off some of the anxiety, some of the problems that folks who are trying to go through that process, and also for children who are not sure about being in limbo for as long as the current processes,” she said.
More than 3,300 Ohio children are waiting to be adopted, according to AdoptUSKids, a national nonprofit that connects foster care children to families.
What’s in the bill?
In addition to modernizing the state’s adoption process, H.B. 5 would offer more consistency from county to county.
For foster-to-adopt situations, Ohio law requires a six month waiting period before an adoption can take place and says time spent in the foster home can be counted towards the waiting period. H.B. 5 would include kinship caregivers in that provision in an effort to speed up the adoption process.
H.B. 5 would allow an adult with a developmental disability to be adopted. Ohio’s law current only allows adults with an intellectual disability to be adopted.
The bill would double financial support for pregnant mothers to cover living expenses, increasing it from $3,000 to $6,000.
Under the bill, a court could reconsider an adoption decree if there is evidence the child is a victim of trafficking.
The bill also touches on foreign adoptions. Ohio law currently permits parents to petition the court to finalize a foreign adoption. H.B. 5 would allow foreign adoption decrees to be automatically finalized if either parent is an Ohio resident and an IR-3 or IH-3 visa has been issued to the child by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
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