Facebook Is Not An Acceptable Way To Notify Someone That He’s Going To Be A Father

I love Facebook, but while it is a wonderful tool it is not good for everything. For example, Facebook messages are notoriously unreliable and easy to miss and thus are a terrible way to notify someone of their paternity.

That actually happened recently in Oklahoma, where a man named Billy McCall says he was not notified that his ex-girlfriend was pregnant and he did not find out about the baby until after the little girl was born. The baby’s mother, whom McCall had dated for three months a few years ago, said she notified McCall via Facebook message, but he never replied. McCall said he never got the message.

We’ve all probably missed a Facebook message now and again, but this story is more terrible than just weird, because the baby girl was adopted and McCall is now fighting to get the two-year-old girl back from the only parents she has ever known.

According to KFOR, the Oklahoma Supreme Court agreed that a Facebook message “is not sufficient to meet the requirements of due process.” It is still unclear what will happen to the little girl because the courts have not decided if that lack of due process is enough to justify taking the girl away from her current family.

It’s an awful situation. It is certainly unfair to the father, and Facebook is not at all an appropriate way to notify someone of paternity. But this little girl has been with her family her whole life, and taking her away from them now would cause her unimaginable suffering.

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