'House Bill 141 does have its deficiencies,' he wrote. He thought it put too much of the onus on the birth mother to find the father, as he wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Katherine Harris, upon letting the bill pass into law without signing it. Those may have been his general thoughts, but it's also true that he didn't wholeheartedly approve of the adoption law. In that book, Bassett also writes, Bush invokes The Scarlet Letter (approvingly) as an example of how society had once condemned people for sexual impropriety. In his 1995 book, Profiles in Character, he wrote (in a chapter with the dark title, 'The Restoration of Shame'), as Bassett reports: It's true that years before the law was passed (and before Bush was even governor), Bush had bemoaned what he saw as a lack of social stigma for men and women alike having children outside of marriage. 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.'Īnd 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.īecause 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.ĭid Jeb Bush want women to be shamed for their sexual activity?

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.

One way to accomplish that was to balance the 'rights and responsibilities' of both birth parents, as well as the adoptive parents, Bush wrote. 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.' Bush wrote shortly after the Legislature passed the bill that the law was intended to bring more 'certainty' into adoptions. The law in question was a 2001 overhaul of the state's adoption regulations. Here's a rundown of what exactly that law did, and why it was passed in the first place. Huffington Post reporter Laura Bassett brought the so-called Scarlet Letter law to national attention in a Tuesday piece. Jeb Bush, required of some women in the state. That was what one 2001 Florida law, enacted under then-Gov. Imagine publishing a list of all of your recent sexual partners in the local paper. and possible Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush attends the CDU Economics Conference of the Economic Council in Berlin on Tuesday.

Scarlet letter