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Law Offices of Mary Beck
Fellows of the Academy of Adoption and Assisted Reproduction Attorneys
The Law Offices of Mary Beck (LMB) is a boutique family building law firm; the practice is limited exclusively to adoption and collaborative reproduction. Together, LMB attorneys have more than 40 years of combined experience, having successfully completed more than 1,000 adoptions, innumerable assisted reproductive technology contracts, and more than 500 parentage actions. LMB attorneys are state and national advocates for adoption and assisted reproduction. Principal and professor of law, Mary Beck, RN MSN JD, has drafted adoption-related legislation in multiple states as well as for the United States Congress.
LMB represents clients in private/independent, agency, stepparent, second parent, intrastate, interstate, foster parent, guardianship, contested and adult adoptions. LMB represents clients throughout the entire collaborative reproduction process, from negotiating and drafting gestational carrier and gamete donation agreements through the court proceedings required for legal recognition of the respective parties’ parental rights.
LMB’s clients include those who wish to place their children for adoption, those who wish to donate gametes or act as gestational carriers, and those who seek to build or expand their families via adoption or assisted reproduction.
What we do
Areas of Practice
What’s the process for adoption in Missouri?
Most uncontested newborn Missouri adoptions have three general steps and two hearings. The first step, resolution of parental rights, occurs over a continuum of time because there are different categories of birth parents and different ways of resolving their respective rights. The second and third steps, transfer of custody and finalization, occur at specific points in time when a Missouri court enters orders after the hearings on transfer of custody and finalization.
Who can seek adoption of foster children?
Any person can seek adoption. Typically, foster parents or blood relatives or those in a kinship relationship with the birth parents seek foster adoption.
What is Assisted Reproductive
Technology (ART)?
ART refers to an array of medical procedures to achieve a pregnancy utilizing the services of reproductive health physicians. Commonly used ART procedures include alternative insemination (placing sperm in the female reproductive tract), sperm collection, egg harvesting, in vitro fertilization (combining sperm and egg outside the body), and embryo transfer (placing a fertilized egg/embryo inside the uterus). Google Assisted Reproductive Techniques to find the definitions of these terms.
How do guardianships differ from adoptions?
As opposed to an adoption, a guardianship doesn’t sever the legal relationship that exists between a child and his or her biological parents. Instead, it co-exists with that legal relationship.
Mary Beck, RN MSN JD
Joanna Beck Wilkinson, JD
Over 40 Years of Legal Experience
You can be confident in our representation.