An interesting Virginia Supreme Court decision, Wyatt v. McDermott (Va. Apr. 20, 2012), recognizes this right. An excerpt (paragraph breaks added):
John M. Wyatt, III, is seeking monetary damages for the [alleged] unauthorized adoption of his baby, herein referred to as E.Z. E.Z. is the biological daughter of Wyatt and Colleen Fahland, who are unmarried residents of Virginia. [Wyatt claims the following happened:] Prior to E.Z.’s birth, Wyatt accompanied Fahland to doctors’ appointments and made plans with Fahland to raise their child together. Without Wyatt’s knowledge, Fahland’s parents retained attorney Mark McDermott to arrange for an adoption. While Fahland informed Wyatt of her parents’ desire that she see an adoption attorney, she assured Wyatt that they would raise the baby as a family. During a January 30, 2009 meeting with McDermott, Fahland signed a form identifying Wyatt as the birth father and indicating that he wanted to keep the baby.
Fahland offered to provide Wyatt’s address, but McDermott told her to falsely indicate on the form that the address was unknown to her, which she did. She also signed an agreement in which she requested that the adoptive parents discuss adoption plans with the birth father. Wyatt was “purposely kept in the dark” about this meeting, and Fahland continued to make false statements to Wyatt at the urging of McDermott, indicating that she planned to raise the baby with Wyatt, with the purpose that he would not take steps to secure his parental rights and prevent the adoption.
To facilitate an adoption, McDermott contacted “A Act of Love” (Act of Love), a Utah adoption agency, and Utah attorney Larry Jenkins with Wood Jenkins LLP, a Utah law firm representing Act of Love.
Approximately one week prior to E.Z.’s birth, Fahland and her father met again with McDermott. At McDermott’s urging, Fahland spoke to Wyatt briefly on the phone and then sent him a text message informing him that she was receiving information about a potential adoption. Later that day and throughout the week prior to E.Z.’s birth, Fahland continued to assure Wyatt that she still planned to raise the baby with him.
Fahland concealed the fact that she was in labor during conversations with Wyatt, at the direction of McDermott and on behalf of the other defendants. E.Z. was born two weeks early, on February 10, 2009, in Virginia, and Wyatt was not informed of the birth. The next day, Fahland signed an affidavit stating that she had informed Wyatt she was working with a Utah adoption agency and an affidavit of paternity identifying Wyatt as the father. Despite her full knowledge of his address, she placed question marks as to his contact information on the notarized documents at the urging of McDermott. Thomas and Chandra Zarembinski, Utah residents who retained Act of Love to assist them in adopting a child and planned to adopt E.Z., signed an agreement stating that they were aware that E.Z.’s custody status might be unclear. On February 12, Fahland signed an affidavit of relinquishment and transferred custody to the Zarembinskis, who had travelled to Virginia to pick up the child. Wyatt claims all defendants induced Fahland to waive her parental rights knowing that Fahland did not want to relinquish rights to the baby and that Wyatt believed he would have parental rights….
The Court is now left to determine what elements are essential to the tort as it exists today, consistent with the original writ, but in line with equal protection and modern law. Kessel [a West Virginia case] succinctly lays out the elements of this cause of action, consistent with Virginia law:
(1) the complaining parent has a right to establish or maintain a parental or custodial relationship with his/her minor child; (2) a party outside of the relationship between the complaining parent and his/her child intentionally interfered with the complaining parent’s parental or custodial relationship with his/her child by removing or detaining the child from returning to the complaining parent, without that parent’s consent, or by otherwise preventing the complaining parent from exercising his/her parental or custodial rights; (3) the outside party’s intentional interference caused harm to the complaining parent’s parental or custodial relationship with his/her child; and (4) damages resulted from such interference.
[As to affirmative defenses, we] share [other] courts’ concern for the well-being of children caught in intra-familial disputes, a concern that was not as prominent an issue in 1607, when only a male parent could bring this cause of action. The fear that this cause of action would be used as a means of escalating intra-familial warfare can be largely disposed of by barring the use of this tort between parents, as other state courts have done. The West Virginia high court put this well in Kessel:
[W]e hold that a parent cannot charge his/her child’s other parent with tortious interference with parental or custodial relationship if both parents have equal rights, or substantially equal rights (as in the case of a nonmarital child where the putative biological father seeks to establish a meaningful parent-child relationship with his child and, until such a relationship has been commenced, does not have rights identical to those of the child’s biological mother), to establish or maintain a parental or custodial relationship with their child. In other words, when no judicial award of custody has been made to either parent, thereby causing the parents’ parental and custodial rights to be equal, no cause of action for tortious interference can be maintained by one parent against the other parent. Likewise, where no judicial decree has been entered awarding custody of a nonmarital child to one or the other of the child’s biological parents, the complaining biological parent cannot assert a claim of tortious interference with parental or custodial relationship against the other biological parent.
… Additionally, in the interest of the child, we note with approval the affirmative defense of justification as set forth in Kessel, wherein the court held that a party should not be held liable if he or she
possessed a reasonable, good faith belief that interference with the parent’s parental or custodial relationship was necessary to protect the child from physical, mental, or emotional harm[; or] possessed a reasonable, good faith belief that the interference was proper (i.e., no notice or knowledge of an original or superseding judicial decree awarding parental or custodial rights to complaining parent); or reasonably and in good faith believed that the complaining parent did not have a right to establish or maintain a parental or custodial relationship with the minor child (i.e., mistake as to identity of child’s biological parents where paternity has not yet been formally established).
We do not cite these as an exhaustive list of available defenses, but rather note them due to their particular importance, so that our explicit recognition of this tort does not promote unnecessary intra-familial litigation or deter an individual from acting when he or she holds a good-faith belief that a child is in danger.