The Ties That Traumatize

SOMETIME BEFORE MIDNIGHT ON April 20, two-year-old Jessica DeBoer of Ann Arbor, Michigan, is scheduled to disappear, leaving behind a heartbroken couple she calls Mommy and Daddy, a dog named Miles, her yellow bedroom and just about everything she has ever known, except perhaps a few favorite stuffed animals. Under court order, the dark-eyed, inquisitive girl will be transported 400 miles west to the small farming community of Blairstown, Iowa, to begin life anew as Anna Lee Schmidt.

Jessica is not likely to go quietly. The child is the victim of an appallingly slow and wrenching struggle between the couple who conceived her and her would-be adoptive parents who have held and nurtured her almost since birth. Last Tuesday, the claims of blood prevailed when the Michigan Court of Appeals deferred to an earlier ruling of the Iowa Supreme Court that granted custody of the girl to her biological parents, Cara and Daniel Schmidt. Now the other couple, Roberta and Jan DeBoer, have 21 days to appeal a decision that has sent shudders throughout the nation's adoption community. Says Mary Beth Seader, vice president of the National Council for Adoption: "People don't trust the permanency of American adoption anymore."

Jessica's troubles began 40 hours after she was born in a hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It was then that her mother Cara, 28 and unwed at the time, waived her parental rights and put the infant up for adoption. Cara identified the father as her boyfriend at the time, Scott, who also consented to the adoption. Elated, the DeBoers, who had arranged weeks earlier to adopt the child, drove all the way from Ann Arbor to claim their new baby. Soon after returning home, they received a letter from Cara that read, "I know you will treasure her and surround her with love, support her, encourage her to dream, to reach for the stars . . . God bless."

That blessing soon became a curse as Cara started to have second thoughts. Six days after the birth, she informed ex-boyfriend Daniel Schmidt that he had actually fathered the child; she had listed Scott as the father partly to avoid the embarrassment of acknowledging an ex-lover. Anguished, Schmidt promptly launched a legal battle to terminate the adoption proceedings. Backed up by blood tests proving his paternity, he blocked the adoption in Iowa courts.

Daniel and Cara married last April. With help from a Des Moines-based antiadoption group called Concerned United Birth Parents, they fought the DeBoers all the way to the Iowa Supreme Court, which ruled 8 to 1 last September in favor of the Schmidts' right to custody. The DeBoers then turned to Michigan courts and won a round last February when a lower court ruled that Jessica's best interests would be served if the child remained in Ann Arbor. That ruling was unanimously overturned last week by the appeals court, which sidestepped the merits of the case by denying the lower-court jurisdiction. Said Roberta DeBoer: "This is like death. Our daughter is dying."