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There were other missing pieces. The adoption of Jessica was a privately arranged transaction. Michigan allows only agency adoptions, and the DeBoers would almost certainly have waited for years before finding a child. But Iowa allows for private adoptions, an arrangement that has become increasingly common as the number of parents seeking healthy infants has outstripped the supply 40 to 1. State adoption agencies can't possibly meet the demand, so prospective parents conduct their own searches, place classified ads, hire adoption lawyers to try to find a baby on their own.
Jessica's adoption, like so many private arrangements, occurred without the careful, painstaking counseling that adoption experts say is essential to protecting everyone's welfare. "One of the first things we would have done is bring this birth father in for counseling," says Bruce Rappaport, director of the Independent Adoption Center in Pleasant Hill, California. "Most birth fathers will accept some kind of compromise. It's rare that they won't budge. But in this case, nobody ever talked to anybody else. With adoption, it should be counselors, not lawyers."
A CHILD'S RIGHTS?
It is here that the story of Jessica promises to rip open the debate over what it means to be a parent, and what rights children have when their parents and guardians take refuge in the law. In many states the rights of biological parents are all but inviolable; only in extreme cases are courts willing to terminate a parent's right to custody. But as stories emerge of children who are plainly suffering the consequences of being treated more like property than people, the tide has begun to turn.
The story of Gregory K. in Florida brought the debate onto the national stage, when he successfully sued to "divorce" the mother who had abandoned him in order to remain with the foster family he had been living with for nearly a year. His was a rare victory: more typical is the story of Joseph Wallace, a three-year-old Chicago boy who spent most of his young life in foster care while his mother Amanda slipped in and out of mental institutions. In one of her pleas to the court for custody of her son, Amanda said, "I want to give him love, affection, something I didn't have." In February the court agreed to return Joseph to her: two months later, Amanda was charged with murdering her son by hanging him with an electrical cord.
In Connecticut two years ago, a teenager named Gina Pellegrino fled a New Haven hospital, where she had registered under a phony name, hours after giving birth to a girl. A search was made for the infant's biological parents, and Pellegrino's parental rights were terminated a few weeks afterward; the abandoned baby was placed for adoption. A few months later, Pellegrino reappeared and sued to regain custody, which would mean taking the baby out of a secure home and sending her to live with her mother in a homeless shelter. Late last year the state supreme court granted Pellegrino custody, evoking an enormous public outcry. "The best interests of the child were totally ignored," says state mental-health commissioner Dr. Albert Jay Solnit. "What was worshipped was the technicality of law and the mystique of blood ties."