What About the Rights of the Child?

The 4th District Court of Appeal was clearly annoyed.

“We do not wish to see another case of this nature,” the justices wrote in August of last year.

Baby Timmy, then 15 months old, was so ordered removed from the home of his adoptive parents, Bob and Marci Stiglitz--the only parents he had ever known--and returned to his natural mother, a girl the court calls only Alyssa W. because she was under age.

Orange County Superior Court Judge Robert Polis had been overruled. He had considered Timmy’s best interests. He had considered damaging psychological information about Alyssa. He had considered the adoptive parents’ love for Timmy and contrasted that with the natural mother’s apparent indifference to the baby she bore.

Judge Polis, the appellate court ruled, had failed to uphold the law.

“To repeat, when a natural mother refuses to consent to an independent adoption within a reasonable time after placing the child with prospective adoptive parents, and six months will always be a reasonable time, the court may not consider whether returning the child to the birth mother will be in the minor’s best interests.”

Thus the 4th District Court of Appeal did what it deemed correct. It did not consider Timmy’s interests at all. Today, baby Timmy’s fate is back in the hands of the courts. This time in San Diego, where the child was born.

Within five months of his return to his natural mother, the state of California alleged that Timmy, not quite 2 years old, had been severely abused. For the time being, Alyssa’s legal custody of her son has been taken away.

“These pictures speak a thousand words,” says the prosecutor in the felony child abuse case, which has not yet come to trial. Charged is 19-year-old Andy Shearer, the man whom Alyssa says that she loves.

“The child has no rights until he’s abused or until the adoption consent is signed,” says Bob Stiglitz, shaking his head as he weighs his own words. “That’s the hard reality, we’ve learned.”

I met Bob and Marci Stiglitz a few days after the appellate justices had ruled that Timmy was not their son in any legal sense of the word. It was the same afternoon that the state Supreme Court had refused to review the case.

We talked at their home in Huntington Beach, which they share with their other adopted son, Sean, who is now 5 years old, and the family cocker spaniel.

Only two hours earlier, Alyssa had arrived unexpectedly with her older brother to take Timmy away. She went upstairs and lifted Timmy from his crib as he napped and then, with the child in her arms, broke into a run as she headed for her car.

Bob Stiglitz was watching from outside his front door. He saw Timmy awake and heard his screams. Marci wasn’t even there to say goodby; she had gone to the supermarket to pick up some milk.

When I talked to the Stiglitzes that August afternoon, Marci was often in tears. Words choked in Bob’s throat. We went over the court proceedings, the psychological reports, the reasons for this petition and that. Marci and Bob were trying to figure out where things went wrong.

The Stiglitzes and Alyssa had arranged for a so-called open adoption, where the natural mother would still be part of her son’s life. A similar arrangement had worked well with the Stiglitzes’ first adopted child.

But it seemed that Alyssa, who was 15 when she gave birth, didn’t really care about being part of Timmy’s life. She barely knew the child’s father, and he had already given his consent for the adoption to go through.

The first time Alyssa saw her son, after allowing the Stiglitzes to take him home from the hospital where he was born, was when he was 5 months old. She filed a request to stop the adoption about two weeks after that. She was within her legal rights.

The court battle that followed took almost a year.

The Stiglitzes--both employed by the Fountain Valley School District, she as a special education teacher and he, with the maintenance department--took out a second mortgage to help pay their legal costs.

Alyssa, who had been kicked out of her parents’ Coronado home, was declared destitute, and the state picked up all of her legal bills.

When, finally, the Stiglitzes lost their fight, they grieved and then resolved to do what they could to enact better adoption laws.

They joined with other families--two other, very similar cases had gone before the appellate court in 1990, and both children had likewise been ordered returned--to found Families for Adoption Reform and Children’s Rights.

Now state Sen. Marian Bergeson of Newport Beach has sponsored a bill that, among other reforms, would allow a birth mother three months to reconsider giving her child up. Currently, there is no statutory time limit, although after six months, abandonment may be legally proved.

Still, the Stiglitzes’ newfound civic activism could go only so far in smothering their pain.

About three weeks after Alyssa came to take Timmy away, she mailed back a stack of color photographs that the Stiglitzes had sent her earlier, to show how well Timmy had been getting along.

I saw the photographs at the Stiglitzes’ home the other day. Timmy’s image had been carefully cut out of every frame. Only a smiling Bob or Marci remained.

It was only recently that Marci saw the pictures herself.

“There was no reason to show her,” Bob says. “There was enough hurt going around as it was.”

Now, of course, the Stiglitzes’ hurt is tangled with fear. Even when Timmy left, the couple tried hard to believe that the boy they loved would not be harmed. Bob called Alyssa’s attorney and offered his help if for whatever reason, Timmy should need it one day. The attorney said he would pass the message along.

I, too, have felt uneasy about Timmy’s fate. Not long after my first column on the Stiglitzes appeared, Alyssa’s mother wrote to say that she and her daughter--who had declined to talk to me before--would now like to talk.

So when I received the letter, I called and got Alyssa on the phone at her parents’ home. She said Timmy was fine and told me the words that he was learning to pronounce. She said she and her mother would be glad to talk with me more.

But when Alyssa didn’t call back as she said that she would, I phoned again. The number had been disconnected by then.

This was about the time that, according to documents before the court, Timmy had been abused. Bob and Marci Stiglitz found out when their attorney called. A social worker in San Diego had talked to Timmy’s paternal grandmother in the mistaken belief that she had a relationship with the child. From there the news spread.

“When our attorney called, I said, ‘Oh, man. I don’t need this,’ ” Bob Stiglitz recalls. “He didn’t know the seriousness of the injuries then. Then when we found out, we said, ‘We can’t turn our backs on him. Timmy is always in our heart. He is calling for help.’ ”

The Stiglitzes have since been granted de facto parental status in the Juvenile Court proceedings that will ultimately decide Timmy’s fate.

The ruling simply allows the couple legal standing. Timmy is still in the custody of Alyssa’s mother, at her Coronado home. Legally, Alyssa’s visits are to be monitored, yet she still lives in the same house with her parents and her child. She is unemployed and has dropped out of school. She will be 18 in May.

The Stiglitzes, meanwhile, say they plan to petition the court for a bonding study to better determine what role, if any, they will play in Timmy’s life.

They are not allowing themselves to hope for too much, even though they have never stopped loving this little boy.

“I’m trying to be pretty skeptical to protect myself from anymore emotional hurt,” Marci Stiglitz says. “We haven’t been treated well by the court system. It’s hard to believe that things could change now. When I really think about it, it makes me really angry. I want to drive down there and yank Timmy out and bring him up here. Obviously, I can’t do that.”

So the Stiglitzes say they will keep trying to make the system work, for the sake of the boy who was almost legally their son. Later this month, Bob will travel to Sacramento to testify on behalf of Marian Bergeson’s bill.

“This whole experience, these last two years, defies logic,” he says. “Nobody says anything about the rights of the child.”