Ruling on Father’s Rights Faces Test : Families: An unmarried Arizona man is challenging a San Diego couple’s custody of his 18-month-old son, given up for adoption by a 16-year-old mother.

Eighteen months ago, Mark and Stephanie had a baby. She was 16. He was 22. Over his objection, she gave the baby up for adoption.

A San Diego couple, John and Peggy, became the guardians of little Michael, intending to adopt him. John and Peggy were even there in the delivery room with Stephanie, who had fled Arizona to get away from Mark--who is still there, working a factory night shift, swearing that he is making something of himself, that his drug problem is over and that he wants his son.

People who know John and Peggy uniformly call them the all-American couple. They have one other young son, also adopted. John is an accountant, Peggy a homemaker. They are the only parents Michael has known, and for 18 months he has been a gift in their lives, a precious treasure they have cherished, according to friends.

But late last month a state appeals court in San Diego issued a ruling suggesting strongly that Mark had been unfairly deprived of his rights as a father--a ruling that could ultimately mean John and Peggy’s treasure would be yanked right out of their house and sent to Arizona.

If, the court said, Mark can show he has made a reasonable effort at preparing to be a father and is otherwise fit to be a parent, he can claim the child. Whatever rights John and Peggy can assert would have to give way before Mark’s right to claim his son--no matter the emotional cost to the couple, no matter what might seem best for the baby, the court said.

The appeals court sent the case back to a San Diego judge to measure Mark’s fitness, setting the stage for the state’s first significant test of a little-noticed California Supreme Court ruling issued earlier this year that gave dramatic force to the power of a biological father’s legal rights.

“There’s no doubt in my mind (John and Peggy) love him,” Mark said last week on the phone from his house in Prescott Valley, Ariz., about 100 miles north of Phoenix.

Because public records in adoption cases are limited to first names only, Mark and others involved in the case agreed to comment on the condition that last names not be used.

“I know they love him very much. I know they’re taking good care of him,” Mark said. ‘I don’t have any really bad feelings against them personally. I just hate their guts because they have my son and they’re refusing to let me have my son.”

John and Peggy declined to be interviewed because of concern, Peggy said, about the “privacy of our family.” Stephanie also declined to talk, saying she was worried that Mark wants to get the baby so he can get her back. “I really don’t want to get into it all,” Stephanie said last week by phone.

Mark said Stephanie has no reason for concern. “I still love her but the relationship is over,” he said. “. . .I have no desire to have her back. I really don’t care what she does.”

Stephanie’s mother, Bev, who lives in Prescott, Ariz., where Mark and Stephanie grew up, said she believes her daughter’s former fiance “is just so immature.” Last month, she said, they passed by each other and “he flips me the bird.” He said he did no such thing.

Bev’s family has long been friendly with John and Peggy, whom she called “wonderful people, so loving and kind and incredible.”

“When the baby was born, Stephanie called me and said, ‘Mom, I know I’m Michael’s birth mother,’ ” Bev said. “But John and Peggy are his parents.”

Mark said it is hard for him to make sense of that. “The main thing I want to (say) is that someone can come and take away your kid,” he said. “Look at me. The mother can go out and put a father’s child up for adoption, and the father doesn’t have a hell of a say-so about it. To me, it’s legal kidnaping.”

When Stephanie became pregnant, Mark agreed she could choose an abortion. Three months later, she had decided against an abortion and, according to a court account, Mark said he would allow the child to be adopted.

Then he changed his mind. He asked Stephanie to move up the date of their wedding because he did not want the baby to be adopted. He also took videos of the sonogram and attended birthing classes, both with and without Stephanie.

About the time Stephanie was five months pregnant, in the fall of 1990, the couple began squabbling. One night, she fled after a scuffle.

Despondent, Mark tried to commit suicide by injecting air into his veins with a hypodermic needle. He survived and sought counseling, according to a court account.

On Feb. 27, 1991, Stephanie gave birth to Michael in San Diego. The next day, Mark filed legal papers in Arizona seeking to establish paternity and custody. John and Peggy were notified but refused to turn the child over and filed formal adoption papers on April 18, 1991, in San Diego.

Mark was notified in March by the San Diego County Department of Social Services of its intent to place the baby for adoption.

During a parental rights hearing in October, Mark was granted permission to visit Michael. He took various pictures of the baby, held him and fed him. Michael “smiled at him and followed him with his eyes,” according to a court account.

Also during the hearing, Mark showed he had gotten full-time work, had obtained an apartment suitable for the baby and had arranged for child care. He presented letters of recommendation from employers, according to a court account.

Nevertheless, at the end of the four-day hearing, San Diego Superior Court Judge Lisa Guy-Schall ruled that it was in Michael’s “best interests” to terminate Mark’s parental rights. She authorized adoption by John and Peggy.

Mark appealed before the adoption decree was signed. While the case languished at the 4th District Court of Appeal in San Diego, the California Supreme Court issued a ruling in a case from San Jose: If, though unwed, a single man becomes a father and acts like one, he should have every right to pursue a “full and enduring” relationship with his child.

The time had come, the Supreme Court said, for the court system to recognize the “rapidly changing concept of family.” A single father, it said, might be just as capable of providing a good home as a two-parent adoptive family.

Two weeks ago, based on the Supreme Court decision, the 4th District reversed the ruling cutting off Mark’s parental rights.

It no longer mattered under the law, the 4th District said, what was in Michael’s “best interests.” What was important was whether Mark had, “at all relevant times, attempted through legal channels to shoulder full responsibility for his child.”

The 4th District court sent the case back to Superior Court with instructions to decide whether Mark had “demonstrated a sufficient commitment to his parental responsibilities” through a “reasonable and meaningful attempt to establish a relationship.” The next legal hoop would be determining whether Mark is now “fit” to be a good father.

“I am ready for my son,” Mark said last week. “I’ve got a good job,” at a window-building factory where he has been employed for almost a year, makes $7.13 an hour and is due for another raise shortly. “I’ve got a good home.”

The next hearing in the case has not been set. Though Mark said last week he is cautiously optimistic, he remains worried. The courts are silent on the issue of parent-child bonding--and Michael, 8 months old at the time of the trial, is already 18 months old.

Still, Mark said he has reason to hope.

“There are a lot of fathers out there fighting for their children,” he said. “A lot of fathers have had their children taken away from them, wrongfully. I would like to say I now know how they feel. And I want to tell them: Stay strong. Keep fighting.”

There is also, according to Bev, reason for Mark to doubt.

“To return this child to Mark would be like the worst environment I can think of for a child to be raised in,” Bev said. “And yet the state of California is considering this? It’s insane.”