Adoptive and Birth Parents Face Off in Court : Custody: A Texas couple had to surrender a 13-month-old boy, and a Michigan couple is battling to keep a 2-year-old girl. They plead for legal reforms.

She forgets sometimes, Jill Collins does, if only for a moment. Sometimes, she still expects to look up and see Stephen playing in the house or sleeping in his crib.

And then it hits her anew, she says, that what happened to her and husband, James, must be worse than having a child die.

The Collinses had taken Stephen home when he was 3 days old; he had been a part of their lives for more than a year, and they had begun proceedings to adopt him.

Then Stephen’s biological father surfaced. The courts awarded custody to this stranger the Collinses had not known existed; Stephen’s natural mother, who surrendered all parental rights, initially had said she did not know who the boy’s father was.

“To me it is comparable to having a missing child, except you have no legal right to ever find the baby,” said Jill Collins, who lives in the Houston suburb of Tomball, Tex.

“Something has got to be done about it because it’s going to kill adoption completely,” she said. “You’d have to be nuts to adopt.”

In courts across the country, couples are fighting over the very issue adoption laws are designed to avoid: Natural parents want their children back.

The Collinses lost their legal battle on June 18, 1991, and gave Stephen, then 13 months old, to the California man the courts had determined was his biological father.

In Michigan, Jan and Roberta DeBoer of Ann Arbor are fighting a similar custody dispute as they attempt to adopt a 2-year-old girl. Dan Schmidt of Blairstown, Iowa, was not told he was the girl’s father until after the adoption was under way. He said he never surrendered his parental rights--and he wants his child.

An Iowa judge has ordered the DeBoers to turn the baby over to Schmidt. But on Feb. 12, a Michigan judge ruled that it would be in the best interests of the baby to stay with the DeBoers. Adding to the confusion is a March 4 hearing scheduled by the Michigan Court of Appeals to determine whether the Michigan judge had jurisdiction in the dispute.

The judge in Michigan agreed with Roberta DeBoer’s assertion that the child will be damaged emotionally if she is removed from familiar surroundings and people.

“Why should she have to suffer?” Jan DeBoer asked before the ruling, fighting back tears. “The court should have to answer that question. Why should she have to suffer for other people’s mistakes?”

Officials and parents involved in adoption cases from Florida to California to Iowa agree that the laws are confusing and should be changed. But they each have a different solution.

Doug Donnelly, a Santa Barbara, Calif., attorney who has worked on adoption cases for 14 years, notes that the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court decision Stanley vs. Illinois set precedent in such disputes.

It established that every biological father is entitled to be given notice that an adoption is taking place and to have an opportunity to argue against it.

But Donnelly said many states now are taking steps to make biological fathers prove more responsibility to their children, such as setting up a special fund to help pay for their support before custody is assigned.

Donnelly applauds efforts by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws to develop a single adoption code for the country and said he thinks the laws need to give more recognition to women’s and children’s rights.

Kathy Ruyle, a social worker who serves as a child advocate in Iowa’s Linn County, agreed that both courts and parents need to consider children’s feelings more.

“You know, everybody says, ‘We’re trying not to put the kids in the middle,’ ” Ruyle said. “But they’re in there whether we want it or not.”

One of the easiest ways to stop custody disputes in adoptions, she said, is to leave children in the custody of social services or the courts until adoptions are complete.

“We should have some type of system in place so maybe children wouldn’t go with anybody until the adoption is final,” Ruyle said. “A week or two isn’t going to make that much difference with a baby.”

The DeBoers have had the little girl, whom they named Jessica, since Feb. 14, 1991. Roberta DeBoer said she believes the courts have not given consideration to children’s rights.

“The problem here is that the birth parents’ rights overweigh anyone--overweigh the child, overweigh the adoptive family,” she said. “And the Constitution is written so that it’s supposed to protect the child, not the birth parents.”

The girl’s natural mother, Cara Schmidt, argues that she was misled by an attorney and signed papers terminating her parental rights before Iowa’s 72-hour-after-birth waiting period had expired. She has sued to have her parental rights restored.

Dan Schmidt, who since has married Cara, said he is angry he has never even seen his child.

“What do they think we’ve gone through for 22 months?” he asked. “They’ve had the joy of being with her, seeing her, touching her--her emotions and that.”

Jill Collins, now 42, said she and her husband could have continued their court fight in California, but simply didn’t have the money.

More than 1 1/2 years later, the pain has scarcely dulled. People who don’t know about the court decision and ask about Stephen can send her home crying. She quit her job as a teacher because she didn’t have enough patience with children or their parents after losing the boy.

She cannot have children--she had a hysterectomy after learning she had cancer--and she does not know if she and her husband will try to adopt again.

“I would like to, but there is a fear in me that might keep me (from it) at the last minute,” she said. “I don’t think I would bond to the child until the adoption was finalized. And I don’t know how I can possibly say that. But even with Stephen, there were times when I didn’t want to get that close because I was so scared of getting hurt if something went wrong.”

She would like to try to organize adoptive parents to lobby for more protection.

“We need to find out how to change the judicial system,” she said. “It’s got to be stopped. Something has got to be done about it.”