Justice Allows Genetic Parents to Get Girl Back

A Michigan couple fighting to keep a 2-year-old they have raised since birth lost their effort Monday to have a Supreme Court justice block an order that they give the girl to her biological parents.

Justice John Paul Stevens denied Jan and Roberta DeBoer’s emergency request, leaving intact the order that they give the girl they call Jessica to her biological parents in Iowa by next Monday.

The DeBoers’ argument that allowing them to keep the child would serve her best interest “rests, in part, on the relationship that they have been able to develop with the child after it became clear that they were not entitled to adopt her,” Stevens wrote.

“Neither Iowa law, Michigan law, nor federal law authorizes unrelated persons to retain custody of a child whose natural parents have not been found to be unfit, simply because they may be better able to provide for her future and her education.”

The DeBoers, of Ann Arbor, want to adopt the girl. But Daniel and Cara Schmidt of Blairstown, Iowa, have been trying to get the child back since shortly after she was born Feb. 8, 1991.

Cara Schmidt, then unmarried, had signed a custody release two days after her daughter was born.