The Vicious Tug of War Over Jessica : The final, tragic act in this long, sad case

A lot of parents, we imagine, looked in on their sleeping children an extra time last night, kissed their cheeks and thought of Jessica.

Sunday night 2 1/2-year-old Jessica slept with the adoptive parents she had known all her life, the ones she calls Mommy and Daddy--Jan and Roberta DeBoer of Michigan. Monday night Jessica slept in the home of her biological parents, Dan and Cara Schmidt, whom she calls by their first names--and who will eventually call her Anna.

THE STRUGGLE: Cara Schmidt gave up custody of her baby shortly after the birth in Iowa in 1991. Cara, single at the time, named the man who was then her boyfriend, not Dan, as the father on the birth certificate. The DeBoers secured all the required adoption releases from Cara and her boyfriend and joyfully took their new daughter home to Michigan.

But within weeks, Cara changed her mind after telling Dan that he is the biological father. The two (who in 1992 would marry) then filed motions to get their daughter back. Because Dan had not relinquished his claim to the child, the Iowa courts voided the adoption. By then Jessica was nearly a year old. The DeBoers fought the Iowa rulings favoring the Schmidts, appealing, unsuccessfully, to the Michigan courts and ultimately to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Monday, as Jessica went to the home of parents she had never known, she sobbed.

THE VICTIM: So did many adults watching the final, tragic act in this long, sad case. Jessica is the ultimate innocent victim. She’s the one whose interests the adoption laws are primarily supposed to protect; but instead she is the one hurt most by those laws, and by the conflict between the two couples contending for her.

There is no easy answer, no quick “fix” to avoid the next adoption heartbreak, no way to keep parents from wanting to keep their genetic offspring or the children they have raised.

Adoption has historically been a state matter, like most legal issues involving families. But laws differ from state to state. Uniform standards on substantive and procedural issues might prevent some disputes when adoptions cross state lines. Such standards might also more quickly resolve problems that arise when parents, particularly in private adoption proceedings such as this one, have second thoughts.

Sadly, there are hundreds of cases nationwide hauntingly like Jessica’s, cases in which birth parents and adoptive parents are in a vicious tug of war, usually over a healthy child. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of handicapped or minority children languish in foster homes--wanted, it seems, by no one. The best interests of these children, too, should move us.