Rallying Cry for Adoptive Parents’ Rights : Families: A grass-roots committee wants to reform adoption laws to avoid another Baby Jessica dispute. But some say birth parents could lose out.

In the background, women’s voices chant “Justice for Jessi, Justice for Jessi” while another woman sweetly sings:

“I hear you deciding my future for me. But no one’s asking me. My feelings are just as real as yours. “

At once militant and sentimental, “Hear My Voice” is a promotional audiocassette of songs written and sung by musician Annie Rose of Ann Arbor, Mich. It sets the theme and tone for the fast-growing and controversial DeBoer Committee for Children’s Rights, a national organization of about 2,000 people galvanized by the custody case of Jessica DeBoer, the Michigan 2 1/2-year-old returned last August to her biological parents from the adoptive parents who raised her from birth.

Armed with the theme song, an 800-number hot line, hundreds of other disputed custody cases and plans for a nationwide rally Saturday, the Ann Arbor-based group is using the DeBoer case as a catalyst to push the children’s rights movement from “rhetoric to action.” The group seeks justice for what it says are “thousands of Jessis”--embattled children who are “treated as property” in custody disputes.

“Our goal is in every state and nationwide to have the best interests of the child considered in every custody case and, if need be, change the law so children are included in the process,” said Joan Pheney Engstrom of Ann Arbor, founder of the DeBoer committee. Children’s interests should take precedence over those of the adults fighting over them, she said. At the least, children’s interests should receive equal consideration, she said.

Periodically, high profile cases, such as the child-abuse death of Lisa Steinberg in New York, have produced reform campaigns similar to the DeBoer committee’s. But the issues at the heart of the DeBoer case are not as clear cut.

John Ryan, president of the National Assn. of Birth Father Rights, based in Punta Gorda, Fla., said the DeBoer committee, in seeking a universal standard to consider the child’s best interests, is wielding a powerful tool. The “best interest” campaign in effect pushes children onto an auction block, giving more rights to whoever has possession of the child or can provide a better home--usually those with more money, he said.

“If a judge is forced to rule in best interests in every case, and you have a married couple, older, financially stable, versus a young single mother or father, any judge in his or her right mind is going to rule with the couple.

“You can’t arbitrarily terminate parental rights based on best interest. In that case (the child) is going to go to the highest bidder.”

Initially, the committee is targeting cases of proven abuse, proven neglect and “long-term custodial care from which (children) should not be removed if they’ve established a family,” Rose said. The word “family” does not always include biology, she believes.

With the help of children’s rights organizations, they say they have compiled a list of hundreds of such cases, similar to the high profile Florida cases of Gregory K., who divorced his parents, and Kimberly Mays, switched at birth in the hospital to the wrong parents.

But it was Jessica’s case, publicized in a New Yorker article, a Time magazine cover story and numerous television shows, that seemed to touch an exposed nerve and sparked an outpouring of support for the committee.

Cara Schmidt, who was unmarried, had agreed to let Jan and Roberta DeBoer adopt her baby, but changed her mind weeks later after reconciling with the baby’s father. His parental rights to the child were upheld by Iowa courts.

The DeBoers appealed the case to the Michigan courts, which declined at the appellate level to overrule the Iowa court. More than two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to stay an order to return the child to her biological parents, by then a married couple.

Like many others, Engstrom said, “I thought ‘I cannot stand by and watch this little child be ripped out of her home.’ I was concerned about her age, what it would do to her developmentally, and the long-term harm.”

A psychotherapist and mother of a 5-year-old girl, Engstrom started a group called Justice for Jessi nine months ago. The group eventually raised $150,000 to help the DeBoers with legal fees. Expanding their horizons, members began to meet with state legislators to support measures to give legal standing to unrelated third parties, such as the DeBoers, in custody disputes. They also ran petition drives and letter-writing campaigns.

Now renamed, the group is incorporating as a not-for-profit committee and growing daily, Engstrom said.

The day Jessica was televised screaming as she was removed from the DeBoers’ home, the group logged 46,000 attempted calls on its hot line (1-800-4R JESSI). It has received tens of thousands of calls and letters from people who agree with the committee’s slogan: “Never Another Jessi.”

“All of our personal phones rang. We had people begging us, ‘What can we do?’ We had all this pressure put on us to do something,” Engstrom said.

With a core group of eight Ann Arbor women working day and night for the last six months, the committee has signed up 2,000 members, each for a $25 fee. Donors have provided them with an office, phones and fax machines, computers and computer time.

Earlier this month, they held a training session that drew 75 people eager to form their own statewide chapters and to organize rallies scheduled for Saturday at noon in about half the state capitals, including Sacramento.

Participants were mostly mothers who went to the workshops for information on legal and financial aspects of forming local DeBoer committees, lobbying, fund-raising, talking to the media.

Some people want the committee to try to get Jessica back. But Engstrom said, “We have to follow the laws.”

Or change them.

“I have no doubt we’re going to change laws,” said Jeneva Hackney of Long Beach, an organizer of the effort in California.

Hackney said she would also like to see the committee raise funds to help people--like the DeBoers--who are fighting custody battles. She is also interested in pursuing a birth-fathers registry, such as one in New York that enables any registered unwed father to be notified in case of a pending adoption.

Hackney said about 100 people have joined the committee in Southern California.

“People who were touched by this are personally grieving,” she said. “There are some desperate people who are calling.” After hearing numerous stories of children being allowed to live with abusive or neglectful parents, she said, “I’m more horrified than when I started. I’m appalled.”

People’s reactions to the DeBoer case have been so personal that it is often difficult for them to sort out legal issues from emotional ones, said Howard Davidson, director of the American Bar Assn.’s Center on Children and the Law in Washington, D.C.

He said the DeBoer case was unusual and there probably are not “thousands of Jessis,” raised for years by adoptive parents and then forced to return to their biological parents. However, he said, there are probably thousands of children from dysfunctional families who have been placed in temporary care. At some point, courts must decide whether their biological parents have improved enough to regain their children.

Davidson said the U.S. Supreme Court has never given children constitutional rights to representation in court unless they are charged with a crime. As it stands now, each state decides through its legislature how children’s interests will be considered in cases of neglect, custody, visitation and child-support disputes.

Some critics of the DeBoer committee agree the laws need to be changed, but not the way committee members want. These critics contend the DeBoers themselves were at fault for not complying with court orders to return the child (an action supporters defend by questioning the “fitness” of the baby’s biological father).

“If the DeBoer Committee for Children’s Rights is going to be for terminating parental rights of people because they don’t seem to measure up to somebody else who wants to adopt the child, we’re in trouble as a culture and a society,” said Kate Burke, president of the American Adoption Congress, a birth parents’ rights organization.

“If we’re talking about a system where we’re going to allow individuals to say, ‘I will be a better parent, therefore I have legal standing for that child,’ we’re talking about social chaos.”

DeBoer committee members deny they are against biological families.

“We’re pro-family,” Rose said. “But families are sometimes not what the law has said they are.” Sometimes, she said, “biological ties get in the way of a child having a right to a real family.”