Birth Fathers Fight for Right to Halt Adoptions, Gain Custody : Families: For the last few years, the number of such cases has increased, with men winning new status. Some experts are alarmed by the trend.

Meet John and Peggy Stenbeck, a suburban San Diego couple. She is a homemaker; he manages a retail store. They have adopted two children--4-year-old J.T. and 3-year-old Michael.

That is, they were in the process of adopting Michael, until the boy’s biological father stepped in to stop the arrangement.

Now, in a story that echoes the notorious Baby Jessica case, the Stenbecks are caught up in a legal fight over who should have custody of the boy they have reared since he was a day old.

This is a growing tangle in private adoptions--biological fathers who demand custody when mothers choose to give a child away.

It is a problem that yields more questions than answers: How do you legislate a business whose stock in trade is children? And what are the rights of biological fathers?

“In our society, fathers have been seen as superfluous. Fathers have been nothing but breadwinners to the family,” said Jon Ryan, a spokesman for the National Organization of Birth Fathers and Adoption Reform, who himself spent five years searching for his biological daughter.

But stories such as Michael’s are forcing the system to pay more attention.

Mark King had had a brief and stormy relationship with 15-year-old Stephanie Harman; it ended with a fight when Harman was five months pregnant. King, who has a history of drug abuse, was arrested for hitting her but was never charged.

At first, King agreed with Harman that their baby should be adopted by the Stenbecks, who knew her family. She moved in with the Stenbecks, gave birth on Feb. 27, 1991, and signed the baby over to them.

But in the time after his breakup with Harman, King had attempted suicide. While recuperating, he had a change of heart, and decided to rear his child. A day after Michael’s birth, he sued for custody.

There are some differences from the Baby Jessica case. Cara Clausen decided to give away her baby without informing the father, Dan Schmidt, that she was pregnant. She changed her mind after the birth, and Schmidt, whom she later married, asserted his rights.

After nearly three years of court battles, the adoption was overturned. Screaming and crying, “Mommy!” 2-year-old Jessica was taken from Jan and Roberta DeBoer in Michigan and sent to live with the Schmidts in Iowa.

The outcome for Michael is still in doubt. A judge has named the Stenbecks legal guardians--while granting King visitation rights--but King has appealed.

“At some point, each parent has to decide, ‘What is the best thing for my child?’ ” said Peggy Stenbeck. “And how can that be to pull him out of the only home he’s ever known? Why ruin a happy, healthy childhood? There’s absolutely no reason to do that, especially when Mark and the birth mother have always been welcome to be part of this family.”

For his part, King asserts that he no longer uses drugs, has a steady factory job and is willing to do whatever it takes to be a good parent. Michael, he says, should be reared by blood relatives.

“Millions of other single parents raise children,” he has said. “Who says I can’t do it?”

For the last few years, the number of birth-father custody cases has increased, legal experts say. There are no national figures kept on such lawsuits, but Jane Gorman of the Academy of California Adoption Attorneys says about half of her 100 cases involve birth fathers.

The increase of these cases is “an understandable and healthy consequence of the women’s movement and the request that fathers become more involved in the lives of their children,” said Joan Hollinger, an adoption-law expert and visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Including the Stenbeck case, there are at least four such cases in California. Of the three that have been decided, judges have tended toward granting greater custody rights for birth fathers.

That trend is alarming to some legal experts and adoption advocates.

“The rhetoric I’m hearing in California is, ‘Because I am the biological progenitor of this child, I have a claim to this child that is superior to anyone else,’ ” Hollinger said.

Hollinger, who also is part of a national effort to uniformly update adoption law, contends the reasoning “goes back to a totally outmoded conception that a child is a piece of chattel, that it can be possessed and owned only by virtue of a biological connection.”

One of the four lawsuits, a 1992 case, established legal precedent by allowing the civil rights of biological fathers to supersede the legal standard of deciding what is in a child’s best interest.

The state Supreme Court, in a sealed lawsuit involving a girl identified only as Kelsey S., ruled that an unwed father objecting to adoption must come forward as soon as he learns of the pregnancy and offer “a full commitment to his parental responsibilities--emotional, financial and otherwise” to gain custody.