2 Moms Overcome Aborted Adoption and Infant Death for Another Chance

Funny how maternal instincts can kick in at the oddest times.

Like the time Nikki Biers, 53, was standing in her kitchen reading a Christmas letter.

The letter was from a woman who, five years ago, had dealt Biers one of the most devastating blows of her life. She had taken back the daughter Biers was going to adopt.

That hurt--immense enough on its own--had been quickly supplanted by another: the death of this same baby girl, shortly after, of sudden infant death syndrome.

Now the baby’s mother wanted to talk. Call me, she wrote. I’m pregnant again.

The scene of Biers reading the letter, years after her painful double loss, offers a tableau of the tangled emotions and shifting realities of present-day adoptions.

Babies now are less likely to be whisked from delivery rooms into the arms of anonymous strangers. Instead, adoption is more personal, and controversial. Birth mothers and adoptive parents are more likely to remain in contact. Large sums of money may change hands. And people like Biers, an adoptive mom who earns a living by setting up private adoptions for others, are embroiled in new debates.

The letter Biers opened last January reflected all these trends, and something else too: The uncharted, intimate side of adoption--untouched by its procedural side and fathomless even to those who know it firsthand.

Because long after Biers had given away the baby things, and thrust aside thoughts of another child, she found herself calling breathlessly to her husband, Michael. “You won’t believe this,” she said, as he rushed downstairs. “I think she wants us to take her baby.”

The couple exchanged looks and made an instant decision. This Mother’s Day, they are celebrating the pending adoption of Nika, born Jan. 15.

Biers can’t quite explain how she came to trust again the woman who betrayed her. But she says it has to do with shared grief, and in the strange bond between adoptive and biological moms in a new era of open adoptions. “I guess it served as more of a healing--for all of us,” she said. “It was just instinct.”

Nikki Biers already had four grown children from a previous marriage when she married Michael Biers in 1987. Eager to start a new family and well into their 40s, they adopted Jimmy, now 7, with the help of an attorney.

A second child, born prematurely, was reclaimed by his birth parents before he was released from the hospital.

“It was one of the worst things I have ever been through,” said Biers. But it was fated to happen again.

In 1990, working through a private Santa Barbara “facilitator,” or an adoption broker like Biers herself, they met the woman who would one day give birth to Nika.

The woman could not be reached for an interview. In the Biers’ version of the story, she is described as bright and warm. She was then 23, pregnant, unmarried and determined to continue school, Biers said. But the woman’s mother, who was also present, cried through the meeting and at the baby’s birth, for which the Biers were present, she said.

The Biers named the baby Emma, took her home and waited a month for the woman to sign the final papers. “Two days before she was supposed to sign, she called and said, ‘I’m sorry,’ ” said Nikki. The woman’s family was too distressed at the impending adoption and she couldn’t go through with it, she said.

Nikki says that at the time, distrust, perhaps underscored by racial differences, may have been a factor. The Biers are white; the woman and her family African American. “I don’t ever want to feel that way again,” Nikki said.

The Biers took the baby to an arranged meeting place. “I was so angry. We were ready to let her have it,” she said. “But we took one look at her and she burst into tears. She said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ . . . So I put the baby in her arms, and she didn’t reach for her, she just sat there. She didn’t want to leave. So finally, we just had to.”

Two weeks later, the woman called to tell her the baby had died of crib death.

“I don’t think I have ever been through something so devastating. And she was in shock. My heart just went out to her,” Nikki said.

They attended the funeral, standing apart from the family, recalling it as a painful and uncomfortable experience.

But the baby’s mother managed to put aside grief and her reservations about the adoption enough to write a letter shortly after. She expressed love and gratitude over the time the Biers spent with the baby. “She knew we felt the loss as much as she,” said Nikki.

The letter became the basis for an irregular friendship and yearly exchange of Christmas cards. Although the Biers went on to adopt another boy, Charlie, now 5, they still grieved for Emma and longed for a daughter. When January’s surprising missive arrived, it seemed things had come full circle.

The woman, now 27, wrote that she was working and had recently married. But the baby she was carrying was from a previous relationship, and she was raising two other children, so she wanted to hand over the child to them, the Biers said.

“We were scared,” Michael Biers said. But this time, the woman assured them she had no doubts. This time she has signed a waiver that severely restricts her rights to stop the adoption. Nika now lives with the Biers in their Valley Village duplex, although her adoption remains to be finalized.

Some people still think they were crazy to do it, Michael Biers said. But others who have been through open adoption said the strange cross-relationships it produces often yield the unexpected.

“Both parties are in an extreme situation emotionally,” said Brian Murphy of Pasadena. With wife Judith, he just adopted two boys after meeting their birth mothers. “Your defense mechanisms are turned off, and your willingness to be intimate is heightened.”

Such meetings are “like blind dates,” said one Van Nuys woman, 27, whose newborn was adopted by a couple she had met.

Parting with a child is difficult, she said, and “If I dwelt on it, I would be a basket case.” But knowing the future parents of her child helped her see the point. “You have to think about someone else besides how, every once in a while, you feel bad.”

For Nikki Biers, another outcome of Emma’s death was her decision to turn such introductions into a full-time job. She and her husband have joined a new group of self-styled adoption “facilitators,” who charge fees to advertise for birth mothers, screen them and arrange meetings with adoptive families.

She says that after her own adoption experiences, the business amounts to a calling.

But critics say adoption facilitators, who--unlike lawyers--are subject to no formal certification process, may simply be exploiting the desperation of childless couples to charge sky-high fees for unspecified services.

They say facilitators are also easily confused with more traditional, nonprofit adoption agencies that are licensed by the state. “Somehow we have allowed people to pass children to other people without safeguards,” said Elias Lefferman, director of community service for Vista Del Mar Child & Family Services in West L.A., one such agency. “It’s the only area of child welfare where people make such huge profits.”

Facilitators counter that critics are jealous of their business. “We are not making lots of money,” said Nancy Hurwitz, an organizer of the newly formed Academy of California Adoption Professionals. She argues there is a demand for private professionals who understand the psychology of adoption. “The problem is someone who just adopted a baby and puts up a shingle and calls themselves a facilitator,” she said.

This might arguably apply to Biers, who used to work in theater production and now charges about $4,500 per case. But she says advertising, screening, educating and “hand-holding” are services many couples are happy to pay for.

The Biers’ saga also touches on another politically heated issue: interracial adoption. Congress is considering a measure that, among other things, would remove some barriers to such adoptions, which opponents have called “cultural genocide.”

If passed, families that look like the Biers might become more common.

Nikki Biers said in this, too, she is jumping in feet first. She has enlisted a black friend to spend time with Nika. Recently, she said, she approached a black stranger in a drugstore for advice on hair-care products.

“It’s been an interesting journey,” she said. And at the end is Nika, “the joy of our family,” Biers said, and “an answer to a prayer, though it wasn’t conscious.”