Word: cara
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Cara Clausen was 28 and single, working in an Iowa shipping factory, when she got pregnant three years ago. She had just broken up with her boyfriend Dan, a trucker, to start dating Scott Seefeldt -- so it was Scott's name she put on the birth certificate when Jessica was born. Two days later, Cara waived her parental rights and put the baby up for adoption...
Robby DeBoer contracted an infection on her honeymoon, had a hysterectomy and so cannot have children of her own. She heard about Cara through a friend in Iowa and began negotiating to adopt the baby. After Jessica was born on Feb. 8, 1991, Robby and her mother drove from Ann Arbor to Iowa through a fierce snowstorm to see the child and set the proceedings in motion. They got signed parental-rights releases from both Cara and Scott, and the DeBoers' joy was complete. They were now Jessica's legal custodians, and in six more months, the adoption would...
...within days, it all began to unravel. Cara saw her ex-boyfriend Dan Schmidt at work and told him everything -- that the baby she had just given up for adoption had been his all along. She began having second thoughts. She went to a support-group meeting of Concerned United Birthparents and heard other mothers' stories of the sorrow they felt at giving up their babies. On March 6 Cara filed a motion to get her daughter back, and a week later Dan did as well. Cara went out shopping for baby clothes...
...other women whom he had made no effort to help raise? Robby wrote letter after letter to children's-rights advocates around the country. She talked to reporters. In January the Iowa Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, but the appeals process dragged on for months. Dan and Cara got married -- and waited to bring their daughter back home. That seemed all but assured when the Iowa Supreme Court upheld the lower-court ruling and said that while Dan's fitness as a parent was questionable and the court was tempted, for Jessica's sake, to leave her with...
...story that holds so much pain for so many people needs a villain. Each set of parents has found grounds to blame the other, and as the stakes rose and the story went public, the charges got uglier. DeBoer supporters claim it was Cara's lie about the father in the first place that started the trouble. But the Schmidts' advocates retort that at the time she gave up her baby, Cara was in a fragile state, without the help of psychological counseling or legal advice. And the courts could not punish Dan for Cara's deception; he never consented...