Word: cara
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...printer and a homemaker, had no right to keep the baby they have tried to adopt for more than two years, it lit a long, scorching fuse on a time bomb. The DeBoers were given a month to turn her over to her biological parents in Iowa, Dan and Cara Schmidt. This afternoon they have 26 days left...
Jessica's troubles began 40 hours after she was born in a hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It was then that her mother Cara, 28 and unwed at the time, waived her parental rights and put the infant up for adoption. Cara identified the father as her boyfriend at the time, Scott, who also consented to the adoption. Elated, the DeBoers, who had arranged weeks earlier to adopt the child, drove all the way from Ann Arbor to claim their new baby. Soon after returning home, they received a letter from Cara that read, "I know you will treasure...
That blessing soon became a curse as Cara started to have second thoughts. Six days after the birth, she informed ex-boyfriend Daniel Schmidt that he had actually fathered the child; she had listed Scott as the father partly to avoid the embarrassment of acknowledging an ex-lover. Anguished, Schmidt promptly launched a legal battle to terminate the adoption proceedings. Backed up by blood tests proving his paternity, he blocked the adoption in Iowa courts...
Daniel and Cara married last April. With help from a Des Moines-based antiadoption group called Concerned United Birth Parents, they fought the DeBoers all the way to the Iowa Supreme Court, which ruled 8 to 1 last September in favor of the Schmidts' right to custody. The DeBoers then turned to Michigan courts and won a round last February when a lower court ruled that Jessica's best interests would be served if the child remained in Ann Arbor. That ruling was unanimously overturned last week by the appeals court, which sidestepped the merits of the case by denying...
Daniel and Cara Schmidt surely must think they will make the best possible parents for Jessica, and the child may agree when she is older. But that will be small comfort to her on the morning of April 21 if she wakes up in a completely different house under the loving gaze of strangers...