Word: deboers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...tidy backyard of the Cape Cod-style house with the cranberry shutters, Jessica DeBoer is having a picnic with her dog Miles. Her mother watches her through the blinds on the kitchen window. Everything feels so very normal. But the clock ticks loudly and the blinds all stay down and an answering machine screens the phone calls. Reporters keep calling -- and sad friends, and adoption experts -- and strangers who feel sorry for them...
When the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that Jan and Roberta DeBoer, a 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...
...decorated with little footprints, hearts and the words IT'S A GIRL. How is she holding herself together? "People can't understand," she says. "They think I'm falling to pieces nonstop in front of Jessi. But I would never do that." And then Robby DeBoer breaks down, heaving and weeping. The cries are not plaintive, not whimpers, but sobs that send her body shaking and her voice coming from deep inside her. And she is angry...
...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...
...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...