Birth Parents

The man from family planning liked to prowl around the mountaintop village, looking for diapers on clotheslines and listening for the cry of a hungry newborn. One day in the spring of 2004, he presented himself at Yang Shuiying's doorstep and commanded: "Bring out the baby." Yang wept and argued, but, alone with her 4-month-old daughter, she was in no position to resist the man every parent in Tianxi feared. "I'm going to sell the baby for foreign adoption. I can get a lot of money for her," he told the sobbing mother as he drove her with the baby to an orphanage in Zhenyuan, a nearby city in the southern province of Guizhou.

The Premise Dr. Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) is worried that his slowing movements mean he may have inherited his recently deceased father's Parkinson's disease. In this episode, Paul's new 16-year-old gay patient, Jesse (Dane DeHaan), has been contacted by his birth mother and wonders if she may hold some genetic clues to his erratic behavior. He pushes people away, is prone to impulsive behavior (he wonders if this is a symptom of Tourette syndrome), has frequent bouts of unprovoked rage and is sexually promiscuous.

When Karen Adams of West Covina saw the snapshot of the two black-haired babies with pink bows, she said she felt a flower blossom in her heart. They were her granddaughters, but she had never seen them because they had been given away to adoptive parents half a continent away. No matter how well the couple cares for them, Adams, a descendant of Native Americans from a Northern California Pomo tribe, said the twins, now 2, don't belong with outsiders.

Living with a secret is psychologically destructive — that concept was nearly an anthem for Annette Baran, a clinical social worker and psychotherapist who co-wrote "The Adoption Triangle," an influential 1978 book credited with giving early shape to the open-adoption movement. Baran died July 11 at St. John's Medical Center in Santa Monica of complications from an infection, said her son Joshua. She was 83 and lived in Santa Monica. "If there ever was an activist who changed the world of adoption, it was Annette," said Joyce Maguire Pavao, founder of the Center for Family Connections, an educational and counseling center in Cambridge, Mass.

Like a lot of 17-year-olds, Robert Davis was a handful for his mother and stepfather. It's not that he did anything terribly wrong, but he could not do much right either. He argued with his parents, he skipped school, he ran off. This spring, he found himself in the state-run China Springs Youth Camp. There, in April, he heard the news. In San Quentin Prison, the television reporter intoned, a murderer named Robert Alton Harris was about to be executed.

In 1964, when Deborah Mattson viewed her adult dilemma through the eyes of a young girl, her choices seemed clear. This kind of decision was made by adults, and they had concluded that an unmarried 15-year-old's only choice was to give up her child for adoption. "It was always: 'You'll want to give this baby up. You'll want it to have a mother and a father, Debbie. You can't provide that,' " she said. "And it was true that I couldn't provide those things. It was so logical.

Many adopted children have a lot of guilt when they start searching for their birth parents, because they're afraid their adoptive parents will be hurt, says Dae Leckie, a licensed clinical social worker in Tustin. She offers the following suggestions for adoptive parents: * Allow yourself to experience feelings that are common among those who face the possibility of having to share an adopted child with birth parents.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to get involved in a custody fight over an 8-year-old girl whose Chinese parents have been trying for seven years to get back from temporary foster care. Without comment, the high court rejected a request to review a Tennessee Supreme Court ruling that Anna Mae He must be returned to birth parents Shaoqiang and Qin Luo He. "This is wonderful news for my family," Shaoqiang He said of the high court decision.

A Florida teen-ager swapped at birth with another baby cannot be forced to have contact with her biological parents, a judge ruled Wednesday. The ruling, which declared the man who raised 14-year-old Kimberly Mays to be her legal father, caps years of uncertainty that started in 1988 when the bizarre baby switch was first discovered. The ninth-grader's biological parents were seeking visiting rights, but during seven days of sometimes wrenching testimony in a Sarasota, Fla.

A Maryland judge's recent decision to grant a woman custody of her toddler even though she murdered another child has cast a spotlight on the key question under debate in child-protection circles: Just how paramount should birth parents' rights be? Montgomery County Circuit Judge Michael D. Mason's strict interpretation of a state law protecting the rights of biological parents assured Latrena Pixley, 23, custody of her 2-year-old son, Cornelius.

"Life Unexpected" is so oddly sweet and smart and pure of heart, so very much more "Gilmore Girls" than "Gossip Girl," that you have to wonder if the CW is in possession of a time machine. If so, it has used it to good advantage, giving us a heroine so sassy and yet emotionally grounded she could be the child Ellen Page's Juno gave up, if that child had been a girl and Jennifer Garner hadn't been around. Meet Lux (Britt Robertson), a street-smart but still essentially innocent foster kid. On the cusp of her 16th birthday, she needs the signatures of the birth parents she never met to secure her emancipation.

When television producer Sibyl Gardner adopted a baby girl in China in 2003, the official story was that the infant had been abandoned on the steps of the salt works in the city of Guangchang, where a worker found the day-old child and took her to a social welfare institution. But after reading with "utter horror" the latest revelations of child trafficking in China in the Los Angeles Times, Gardner found herself contemplating a trip to back to Jiangxi province to investigate how Zoë, now 7, came up for adoption.

The man from family planning liked to prowl around the mountaintop village, looking for diapers on clotheslines and listening for the cry of a hungry newborn. One day in the spring of 2004, he presented himself at Yang Shuiying's doorstep and commanded: "Bring out the baby." Yang wept and argued, but, alone with her 4-month-old daughter, she was in no position to resist the man every parent in Tianxi feared. "I'm going to sell the baby for foreign adoption. I can get a lot of money for her," he told the sobbing mother as he drove her with the baby to an orphanage in Zhenyuan, a nearby city in the southern province of Guizhou.

The father fell to his knees, weeping. The mother quietly buried her face in her hands. The 17-year-old boy stood upright and motionless -- whether out of shock or stoicism, no one knew. Christian Norris, who had just returned to China for the first time since he was adopted by an American eight years ago, didn't know what to think. The interpreter stood quietly on the sidelines waiting for what seemed an eternity, the only sounds were the sobs and the clicking of cameras that filled the room.

In some ways, the search for a woman I'll call Marie was like countless others I'd done as a journalist. It began with a name and an old address. I surfed the Web and worked the phones, and before long I was pretty sure I'd found her. So I bought a ticket, hopped on a plane and took a rental car to her neighborhood in a small town outside Dublin, Ireland. I drove up and down her street, looking for a good spot from which to watch and wait for the right moment to introduce myself.

IT WAS A SATURDAY, midmorning. A telephone split the stillness. Kendall McArthur's adoptive mother, Dorothea, known as Dorrie, took the call in the study. In an instant, more than two years of turmoil crested, then crashed in Kendall's heart. It was her birth mother. Kendall, 11, dismissed a playmate. She crept to the study door, just out of sight, and listened intently. Within moments, the conversation grew heated.

Kimberly Mays, the girl who was switched at birth and became the center of one of the nation's most celebrated custody fights, has moved in with her biological parents--the same couple she once told a court she never wanted to see again. The surprise move follows weeks of turmoil in the life of the 15-year-old, who for the past several days had been living in a Sarasota YMCA shelter for troubled teens.

Julie Cooper knew that if she heard her newborn cry, she wouldn't be able to give her up. But when she begged her doctor to take the child away the instant she was born, she never imagined that someday, many years later, she would hear her daughter cry--and hold her and cry with her, ending years of yearning with tears of joy. Shirley and Ronald Squires, who raised Cooper's baby, might have dreaded this reunion because it meant they'd have to share their adopted daughter with her birth family.

EXPERTS who advocate open adoption as well as those who oppose it say that adoptees grapple with a sense of loss. Virtually all adoptees understand that they have been given up by their birth parents and fear deep down that they might be given up again. Open-adoption advocates say that most adopted babies grow into well-adjusted children. At any given time, however, these advocates say, adoptees might react to the loss of their birth families in more pronounced ways.

A tiny blue-eyed girl made her entrance into the world. An obstetrician opened his hands to receive her, just in time. A nurse started to carry the baby to her mother, but another nurse stopped her. Someone whisked the child from the delivery room. The mother protested, but her baby was gone. The child was taken to the nurses' station, apart from the other babies in the nursery and mostly out of sight. The mother demanded her newborn. The nurses stalled.