Woman says agency's coercion made her surrender her infant

LESLIE WOLF

The San Diego Union-Tribune

Krista Stoner's little girl is lost to her forever, adopted by a family in Nashville, Tenn., and there is nothing Stoner can do about it.

But she hopes to make the agency that helped arrange the adoption pay for the loss of her child.

Stoner is suing San Diego Pregnancy Services, which she says pressured her into giving up her baby, who was born Jan. 5, 1989.

In a trial that began this week in San Diego Superior Court, Stoner contends the coercion even extended to the point where the service's employees made her choose the adoptive parents while she was in labor and had her sign documents related to the adoption while she was in the hospital and under the influence of the potent sedative Demerol.

The agency, however, says Stoner has no one to blame but herself.

Stoner was an unmarried and homeless 19-year-old at the time, a high school dropout and crystal methamphetamine user whose parents had given up trying to rehabilitate her.

She decided in late December to give up the baby for adoption and showed no desire to get the baby back until months later, said the pregnancy center's attorney, Joel L. Incorvaia.

"At the time (of birth) she gave no indication she was having second thoughts about the adoption," Incorvaia said. "Three months later, she decided she wanted the baby back. . . .

"In short, she turned on the very people who had tried to help her," he said. "It's a tragedy of Miss Stoner's own making."

There are complicating factors. Stoner never signed the final consent to adoption in front of a judge, so the Tennessee couple, Carson and Jennifer Looney, went to court in that state to have baby Elizabeth declared abandoned by her mother. Employees of San Diego Pregnancy Services helped the Looneys finalize the adoption, according to the suit.

"The evidence is going to show (Stoner) was told this thing is not final until you go down to the judge and sign on the dotted line," said her attorney, Milton Silverman. "She told (agency employees), who she thought were there to help her, to get her baby back. Instead, they shafted her."

Stoner had hired another lawyer to challenge the adoption soon after the baby was taken away. But that lawyer, Alice Miller, filed the papers too late to stop the adoption from going through.

Four months ago, Miller was indefinitely suspended from practicing law, according to the state Bar Association.

Stoner then filed suit against San Diego Pregnancy Services, charging fraud and misrepresentation and asking for unspecified damages.

Opening statements in the trial began Wednesday in San Diego Superior Court, but not before dozens of would-be jurors were grilled about their beliefs on everything from religion to drug use to abortion.

Several who said they are sympathetic to the anti-abortion movement were dismissed, as was one woman who had been adopted herself and said born-again Christians strike a negative chord in her. A minister's ex-wife did make it onto the panel, however, as did a woman who supports the right to an abortion.

Abortion is not an issue in the case, however. Stoner, who had already had one abortion at age 16, was dead-set against that option.

But it is likely to come up during the trial because San Diego Pregnancy Services was founded in 1984 by a group of women who shared anti-abortion views. The acknowledged goal of the agency is to help women continue their pregnancies rather than abort. It also provides counseling, housing, food and clothing to the women and their babies, if needed.

In the four years since her daughter was born, Stoner has changed her life, she says. She has stopped using drugs and reunited with her parents. They came to court this week, with the entire family, to support her.

Stoner wept at times, dabbing her eyes with a tissue, while her lawyer described the deception that he said she endured.

"She went to a place where she'd heard a woman could get objective advice and counseling about the full range of options," Silverman said in his opening statement to the jury. "But this turned out to be a pious fraud."

Silverman said the group instead used all its energy and resources to persuade mothers-to-be to give up their babies for adoption to Christian families.

But, according to Incorvaia, San Diego Pregnancy Services arranged no more than 30 to 36 adoptions in 1988 and 1989, out of about 1,000 women who came to its offices in Oceanside and El Cajon.

"Adoption was not the only option," he said. "In fact, women were encouraged to do what they wanted to do, parent or adopt."

A key figure in the trial is Bonnie Jo Williams, former director of adoptions at the pregnancy center, who was once Stoner's friend.

Williams now runs her own adoption agency. Her lawyer, Michael E. Williams, told the jury that Williams, known as B.J., is not "the devil incarnate, as Mr. Silverman is trying to make her, stealing babies from mothers."

"She's a woman who saw a need that was not being met in society . . . to help women who were in crisis pregnancies," the lawyer said. Although B.J. Williams was not a licensed counselor, her lawyer said, she felt qualified to help women decide about adoption because as a teen-ager she had herself given up a child for adoption.

"You're going to hear there were a lot of Christian motives behind this," Michael Williams told the jury. "Well, a woman gave Jesus a cold cup of water, and that's what they're trying to live out."

Another San Diego woman, Delina Villa, also sued San Diego Pregnancy Services in 1990, saying she also had been pressured to give up her baby. She won the child back a year later, after spending $21,000 on a legal battle in Texas, where the adoptive couple lived.

A third suit against the agency is pending. In that one, Planned Parenthood accuses the center of deceptive advertising, contending that the agency does not reveal its anti-abortion slant to women who go there for help with unplanned pregnancies.