Birth brings joy, renews pain over loss of firstborn in pregnancy-center case

LISA PETRILLO

The San Diego Union-Tribune

Krista Stoner just gave birth to her second child -- but the first she'll be able to keep.

What happened to her firstborn is a case that is still making national headlines. A San Diego jury ruled that a Christian crisis pregnancy center defrauded Stoner out of her daughter, Elizabeth.

Stoner knows she will never see her Elizabeth again, for the girl legally belongs to a Tennessee couple who took the newborn girl four years ago.

And she doubts she will see a penny of the $675,000 the jury awarded her in May. A Superior Court judge later cut the total award to $300,000, and then the center that owes her, San Diego Pregnancy Services, quietly closed down.

"I got shafted either way," says Stoner, though she feels the verdict vindicated her. "The important thing is that everybody knows I was right, and that they (San Diego Pregnancy Services) won't be able to ruin anybody else's life."

While her family and attorneys wrangle over the money, Stoner is concentrating on rebuilding her life. But even as life renewed itself with her fair-haired son, Charles, his birth has also renewed deep pangs of what was lost.

"I hope I don't seem like a baby when I cry, I know I should be happy. But when I see him, I see Elizabeth, and it hurts," she says, cuddling Charles John Craft recently.

Charles has the same father as her firstborn, her longtime boyfriend Mike Craft, a local mason. And the baby is using the layette and crib bought for Elizabeth five years ago and stored, all this time, like Stoner's hopes.

Stoner is now 24 and reconciled with her parents, Sharon and Darryl Stoner of Vista. She is a long way from the pregnant and drug-addicted 19-year-old who in 1988 turned to San Diego Pregnancy Services, which operated as part of a network of some 400 centers associated with the nonprofit Christian Action Council outside Washington, D.C.

"I don't think Krista Stoner deserved the award," said one of the center's attorneys, Joel Incorvaia, who maintains that Stoner was not drug-free as she claimed.

Incorvaia and the center's attorneys argued that Stoner was on drugs and not coherent at the time she agreed to give her first child up for adoption. Stoner contended she had been off drugs since early in the pregnancy and points to the hospital drug test proving she was clean.

Still, "I'm happy for her, I wish her the best," says Incorvaia, who also was a board member of the center, which opposes abortion.

Stoner was the third woman to sue San Diego Pregnancy Services, claiming the agency pressured for adoption. Although the other two birth mothers won their babies back in court, Stoner's daughter stayed with the Tennessee couple -- who also served on the pregnancy center board.

So strong was the pressure to give up her first baby, Stoner testified during her trial, that when she went into labor she was taken to the pregnancy center office instead of the hospital and made to pick out an adoptive family.

San Diego Pregnancy Services closed last summer, though it remains incorporated with the state as a tax-exempt non-profit agency.

Center attorney Michael Adkins, who is also board chairman, maintains the closure has nothing to do with another civil suit against the center by Planned Parenthood of San Diego-Riverside counties. That suit against four pregnancy centers countywide -- San Diego Pregnancy, Center for Unplanned Pregnancy, Poway Pregnancy Counseling Centers and Escondido Pregnancy Services -- claiming they defraud and coerce women in the name of stopping abortion.

"We are no longer doing business, not because of this litigation (Planned Parenthood), but because of the Stoner case," Adkins said.

Attorneys for SDPS maintain that the pregnancy center's insurance carriers should pay the Stoner judgment, and the center's assets, including money from a spring fund-raiser, remain in limbo. Meanwhile, the Stoners say they will have to sell their new home to pay their bills.

Incorvaia maintains that the agency always ran on a shoestring and there isn't much money in the bank. Financial records show the unlicensed center had two offices and some years took in more than $250,000, while being staffed mostly by volunteers.

"Even $250,000 is not a whole lot for an organization like this," he said.

"SDPS has by and large done a wonderful job for what it was trying to do," Adkins says.

Adkins said he could only vouch for the center's work -- which includes counseling against abortion, giving free baby clothes and helping pregnant women get governmental assistance -- because he joined the board in early 1991, after Stoner and the other birth mothers sued. It was also after the center's director of adoptions, B.J. Williams, left to start her own adoption service.

It was Williams who Stoner and the other woman, as well as members empaneled for Stoner's civil trial, blamed mostly for the adoption pressure.

Williams has appealed the Stoner verdict. The jury fined her punitive damages of $375,000, which the judge cut to $25,000. Her attorneys say she has suffered health problems and cannot afford the judgment. The appeal could cost as much as $10,000, and one of her associates said supporters are helping pay her legal bills.

It was Williams who stood by Stoner all the way through her first labor and delivery -- and who gave Stoner the release forms to sign while under the powerful painkiller Demerol.

Those bad memories, Stoner said recently, haunted her during the birth of her son. Not only did she deliver in the same hospital, but she had the same delivery nurse, and even talked to the same doctor.

"I refused to sleep the whole time. I watched everyone who came in and asked to see all their IDs. I was taking no chances," Stoner said.

Once she gets some sleep, she says, she plans to work for her mother's accounting business, Stoner Co., and someday go to cosmetology school.

"My plans are just watching him grow up every day," she said.