A BABY ARRIVES AMID JOY, DEPARTS AMID HEARTACHE

Washington Post

ROCKVILLE COUPLE FAULTS ADOPTION AGENCY

Author: Paul Duggan; Washington Post Staff Writer

This is how their story ends: It is dusk in Rockville, a few minutes before 5 o'clock, the dead of January, and Barbara Ship is upstairs in her town house, changing the baby's diaper for what she knows is the last time.

The boy, a month old, was born on a December afternoon, and Barbara Ship, intent on adopting him, was there in the birthing room for the delivery, joyous and awestruck. She wept, and so did her husband, who was pacing nearby. They named the child Aaron and felt blessed.

But what followed was uncertainty and heartache. And now, gazing at him on the changing table, this infant who will not be her son, Barbara Ship without speaking says goodbye, buttons his powder blue outfit and carries him from the nursery to the woman downstairs who has come to take him away.

The woman is Denise Zuvic. She helps run an adoption agency, an agency that accepted $27,750 from the Ships, promising them a newborn. Now the long-awaited adoption has come to disaster, and the Ships blame the agency. As for Aaron, what the Ships feel for him is not nearly so simple: They feel love, unquestionably, yet they are eager, too, for the boy to be gone so that their pain at losing him might begin to abate.

The Ships' story is hardly typical -- most of the tens of thousands of adoptions begun each year in the United States conclude successfully. Rather, it is a cautionary tale of what can happen even to the most educated of couples who, in their yearning for children, may overlook warning signs. For those who aren't careful, financial and emotional perils await.

Two months later, Barbara and Andrew Ship -- one a physician, the other a graduate student in social work -- are still trying to get back $22,750 of the money they paid to a New Jersey-based agency called Today's Adoption. Their attorney and the agency's attorney have been corresponding, but the issue is unresolved.

As for Denise Zuvic, neither she nor her mother, Patricia Zuvic, Today's founder and director, returned telephone messages left at the agency's Montague, N.J., office by The Washington Post last week, seeking a response to the Ships' assertion that the agency mishandled their planned adoption of Aaron by failing to obtain a signed "relinquishment of parental rights" from his biological father. Today's has been the subject of dozens of complaints about mishandled adoptions in several states, according to regulators. In cases in which the agency has responded, it has denied wrongdoing.

Adoption lawyer Samuel Totaro, whom the Ships consulted after losing Aaron, said he knows of no public or private organization that keeps statistics on failed adoptions. But, Totaro said, "these things occur more often than you would think. You have to be aware: It's a legal risk."

There are well over 1,000 licensed adoption agencies in the country, many of them not carefully monitored by the state regulators who issued the licenses, said William Pierce, president of the National Council for Adoption, a Washington-based professional association that offers advice to would-be adoptive parents. "Agencies pop up all the time -- kitchen-table operations, all kinds of operations," he said. "Licensure means very little. There are agencies and attorneys who have been in trouble in state after state after state."

One afternoon recently, Andrew and Barbara Ship sat in the dining room where two months earlier she had been forced to give up Aaron. On the floor nearby, asleep in a baby seat, was Hannah Ship, born in Mississippi on March 1 and given to the Ships three days later by a Florida-based agency that the couple had turned to after the earlier debacle.

Andrew Ship said he did research and was satisfied that the new agency, the Adoption Centre, had a clean business record before he and his wife paid $24,000 to adopt Hannah. "We're so much more knowledgeable about adoption now than we were before," Barbara Ship said. Her husband added, "Now we know specifically what questions to ask. . . . Before, when we got an answer that everything was okay, we accepted that. Now I want to know, Well, exactly how is it okay?' "

He is 37, a former special education teacher studying for a master's degree at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is 42, an internist on the faculty at George Washington University School of Medicine, where she goes by her maiden name, Barbara Basuk. They married in 1991 and longed to conceive children. But neither is able. Two years ago, after infertility treatments failed, they decided to adopt.

A public adoption, a relatively inexpensive process arranged by a government social services agency, was not a route they considered. "You're not going to find a healthy, Caucasian infant" through a government agency, Andrew Ship said. Instead, the Ships turned to a social worker, who gave them a list of 20 lawyers specializing in adoptions. Andrew Ship called them all.

One, in Virginia, recommended a lawyer who might be able to find them a child soon:

. The Ships had heard of Michelman; they knew, for example, that he had been suspended from practicing law for three years in New York after licensing authorities determined that he had improperly counseled both sides -- the biological mothers and would-be parents -- in two adoption cases. Yet the Virginia lawyer spoke highly of Michelman. So the Ships called him.

That was last June. Michelman was in Fort Lee, N.J., working for an agency about which the Ships knew little:

.

In a statement, Michelman's attorney, Ivan Fischer, said Michelman was "forthright, accurate and caring" in his dealings with the Ships and bears no responsibility for the failed adoption. "He very much regrets the difficulty these people experienced," said Fischer, adding that Michelman no longer is associated with Today's.

Michelman sounded optimistic when the Ships called, and within a few weeks, after the couple had paid the agency $2,500, Michelman faxed them 26 pages of biographical forms filled out by a woman who just recently had been in touch with the agency.

Her name was Lisa. She was 36, twice divorced, had lived mostly in Texas and Oklahoma and was raising two boys. She was four months pregnant.

Over time, the Ships talked with Lisa frequently on the telephone. "We really liked her," Barbara Ship said. "If we had to go out and find the mother of our child, she would be a good one. Her kids were good-looking, smart. She was smart. She has a brother who's a PhD. I mean, she's even Jewish!"

The couple knew much less about the father of the baby Lisa was carrying -- only that his name was Wayne, he was in his thirties, and he was a traveling oil-pipeline worker in Texas and Oklahoma. Lisa said she was no longer seeing him. The Ships said Michelman repeatedly assured them that the agency would arrange for Wayne to formally relinquish his right to the child.

In July, the couple signed a contract with Today's, agreeing to pay an additional $25,250 in installments during Lisa's pregnancy. The agency, agreeing to handle the adoption legalities and pay for Lisa's living and medical expenses, arranged for her to move into a house in Pennsylvania. The contract warned "that there is a financial risk in all adoption plans which must be realistically accepted and known." But if the adoption failed and the Ships were not to blame, according to the contract, "the risk of loss to the adoptive parents is maximized at $5,000" -- for which the Ships had an insurance policy.

"During the pregnancy, we stayed in touch with Mr. Michelman," Barbara Ship later told the Pennsylvania attorney general's office in a letter of complaint. "On many occasions we asked about the birth father, but were always reassured" that he would not interfere with the planned adoption. Also in the letter, Barbara Ship recounted many of Lisa's complaints during the summer about the agency neglecting her. "Each week she was supposed to get food/living money," but often no money would arrive,Barbara Ship wrote. And among other problems, "the plumbing in the house broke and she was without water in her bathroom for days."

In hindsight, the Ships said, the list of complaints should have alerted them to potential problems with the agency. But the problems all were resolved eventually, and the Ships convinced each other -- rationalized -- that all would turn out well. "And by then," Barbara Ship said, "we were into it for $10,000."

In late September came more disconcerting news, an article in New York magazine titled "One Year in Adoption Hell" -- writer Mark Frankel's first-person account of his and his wife's dealings with Today's Adoption. The article referred to scores of failed adoptions allegedly mishandled by Today's, including the Frankels', in which the couple lost $9,650. The story also noted that New York authorities were moving to bar Today's from doing business in their state, that Today's was operatingin Pennsylvania while fighting an effort by regulators there to take away its license, and that New Jersey officials had accused the agency of violating provisions of their state's adoption code.

Explaining why he became involved with Today's without researching its business record, Frankel, in an interview, echoed the Ships. He said the agency was optimistic about arranging an adoption relatively quickly. "They trade on one of the most basic and strongest human emotions, which is the desire to love and raise a child," he said. "And they're dealing with people who are extraordinarily vulnerable."

Even after reading Frankel's article, the Ships convinced each other -- with Michelman's help -- that there was no great cause for alarm.

Lisa gave birth at 1:13 p.m. on Dec. 23 in a hospital in Homesdale, Pa. The boy, 19 3/4 inches long and weighing 8 pounds 3 ounces, "was gorgeous," Barbara Ship recalled. "I mean, you see his little head pop out. All this hair all over his head. I mean, it was just . . . awesome."

Lisa let the Ships choose his name: Aaron. "And when he came out, Lisa almost immediately -- the nurses wanted to give her the baby, but she said, No, Barbara's the mother.' And the nurses gave the baby to me."

Barbara Ship paused at the memory of it. "He was my son," she said. "I was part of it. I mean, I wasn't pregnant. But I had been through the pregnancy. I knew everything that happened to that baby along the way -- every doctor's visit, everything."

Lisa waited the 72 hours required by Pennsylvania law, then signed papers giving the Ships temporary legal custody of Aaron while she petitioned a state court to authorize an adoption. A routine hearing on the adoption request was set for Jan. 24, at which Lisa's petition (if not objected to by the child's father) almost certainly would have been granted. After that, under Pennsylvania law, she would have had a four-month grace period in which to change her mind.

Not long before the birth, Lisa had contacted Wayne to let him know where she was, that she was planning to give up their child, and that his permission would be needed. The Ships don't know what his response was then. But just days after the birth, Wayne called Lisa from Oklahoma and told her he wanted the baby. He had contacted a lawyer in Pennsylvania and was prepared to fight.

Barbara Ship called Michelman, furious. Why hadn't Today's dealt with Wayne much earlier? If Wayne wanted the baby, why hadn't they been warned long ago, before they had poured so much emotion and money into the adoption effort? "And he said, Don't worry, don't worry,' " Barbara Ship said. But she worried.

On Jan. 9, with her husband already back in Maryland, Barbara Ship drove home to Rockville from Pennsylvania with Aaron. It was snowing. "I'd been up every three hours for days with the baby," she said. "I was distraught. I had no sense at all that we were going to keep him."

Aaron's circumcision ceremony was scheduled for Sunday, Jan. 12, in Rockville, at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington. More than 100 guests had been invited, including the couple's parents and other relatives from Massachusetts, New York, California, Arizona and elsewhere. The Ships decided to go through with the ceremony and celebration and keep their fears to themselves, at least until after the party. So it wasn't until Sunday night, back at the town house with their immediate families, that the couple broke the news about Lisa's ex-boyfriend.

"I saw my mom almost turn just pale white, she was so scared," Andrew Ship said.

The next day, Barbara Ship called lawyer Totaro in Pennsylvania. He could offer her little hope. The Ships could fight for Aaron in court, he said, but he could almost guarantee they would lose. Wayne had a clear right to his son. All Totaro could suggest was that the Ships contact Wayne -- call him personally -- and try to persuade him to change his mind.

All that week, Barbara Ship tried to work up the nerve to contact him. Finally, on Friday, she reached him at an Oklahoma motel. "He was very, very pleasant," she recalled. "The first thing he did was thank me for taking care of his son. And I told him about our relationship with the baby, how we were there when he was born, and all the things we could do for him. And he said, I want my son.' It was a very short conversation. I asked him if there was anything we could say or do to change his mind, and he said, No.' "

"I remember when she hung up the phone," Andrew Ship said. "There was dead silence. That was when I knew we had no chance. It just wasn't going to . . . "

"We loved him," Barbara Ship said suddenly. "We loved him. He was ours."

After that, "it became really hard to take care of Aaron," she went on. "It was really hard to get up every three hours in the middle of the night and feed him and take care of him. It was really painful."

"I could care for him," Andrew Ship said. "But I couldn't bond with him."

Four days later, Lisa, with the Ships' agreement, withdrew her adoption petition and asserted her right to the baby to prevent Wayne from taking custody of him. The next day, Jan. 22 -- the eve of Aaron's one-month birthday --

c drove to Rockville from New Jersey, arriving at 4:45 p.m. A few minutes later, Barbara Ship carried the baby downstairs from the nursery, his diaper changed.

She unfastened the diaper and showed Zuvic that Aaron's circumcision had healed -- and Zuvic, in the awkwardness of the moment, told her, "That's fine." Barbara Ship refastened the diaper, refusing to meet Zuvic's eyes.

Andrew Ship, afraid of what he might say or do, had gone out. Now his wife could not bring herself to hand Aaron to the woman who would take him away, and instead she gave the child to a friend, Karen Karlin, and Karlin handed the baby to Zuvic. Barbara Ship turned her back as Karlin escorted Zuvic and the baby outside. Only when the front door was shut and he was truly gone did Barbara Ship begin to cry.

The pain of his leaving, though it persists, has faded, much of it erased a month later by the arrival of baby Hannah -- 6 pounds; 19 inches. "The more time goes by, the less I think about them," Barbara Ship said, meaning Lisa and Aaron.

Someone told her they're in Texas now, or maybe Oklahoma, and sometimes she finds herself wondering about the boy -- who he might have become; who he'll become instead.

Caption:

After being forced to relinquish a boy they thought they could adopt, Andrew and Barbara Ship adopted Hannah, who was born March 1.

"He was my son," Barbara Ship says of Aaron, who was born Dec. 23