Allison Quets Abducts Her Twins After Giving Them Up for Adoption
When I wrote for Blogging Baby, I found that there was a whole cadre of folks who are virulently anti-adoption. They believe that the adoption industry is an inherently evil, immoral entity that tears families apart. I hadn’t encountered these folks again, though, until today, when MCA alerted me to the case of Allison Quets. According to anti-adoption organization Adoption: Legalized Lies, the 48-year-old woman was faced with “intense pressure” to surrender her twins immediately after she gave birth. After six weeks of caring for them, Quets signed the papers. The babies, Holly and Tyler, were subsequently adopted by Denise and Kevin Needham of Raleigh, North Carolina. Quets changed her mind the same day she signed papers, and fought the adoption. When a court upheld the adoption as valid and legal, Quets kidnapped the kids and ran off to Canada.
Quets has since been arrested, and the twins returned to the Needhams. For their part, the Needhams won’t discuss the details of the case; their only public statement has been to insist that they want to keep the babies. Both the Needhams and their lawyer are relying on the privacy granted adoption proceedings to remain mum about their side of the story. All that the Needham’s lawyer will say is that the facts “don’t support” the Quets family’s account of how the adoption went down.
My first instinct was to side with the Needhams – largely because the anti-adoption advocates like Tricia Vaughn Smith frighten the holy hell out of me. But after considering the case, I realized that too much shit just doesn’t add up.
First, Quets is not some 18-year-old broke-ass mom who got accidentally knocked up. She’s a single professional woman who became pregnant through in vitro fertilization. She reportedly started considering adoption during the pregnancy. According to the News Observer, Quets suffered from hyperemesis, which caused her to become violently ill and frail. Her birth was reportedly a traumatic experience; according to her sister Gail, Allison had to be hooked up to a PICC line and a feeding tube afterwards. A mere 12 hours after realizing that she had given up her babies, she changed her mind. So on first blush, this is not a mom who came back after three months and tries to take it all back; this is a mom who realized she had committed a fatal error that same day.
But then there’s the question of the waiting period. Ironically, as the Ottawa Sun points out, Canadian adoption law would have enforced a 7-day waiting period on the adoption as well as a 28-day revocation period, giving Quets plenty of time to recover from the trauma of her pregnancy and change her mind. But Florida (where Allison Quets gave birth) has a three-day waiting period. Which raises the question: if Quets objected to the adoption the same day she signed the papers, why was the adoption allowed to proceed? To even further confuse the subject, check out the discussion on MCA’s site, where at least one poster claims that Quets tried to get more than one adoption agency to foot the bill for the birth. (Given that Quets has since spent nearly half a million dollars trying to get her kids back, though, that piece of info sounds a tad far-fetched.)
My verdict on this currently leans toward the birth mom and against the Needhams, who seem intent on keeping their shiny new babies regardless of what their bio-mother wants. But a key fact or two could flip my decision. So let’s open this up for discussion: who’s the real villain here? Is there one?
Sadly, there’s little question as to who the victims are…
(Minor P.S. to the folks at abc7.com: it’s PICC line, not “pick line”. PICC is an acronym for “peripherally inserted central catheter”. Sorry, just had to be a know-it-all…)
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July 9th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
What I find odd in this whole post is the lack of compassion for a woman with Postpartum Depression and serious complications from Hyperemesis. I do not see how anyone can look at the time and circumstances of the case and believe Quets was NOT coerced and manipulated. I seriously cannot see how someone could miss the lies.
Opinions aside, what about the law? NC law was not followed as Quets signed then filed to stop any adoption with the NC time frame. Federal law states that the laws of both sending and receiving states must be followed. Why weren’t the laws followed? If someone cannot see the fraud, can they also not see the laws broken by the Needhams and the attorneys? That a judge said, “hey, no problem, feel free to do as you like despite federal law,” makes me afraid for the future, not just Tyler and Holly’s but all of our futures.
November 12th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
I would have been so quick to judge Allison Quets harshly until….until I suffered prenatal depression. I was so seriously ill that I planned ways to end my life and the baby inside me. I couldn’t even think straight. The depths of despair that kind of depression will sink you to are unimaginable, truly.
Only after WEEKS of anti-depressants and intensive therapy did I begin to see through some of the suffocating fog.
There is, sadly, no support for women who suffer this disease. Depression is crippling and depression surrounding a pregnancy can be lethal.
My heart hurts for Allison; today, I understand how you can reach that point and not even understand how to stop it.