Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, August 20, 1993                   TAG: 9403090004
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WHOSE RIGHTS?

Yes, the decision was based on what is best for Kimberly, rather than for the adults involved, and that is encouraging. But the ruling in a low-level state court has limited impact. It will take an appeal of the decision by a Florida circuit court judge to set any legal precedent.

Florida's appellate court is likely to have the opportunity to break that new legal ground. Kimberly's biological parents, Ernest and Regina Twigg, say they will appeal - all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary - to win the right to have contact with the child they created.

This is such a bizarre case; it's difficult to imagine parallel situations arising in any numbers. The delivery room identification tags on the Mays and the Twigg babies were switched at the hospital where they were born. This wasn't discovered for nine years, until the daughter that the Twiggs took home and raised, Arlena, died of a heart defect. Genetic tests showed that Arlena wasn't their biological daughter, and the Twiggs set about finding the daughter who had been born to them.

The Twiggs certainly were innocent parties to this terrible mistake. But since finding Kimberly, their conduct, particularly that of Regina Twigg, has not been that of loving parents. Regina Twigg has used numerous public forums to air unproven allegations that Robert Mays somehow was involved in the baby switch, and that he is an abusive father.

Such accusations against the man Kimberly regards as her father - who, after 14 years of parental nurturing, f+iiso her father - prompted her to seek to sever her contacts with her biological family. The Twiggs bore no responsibility for losing her the first time, but they did this time.

Clearly, it is in Kimberly's best interest to remain with the father who has raised her, and whom she loves, and to end her troubling entanglement with the Twiggs. A circuit court made her strong preference the deciding issue, as it should be.

Is this uncertain legal ground? Yes. Social conservatives and others worried about the rights of biological parents fear that such a philosophy will further erode the strength of the family, and lawyers will be hanging out around schools trying to hire themselves out to youngsters who might want to trade in one set of parents for another. Their fears must be assuaged.

But the strange cases of Kimberly Mays and, earlier, Jessica De Boer, who was torn from a loving home to live with her biological parents, point to a need for a national standards that regard children as persons, not property, and that make the best interests of children paramount. Good parents, whether biological or not, would want nothing else.