My Question of the Day: Sabina’s 15-year-old daughter, Cassidy, gets pregnant, and Sabina refuses to allow her to have an abortion. Cassidy is adamant that she will not mother the child, and she won’t even tell Sabina who the father is.

Sabina would love to raise the baby herself, but she’s a widow with four small children of her own, limited in her mobility by the same car accident that claimed her husband’s life.

Sabina’s younger sister, Daphne, and her husband, Darryl, stop by very often to help Sabina with the household responsibilities and the children. Daphne and Darryl would love to have children of their own, but they’ve been trying unsuccessfully for years. When they find out about Cassidy’s pregnancy and Sabina’s and Cassidy’s  stalemate, they ask Sabina if they can take the baby when s/he is born and raise him/her as their own. Sabina immediately agrees to this solution.

For five years, Daphne and Darryl raise their niece, Asha, in a loving and comfortable home. They spend a lot of time with Sabina and her children, and Cassidy calls Asha her cousin.

Everything changes, however, when Cassidy turns 21 and moves out of her mother’s house. On the day she is to remove the last of her things to her new place, Cassidy comes over to find Daphne, Darryl and Asha visiting Sabina. Asha is playing with her aunts and uncles, and Cassidy steps into the living room, where the adults are watching television. She tells her mother, her aunt and her uncle that she wants her daughter back.

Daphne and Darryl are stunned, and Sabina is beside herself with anger. The idea of uprooting and traumatizing her granddaughter fills Sabina with fear and rage, especially when she thinks back to how totally unbending Cassidy was about raising Asha when she was pregnant with her. With her mother, aunt and uncle ranting and raving at her, calling her selfish and questioning her love for her daughter, Cassidy says nothing but allows them to tire themselves out and dissolve into tears.

Cassidy very calmly says that Asha is her child, that she never signed away her parental rights, that Sabina, not she, made the arrangements with Daphne and Darryl, and that they can hand Asha over peacefully or she will get a lawyer and fight them for as long as it takes to get her daughter back. When she’s done speaking, Cassidy picks up her purse, goes out the front door, walks to her friend’s car and they drive away. Daphne, Darryl and Sabina stare blankly at one another.

What do you think Daphne and Darryl should do?

My 2 Cents: Something similar to this happened in my family, and the family member who’d cared for the child allowed the child to go back to the birth mother without a fight, but there were many, many tears and hard feelings, for sure.

It’s hard for me to say I’d battle with family in a situation like this, but it’s hard to say I’d allow a child I’ve bonded with for five years to go without at least attempting to fight for him/her.

I’d first try to reason with my niece; try to come to some sort of compromise to make sure we stayed in Asha’s life. If that failed, I’d like to believe I’d get legal counsel and attempt to keep Asha right where she’s been since her birth; in our loving and comfortable home.

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