Boy, can I ever relate to the Allison Lee Quets story...and not just because I’m a birthmom who would have revoked my surrender if I’d had a chance to. No, the thing that causes me to feel such a major sense of kinship with Quets is that I too suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum while pregnant.

In layman’s terms, hyperemesis is when you just can’t stop throwing up. It goes far beyond normal queasiness or morning sickness; it’s a chronic and miserable condition for which you have to be hospitalized, hydrated, medicated, and fed through a tube. Unlike most pregnant women, those of who suffer from hyperemesis tend to lose weight rather than gain it.

I was in the hospital eight times during my pregnancy. It cost of thousands of dollars, even with good insurance coverage. When I wasn’t in the hospital, a home health nurse visited me, and I had to wear a special contraption that administered anti-nausea meds all day long. The little machine didn’t really help, but I wanted to do whatever it took to feel better.

Like Quets, the onset of hyperemesis is precisely the time when I began considering adoption. I was so sick that my mental energy to fight for my parenthood was not there. All my defenses were weakened. If I couldn’t even keep food down, how would I manage my baby? When you’re that sick, you can’t see beyond the present, and it’s hard to believe you’ll soon be strong again. It seems like any parents would be better than you yourself are—and you begin to listen to the voices that are constantly telling you so.

Adoptive relationships are all over the Quets story: Quets conceived her children with donor egg and sperm, which makes her their birth, but not biological, mom. And Quets’s sister Gail is an adoptive mother herself...but instead of judging her sister, she's able to see exactly why this sad thing has happened:

During her pregnancy with the twins, Allison Quets was severely ill, often hospitalized, and had to have food and fluids administered intravenously, her sister said. It was during this time that the future mother began worrying about her ability to care for the twins and a friend, whose identity Gail Quets won't reveal, put Allison Quets in touch with the Needhams.

"They preyed on her, they basically took advantage of her," alleged Quets, "They kept calling her, telling her, 'You're too old; you can't take care of them on your own.' "

How does a smart woman fall for that type of line? I'm here to tell you that it happens easily. Like me, Allison Quets was an older mother with a solid career (systems engineer at Lockheed Martin). She wasn’t a scared pregnant teenager, and she wasn’t dumb, either, but she still got sucked into the adoption world against her true wishes due to an unfortunate combination of illness, lack of self-confidence, and opportunistic would-be adoptive parents. And now all the parents plus the children are in a big fat mess.

In the Quets story, many, many bad decisions built on each other to create a perfect storm of an adoption nightmare. Quets should not have been encouraged to place her children solely because she had a temporary medical condition. The adoptive parents should have acted responsibly and returned the children when they realized why she had surrendered. The courts should have realized that any woman who would spend her life savings to right the wrong probably had a legitimate case. And Quets should not have taken off with her children. In this story, everyone failed everyone else.

Adoption decisions should have a period of revocation for precisely these situations. People can and do choose adoption for the wrong reasons, and they need a brief window of freedom to reverse what they know is a huge mistake. No one should have to suffer their entire lives for signing a piece of paper during a weak moment.

I can think of no other type of contract that can’t be overturned. We need to get consistent about adoption revocation periods, and allow new parents at least a few weeks to change their minds, in every single state of the union.