Remember the story of Robert Temple and his wife Dr. Alette Coble- Temple? The Walnut Creek couple paid some $9,000 to Maya-Anne Mays, who said they could adopt her unborn daughter. But Mays was not pregnant. The facilitator who arranged the adoption, Nancy Hurwitz Kors, said the news was a "shock."

It shouldn't have been. It wasn't the first time such a thing had happened to a client of hers.

In 2001, Kathy and John Bowen, who were then living in Rancho Murieta, near Sacramento, had the same experience with Hurwitz Kors. The potential birth mother not only claimed she was pregnant, she also hired a friend to pose as the imaginary baby's father.

"A lawyer told us about (Hurwitz Kors)," Kathy Bowen says. "He said she gets babies, but you've got to be careful. She'll send you on some wild goose chases."

In all, Hurwitz Kors sent the Bowens to six prospective birth mothers, including a Las Vegas woman who would call in the middle of the night "screaming for more money."

"Oh, they're all like that," Hurwitz Kors told The Chronicle. "The fact is it's not the high school cheerleader who is the birth mother any more."

The Bowens eventually adopted a child with help from Hurwitz Kors but found the experience expensive, difficult and emotionally draining.

"It was like a bad soap opera," says Kathy Bowen, who now lives near Pontiac, Mich.

Hurwitz Kors twice declined an interview before changing her mind and having satisfied clients offer testimonials praising the speed with which she found them a birth mother. When John Mingham and his wife did not find a candidate with their previous adoption service, they signed up with Hurwitz Kors and "within 2 1/2 months we had a match." Stephanie Harriman, who has adopted six children, says the adoption process "is high drama, but it's a labor of love."

The message? Hurwitz Kors is doing a wonderful job. The problem, she said, is that others sometimes give her bad information. "Do I know anything 100 percent?" she asked. "Of course not. We verified (Mays') pregnancy with a pregnancy clinic."

But the verification turned out to be false. Tammy Leake, director of the Pregnancy Care Center of Ogden, Utah, says Mays' pregnancy test was self- administered and unsupervised.

"We are not a medical facility," says Leake. "We always urge the women to go to a doctor."

There was no ultrasound -- "She kept skirting it," Hurwitz Kors says, adding that Mays visited a doctor who never told Hurwitz Kors whether Mays was pregnant.

"In our case, I think Nancy really did fall down," says Bob Temple. The Temples remain clients of Hurwitz Kors, who has found them another birth mother.

Contra Costa County prosecutors have charged Mays with three counts of felony grand theft, and the Temples are out some $9,000. It was a lot of heartache that might have been prevented had Hurwitz Kors simply confirmed that Mays was pregnant to begin with.

Other former clients of Hurwitz Kors said they had virtually the same experience.

"Nancy called us and said there's a woman in Marysville who is pregnant, " Kathy Bowen says. "She said, 'Get out there (to Marysville); we'll deal with the pregnancy test later.' "

That woman turned out not to be pregnant. After sending the Bowens home with another prospective mother who needed a place to stay, Kathy Bowen said, Hurwitz Kors called to ask if the woman "looked" pregnant.

"An even more important question should have been, why were we being sent to meet a birth mom without a confirmed pregnancy?" Kathy Bowen says.

Hurwitz Kors says she doesn't remember the particulars of the Bowens' case, noting that "we get everything here -- 60 adoptions a year, 200 birth moms. To remember everything is impossible."

Some have said they refuse to work with Hurwitz Kors.

"I will not work with her," says Debra Vinson, executive director of Adoption Alliance, a nonprofit adoption agency in San Antonio, Texas. "Look, pregnancy verifications are not that difficult. She drove me crazy. She will not listen to anything anybody tells her."

Part of the problem is that adoption facilitator is a vaguely defined job with no guidelines, licenses or regulatory oversight.

"I have a license to practice law. A social worker has a license," says adoption attorney Susan Romer, a past president of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys. "All you have to do to be a facilitator is to print a card, have a phone and advertise. I think you have people who are paying tremendous sums for phone numbers (of pregnant women)."

Romer isn't kidding. Providing a phone number may be the extent of the facilitator's service. Typically a facilitator's advertising budget -- Hurwitz Kors says half of her $13,000 fee goes to ads -- is used to attract pregnant women.

Ellen Roseman, a facilitator from Marin County who has been in the business for over 20 years, says she "figured out years ago that my job was to educate." She focuses on teaching adoptive parents how the adoption process works and explaining the costs and fees involved. Roseman says the most she would recommend parents pay for a birth mother's expenses is $2,000 -- which is far less than what the Bowens or Temples paid.

Hurwitz Kors said there is a "get-acquainted" meeting with the adoptive parents, the birth mother and someone from her office in "95 percent of the cases." She later amended that, saying there isn't time in "10 to 15 percent" of cases for a meeting.

But even someone like Laura Yoklavich, who offered an effusive account of her experience with Hurwitz Kors, says that, of the four birth mothers with whom she was connected, there was a formal meeting in just one.

Kathy Bowen says it was one of six in her case, and even that experience was a problem. She and her husband met a birth mother at Hurwitz Kors' office on a Friday afternoon and were told that the woman and her boyfriend needed a place to live. " 'Good luck. You guys can work out the particulars,' " she recalls Hurwitz Kors saying. "And we were basically booted out of her office with her."

The Bowens estimate they spent "over $1,000 dollars" on that prospect, whom Kathy Bowen said was a heroin addict. She says they have receipts showing that they spent $20,000 before being matched with a baby and another $15,000 on birth mothers who didn't pan out.

"I find that hard to believe," Hurwitz Kors said of the expenses the Bowens claimed to have incurred.

The Bowens eventually adopted a boy, Samuel, from Hurwitz Kors' office, but credit an office assistant for doing all the work.

Why do parents continue to use someone like Hurwitz Kors? First, she presents herself as an experienced professional. Her Web site and Yellow Pages ad note she is "President of the Academy of California Adoption Professionals. " But, as Los Gatos facilitator Lil Snee acknowledges, the "Academy" consists of just three people: Hurwitz Kors, Snee and Loretta Cooper in Rancho Cordova (Sacramento County).

"Three active people," Hurwitz Kors says. "There's been more."

But the real appeal is that, although her methods may sometimes appear questionable, she consistently finds a baby.

"That's true," says Vinson, the San Antonio adoption advocate who is critical of Hurwitz Kors. "There's a lot of adoptive parents who had a horrible experience but go back to her for the second baby because of the end result. I'm sure because she's been able to place, she feels justified."

The bottom line seems to be, as one client said she was told when she signed up with Hurwitz Kors, "It's an ugly process, but she'll get you a baby. "

There's got to be a better way.