Eight years ago, Debbie Rowe, the mother of Michael Jackson’s two older children, told a Los Angeles court she wanted to give them up.

“These are his children,” she had testified in court. “I had the children for him... I did it for him to become a father, not for me to become a mother.”

Jackson seemed to consider Rowe little more than a baby machine. When their daughter was born, he snatched her and “just went home with her with the placenta all over her”, leaving Rowe behind in the hospital, Jackson told ABC News in 2003.

Now, however, the 50-year-old Rowe needs to decide if she feels the same way. Rowe is considering whether to challenge Katherine Jackson, MJ’s mother, for custody.

Legal experts say that Rowe has a strong claim to the children as their biological mother, and if she attempted to win custody now, Jackson’s family would have to convince a judge that it would not be in the children’s best interest. Eric George, her lawyer, said he will be at a custody hearing on Monday to represent her, but did not know whether she would ask for custody.

When reports surfaced several years ago that Jackson’s mother, Katherine Jackson, might adopt the children, Rowe declared she would “never consent to such a thing” as Jackson’s parents “would not properly care for the children”.