Womb to let

National Review, April 24, 1987 by Maggie Gallagher

WOMB TO LET

IT'S THE KIND of story that makes Phil Donahue'smouth water. It's a tale of six and money, love and greed, eager hope and cruel betrayal. It's the stuff of soap operas, cheap tabloids, and pulp fiction: On March 27, Baby M turned one year old.

Everyone knows by now the outline of Baby M's story.For $10,000, Mary Beth Whitehead agreed to bear a child and give her to Bill Stern and his wife. After Baby M was born, Mary Beth changed her mind. She refused the ten grand and kept Baby M for four months, fleeing to Florida after a New Jersey court granted the Sterns temporary custody.

A snapshot from Baby M's family album: On a sunnyday in Holiday, Florida, four-month-old Baby M sleeps peacefully in a crib in her grandma's home. Her mother is out, but her ten-year-old half-sister, Tuesday, is in the bathroom, brushing her hair. Tuesday hears a strange man's voice, and runs out into the hall to see what's happening. Three men stand in front of her sister's room. They see the crib. One man snatches up the baby and runs toward the front door. Maybe it looks like a kidnapping, but it's all perfectly kosher: The men are officers of the law. Tuesday takes her hairbrush and starts beating on the nearest sheriff, screaming: "No! No! No!'

Bill Stern got his daughter back. Mary Beth Whiteheadwas reduced to visiting Baby M for two hours twice a week at a local home for troubled youths. At first, Baby M, smelling her mother's milk, nuzzled at Mary Beth's neck, but the court-appointed chaperon wouldn't let Baby M nurse. That might create a mother-child bond, and the state of New Jersey has not yet decided whether Mary Beth will be permitted to be Baby M's mother.

Though reams have been written about surrogate motherhood,the underlying issues are seldom named. A great soap opera is taking place right before the public's eyes, and most of the discussion sounds like a page ripped from a National Enquirer primer: See Mary Beth cry. See Bill Stern cry. See Bill Stern's childless wife cry. Who's sorriest now? By the time this magazine goes to press, the first leg of Baby M's long journey through the courts will be over, but her case and the fight over the larger issues will continue. What is at stake is our fundamental conception of the family and the most primal personal right --the right to one's own children.

Advocates of surrogate matings don't want us to thinkabout the issue in those terms. They have successfully sold the public on the idea that surrogate matings are the fruit of a revolutionary new technology. "There was not one state in fifty that was ready for this scientific revolution,' Gary Skoloff, the Sterns' attorney, proclaimed during a court recess. Those who oppose the practice end up looking like intellectual Neanderthals: anti-medicine, antiprogress, anti-science. Not only do Americans love technology, we are loyal to it. It is as difficult to persuade an American that he could successfully resist the advance of technology as it is to persuade a Marxist that he could resist the march of history. Even those who oppose surrogate motherhood describe it as a kind of Frankenstein's monster, a moral horror brought on by science out-of-control.

In actuality, the only thing new about surrogate motherhoodis our willingness to tolerate it. The term was originally coined to describe a complicated medical procedure in which a woman's egg is extracted, mingled with her husband's sperm, and implanted in a biologically unrelated "host' mother who carries the baby to term. But almost all those called surrogate mothers today are really surrogate wives--women who agree to conceive a child with a man through artificial insemination, and then hand it over to him.

THE FIRST recorded case of artificial insemination tookplace in 1790. The procedure is so simple, women have been known to do it themselves. All you need is a mechanical device to suck up and then expel liquid. One woman I spoke with used a syringe without the needle. A turkey baster will also do. Carol Pavek, a lay midwife in Amarillo, Texas, has been a surrogate mother three times. In each case, she performed her own insemination. "The couple came to stay in my house. The wife and her husband went into one room and did their thing, and then the wife gave me a little cup of semen; I placed it as close to my cervix as possible. For that, doctors charge as much as $500 per insemination!'

Mrs. Pavek's experience as a surrogate is especially interesting,for her career spans the recent history of the practice. Carol Pavek is a lively and articulate woman, difficult not to like. She has a husband, a son, a college diploma, and a delightful Texas accent. A Christian, Mrs. Pavek volunteers for a number of Amarillo charities, mostly working with sick or handicapped children. She was married, with a son of her own, when she had her first surrogate child, a "ten-pound baby boy with flaming red hair,' in 1980. She gave birth to a second surrogate son in 1982 and a third in 1984. Her last surrogate baby was a full brother to her second. That is not unusual. Parents who want more than one child usually like the idea of a matched set.