Uncle John’s Presents Mom’s Bathtub Reader (39 page)

Who am I?

__A. Grace Slick

__B. Michelle Phillips

__C. Marianne Faithfull

__D. Carly Simon

A
NSWERS
:
1. C; 2. D; 3. B; 4. A

It was a trial that mesmerized the nation. Who would keep Baby M?

I
n 1985, a New Jersey homemaker and mother of two, Mary Beth Whitehead, and her husband, Richard, entered into a contractual agreement with biochemist William Stern to conceive a baby. Stern agreed to pay $10,000 to the Whiteheads for Mary Beth to be artificially inseminated with William’s sperm. The contract stipulated that Mary Beth would not form a “parent-child relationship” with the baby and would surrender both the baby and her parental rights to William Stern. By signing the contract, Mary Beth agreed to become a surrogate mother for William and his wife, Dr. Elizabeth Stern.

There are two types of surrogacy. Gestational surrogacy involves a surrogate mother being implanted with another woman’s fertilized egg; in this instance, the surrogate isn’t genetically related to the baby she gives birth to. Advanced infertility treatments developed in the 1980s allowed doctors to fertilize an egg in a petri dish, then implant the zygote in a woman’s uterus. This meant that many infertile couples would now be able to bear children. It also meant that if a woman could not carry to term, she could hire another woman to carry the baby for her. Mary Beth was different in that her egg was fertilized via artificial
insemination. She was the baby’s biological mother and Stern was the biological father.

Surrogate mothers help couples that can’t have children by bearing a baby for them. According to the Old Testament, Sarah and Abraham had a surrogate mother, Sarah’s maid Hagar, for their son Ishmael (Genesis 16). But if surrogacy is as old as the Bible, formal contracts like the one between Mary Beth and William were very new in 1985.

Though the contract was set down neatly in black and white, when the baby arrived things became very complicated. On March 27, 1986, 28-year-old Mary Beth gave birth to a baby daughter, with whom she immediately bonded. She decided that she had made a mistake in signing the contract and wanted to keep her daughter. Naming the baby Sara Elizabeth Whitehead, Mary Beth took the baby home and turned down the $10,000. The Sterns demanded custody of the infant they named Melissa Stern, and when Mary Beth refused to give her daughter up, the Sterns got a court order from Judge Harvey Sorkow ordering Whitehead to hand over her five-week-old daughter.

Whitehead escaped with her baby to Florida and threatened to kill herself and the baby if authorities tried to take her away. Private detectives hired by the Sterns tracked the pair down and took the baby away from the mother. They turned Sara over to the Sterns, who renamed her Melissa. On January 5, 1987, a custody trial began with both sides suing for custody. To protect the baby’s privacy, the court referred to her as Baby M.

The highly publicized case was called the “trial of the century” at the time. The new use of surrogate contracts
stirred curiosity. Could you really hire a woman to “rent out her uterus,” as some newspapers described it? Mary Beth’s dramatic flight to Florida gave the case an uncertain edge. What might this desperate woman do next? Finally, there was the prize of custody—everyone had an opinion about who should care for Baby M.

As the trial progressed, two issues were debated by the lawyers, pundits, and the public. The first was the contract between Mary Beth and William. The Sterns argued that Ms. Whitehead knew what she was getting into when she agreed to give the baby away. A famous child psychologist of the day, Dr. Lee Salk, testified that by signing the contract Mary Beth became a surrogate uterus—not a mother at all. Mary Beth supporters argued that she returned the money and that she loved her daughter. The two had formed a bond through pregnancy and delivery.

Next came the question of the most fit parent for Baby M. Mary Beth’s attorneys attempted to show that the forty-something Elizabeth Stern had not had a baby because of possible interference with her medical career. The prosecution claimed that Dr. Stern hadn’t become pregnant because she had self-diagnosed multiple sclerosis. Aiding the Stern’s case were influential experts like psychiatrist Dr. Marshall Schechter. He called Ms. Whitehead an unfit mother, giving as examples her playing of patty-cake inappropriately—shouting “hooray” when the baby clapped her hands instead of reinforcing the behavior by clapping her own hands—and her giving the baby stuffed pandas for toys instead of simple pots and spoons.

Outside the court, much public sympathy went to William Stern. “A deal is a deal,” ran the popular verdict. Against
the evidence of the contract she had signed, Mary Beth’s love of her daughter was dismissed by many observers as overemotional and even a tad unbalanced. Though she was raising two healthy children, her former desperate outbursts and the verdicts of psychological experts convinced many that this mother shouldn’t be trusted to even visit her daughter.

Still, there was growing public support for Mary Beth. Over 100 famous females—including Nora Ephron, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Meryl Streep—signed a statement debunking Schechter’s patty-cake test for judging motherhood. Other court watchers pointed out that the contract itself was unreasonable. It forced the Whiteheads “to assume all risks, including the risk of death” and insisted that Mary Beth not fall in love with her baby. Could a contract force a person to risk death and not feel love?

After listening to the evidence, Judge Sorkow granted William Stern full custody and denied visitation to the surrogate mother. Immediately following the decision, Elizabeth Stern adopted Baby M in Judge Sorkow’s chambers. Mary Beth immediately appealed his decision, saying that the judge who had signed the original order taking the baby from her considered her “just a uterus with legs.”

On February 3, 1988, the New Jersey Supreme Court heard Whitehead’s appeal and reversed Sorkow’s ruling. The original surrogacy contract was nullified, Elizabeth’s subsequent adoption annulled, and Mary Beth’s parental rights reestablished. The court recognized her as the baby’s biological mother, giving her “generous” and unsupervised visitation rights. It also declared surrogate mother contracts invalid and illegal in the state of New Jersey. The
Baby M case led to strict legislation of surrogacy and bans on fee-based surrogacy arrangements in ten states. Mary Beth and the baby were now reunited. Some were glad. Some were horrified. And some called it “mothering by committee.”

The little girl who’d been named both Melissa and Sara has since nicknamed herself “Sassy.” According to Mary Beth, Sassy calls her “Mom,” William Stern “Dad,” and Elizabeth Stern “Betsy.” Living mainly at the Sterns as an only child, Sassy also fits in comfortably with her half siblings when she visits her mother in Long Island, New York. Mary Beth feels she and her daughter still share a deep bond.

Though Mary Beth would never regret having Sassy and has described her relations with the Sterns as “civil,” she speaks out against surrogacy and would like to prevent it from happening to anyone else. It’s not known what the Sterns, who have fought hard for Sassy’s privacy, think of the arrangement. On this and on the subject of surrogacy—they’ve kept mum.

Record Breaker, Olympic Gold Winner, Basketball Maven, and Mom

S
heryl Denise Swoopes has been called the female Michael Jordan. The six-foot-tall forward for the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) Houston Comets certainly racks up points and awards like her male counterpart. But Swoopes has achieved something that Jordan will never accomplish—she’s given birth.

Swoopes was born March 25, 1971, in Brownfield, Texas. When she was seven, she started playing basketball with her two older brothers with a homemade basket built from an old bike tire rim with the spokes popped out. Luckily, all the home practice paid off. A year later she went to the national championships with her Little Dribblers team.

As Sheryl got older, she became an even brighter star. As a high-school athlete, she led her team in scoring and earned the Texas female high-school player of the year award in 1989. Attending Texas Tech University, Swoopes and the Red Raiders won the national championship in the NCAA tournament in 1993. During the championship game, she even shattered the record for the most points ever scored in a Division I NCAA basketball championship game—a record formerly held by Bill Walton! Swoopes’s 47 points are the most ever scored in the Final Four by any player—male or female.

In spring 1995, Nike announced the launch of a new basketball shoe—the Air Swoopes. Sheryl signed a multiyear deal with Nike to put her name on the first signature shoe named after a women. The black-and-white Air Swoopes is a high-top shoe, the first one named after any athlete since 1985, when the Air Jordan was introduced.

After college, Sheryl’s star continued to rise when, in 1996, Swoopes, as part of the U.S. women’s team won Olympic gold. Then in 1997, she was the first woman signed to play basketball for the fledgling WNBA, a professional sports league for women. Since then, she has helped lead the Houston Comets to four consecutive championships.

On June 25, 1997, Sheryl Swoopes gave birth to her son, Jordan Eric Jackson. Swoopes claims that the first question she asked her doctor after giving birth was, “When can I start working out?” Two weeks later she was back in the gym working hard to lose the baby weight and get herself back on the court. In just six weeks, she returned to the hardwood floors having lost all but 5 of the 47 pounds she had gained during pregnancy. On August 7, she made her WNBA debut as a glowing new mom.