Editorials

...Whitehead contracted to produce a baby for $10,000 plus at least an equal sum in expenses...

...In the year following came Christ and Apollo, which laid out the ground of the Christian literary imagination...

...There are deeper, more fundamental, reasons for the acceptance, even the defense, of debt, deficits, and imbalances, by bankers, businessmen, and their counselors and political representatives...

...When he entered the shrine of the Holy Sepulcher on January 1, the cardinal was accompanied by a crowd of reporters, photographers, drummers, Boy and Girl Scouts, clergy, and men with fezzes and sheathed swords...

...No doubt, responsibility for the most recent O'Connor flap — styled a "diplomatic mess" by one Vatican official and "an insult to the Jewish nation" by the New Republic (January 19) — rested first of all, with the cardinal...

...Yet the archbishop of New York has proven before not only a knack for self-inflicted controversy, but an ability to arise from it...

...But it is not only the heartrending or the bizarre aspects of this case that have put it on the covers of news magazines and the front pages of the daily papers...

...1 think it's great that a woman with a healthy body can help a woman who doesn't have one" (New York Times, May 27,1980...

...The genetic mother's — Mary Beth Whitehead, who carried and gave birth to "Baby M...

...Yet his trip to the Middle East proves there is still a great deal more need for turning: for growth, understanding, sensitivity, and forgiveness...

...On January 9, after a short illness, this great friend and critic of the human imagination, age seventy-eight, died at Lenox Hill Hospital in his beloved New York City...

...Second, they see that capital (of the classical land-labor-capital trinity) is gaining in its advantages, both relative and absolute, over the other factors of production...

...Surrogate motherhood plain and simple should'be opposed by moral pressure — 30 January 1987: 35 and probably not much else...

...Yet the Vatican might have eased tensions if it had allowed Cardinal O'Connor to meet where and with whomever he desired by simply officially distancing itself from his itinerary...

...One also welcomes the similar reflection occurring among the Jewish leaders whose sharp criticism of the cardinal gave the impression of an unwise determination to make Vatican recognition of Israel the pivotal issue of Catholic-Jewish relations...

...We couldn't agree less with the New York Times editorial which recommends such regulation on the grounds that, after all, "the business is probably here to stay...

...AN IMAGE OF HOPE Until he was fifty, Father William F. Lynch, S.J., had written little except for a few articles in Thought, the Fordham University quarterly he edited from 1950 to 1956...

...It has become a critical issue today not because of a breakthrough in technology but because of a breakdown in moral understanding —namely, the understanding that human reproduction should be firmly placed in the matrix of personal sexuality, marital love, and family bonds...

...THE CARDINAL & ISRAEL He was not a common pilgrim, and it proved a very uncommon pilgrimage: John Cardinal O'Connor's trip to Jordan, Israel, and Vatican City...

...The Catholic imagination," he once wrote, "does not force me to imagine that at the end I must free myself from all human society to unite with God.- Rather, it helps me to imagine that once 1 have embarked on a good thing with all its concreteness, I can and must carry it with me all the way into the unimaginable...

...Or the genetic father's and his wife's — William and Elizabeth Stern, with whom Mrs...

...Of course, one needn't take various surrogates' professions of altruism at face value...

...Since Vatican II, there has been a genuine teshuvah, a turning, on the part of many Christians in their understanding of Jews, Judaism, Israel, and Jerusalem...

...To the Jordanians, O'Connor spoke of the right of Israel to secure borders...

...Bill Lynch knew what it meant to rise from the dead...

...I never think of itasmine," shedeclared...

...The Vatican position on Jerusalem is neither void of flexibility nor without merit (cf...

...And when one considers how O'Connor ran amiss of the Vatican, the Jewish groups that had urged him to embark on the trip, and his Israeli hosts in so short a sequence of events, one might be tempted to title the affair "The Cardinal Orders His Tomb...

...We prefer the blunt assessment of William Pierce, president of the National Committee for Adoption: "If you regulate it, that is making a public statement that it's all right...

...There are obvious surface explanations...

...Then the dam burst...

...The weapons of art are terrible and not merely ornamental," he wrote...

...Cardinal O'Connor spoke forcefully, both in Jordan and Israel, on the plight of the Palestinian people...

...Today Miss Kane is said to have changed her mind: "All you're doing is transferring the pain from one woman to another, from a woman who is in pain from her infertility to a woman who has to give up her baby...

...Even those dealing with problems of infertility who say they "need more data'' before reaching a final opinion on surrogate motherhood should realize the futility of suspending judgment if aggressive entrepreneurs are going to create a fait accompli...

...For one, interest rates during the Reagan years have gone down from the inordinately high level they reached in the Carter administration...

...They are the cognitive allies of the Holy Ghost...

...Surrogate motherhood for profit is something else, however...

...When it came to his comments at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum, O'Connor should have stopped with his initial response: "Anything I would say here is banal...

...And in the not-too-distant future, the perfection of techniques to fertilize and implant embryos will mean that couples can supply all the genetic material and need no longer be constrained by the need to find a genetic "match" in a surrogate...

...very little written since has surpassed it...

...The same is true of publications such as the Wall Street...

...Commercial surrogacy should simply be outlawed under the same sort of laws that, in connection with adoption, now prohibit baby-selling in all fifty states...

...Behind this apology one can hope that the cardinal and his aides are engaged in serious reflection about what went wrong...

...If married couples, infertile or not, can contract with surrogates for babies, why not singles who want children...

...He has been forced to admit his mistakes, and in a straightforward and rather winning manner, did apologize to the people of Israel for his failures...

...In Jerusalem he met with Israel's president and foreign minister — in their residences — but met Jerusalem's Teddy Kollek in the mayor's office...

...As a consequence of his trip, the Vatican stated explicitly that "neither the state of Israel nor its sovereignty is in question...

...We decided a hundred years ago we didn't want people bought and sold in this country...

...In the Baby M case itself, surrogacy was sought not because of infertility but because Mrs...

...What are the reasons for these apparent changes of position and for the tolerance of conditions once held to be intolerable...

...If you care to know the ramifications of the classic creeds of Nicaea and Chalcedon for the arts, Christ and Apollo will still startle and enlighten...

...This is one infant industry that doesn't deserve protection...

...Surrogate motherhood is a simple idea...

...There are aspects of this case which are genuinely heartrending, as the accounts of each family's attachment to Baby M make clear...

...In 1980, papers and talk shows featured the enthusiastic and untroubled reports of a surrogate mother calling herself Elizabeth Kane...

...His characteristically sanguine hope to build peace in the region was not matched by awareness of the historical and political intricacies...

...One major reason as they see it, is that under pressure of budget deficits and mounting debt, liberals are in retreat, and domestic programs are being cut back...

...COMMONWEAL Surrogate-gate A nightmare is being played out in a New Jersey courtroom: Whose baby is it anyhow...

...One can fairly ask "Why...

...Over the next fifteen years, Lynch published six more books, the best known of which, Images of Hope, issued out of a harrowing personal experience of severe mental breakdown and still a classic in the field of psychological healing...

...Some even see virtue in current and prospective debts, deficits, and imbalances in trade...

...Only the pregnancy itself would be farmed out, creating a new demand for a pool of human incubators...

...The New Jersey bishops are quite right to insist that commercial surrogacy "exploits a child as a commodity and exploits a woman as a baby maker...

...A legal defender of surrogate motherhood has already protested that "convenience" may be an unfair term for important although nonmedical reasons some women might have for wanting someone else to carry out their pregnancies...

...Unemployment hovers at about 7 percent, a point at which labor analysts say management can effectively control wages and worker benefits...

...He reiterated the Vatican call for a Palestinian "homeland," eschewing violence "even when the goals are just...

...Average weekly wages of private non-agricultural workers in 1) 30 January 1987: 37...

...Nevertheless, to counter what are claimed to be purely disinterested decisions for surrogacy by anything but moral suasion seems impractical —and quite possibly unconstitutional...

...It is the sense that something very fundamental about our society is at stake, something that sets this case apart from millions of child-custody battles that are similarly tragic in their personal dimensions...

...Journal and Forbes magazine...

...In that time, Cardinal 36: Commonweal O'Connor has been a strong voice against anti-Semitism...

...the volume won the National Catholic Book Award...

...Stern believed pregnancy posed some medical risk...

...Notice of The Image Industries (1959) made the front page of Variety...

...As a member of the Vatican Council for Public Affairs (an arm of Cardinal Casaroli's secretariat of state), he should have taken more seriously Casaroli's written advice prior to the journey: "You are reminded to observe all the customary guidelines for the visit...

...There are aspects which are sickeningly bizarre, as a reading of the surrogate mother's contract reveals, with its provisions for amniocentesis and obligatory abortion if the results were not to Mr...

...1 am simply growing it for [the father...

...Those who control capital and profit from that control, note a growing advantage over labor...

...There remain merits to the trip that deserve to outlive the gaffes...

...Is "convenience" next as a reason for hiring a surrogate to bear one's child...

...Naturally, the new infertility-industrial complex as well as some lawyers with a vested ideological interest in an absolute "right of privacy" want to see commercial surrogacy moved from legal limbo into respectability, if necessary by submitting it to state regulation...

...The possibility that new human life will someday be "bred" or "manufactured" has been raised by ethicists and dystopian novelists for decades...

...Stern's liking, or its provisions for vastly reduced compensation "in the event the child is miscarried, dies, or is stillborn...

...Contrary to the New Republic's misinformed and snide equation of Vatican policy toward Israel with the Kremlin's, Fisher has pointed out that the present pope has specifically recognized the legitimacy and existence of Israel as a nation and a state, and that diplomatic relations do exist between the two...

...As a monsignor in the retinue recalled: "It was a scene out of a Fellini movie...

...What exactly this vague language of "homeland" does or does not necessarily imply would be a good point for further Vatican clarification...

...The trend of wages in recent years has been downward...

...Neither the leverage of a Cardinal O'Connor in Rome nor tragically needed progress in the uprooting of religiously based anti-Semitism will be strengthened by lobbying efforts more suitable to congressional battles over selling AWACS to Saudi Arabia than to interfaith relations...

...President Reagan who in his first inaugural address spoke of how "for decades we have piled deficit upon deficit mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present," seems less and less concerned about the national debt, or at least about the $900 billion increase that has occurred in the six years he has been in office...

...The rate of inflation which climbed to 13 percent in the last year of the Carter administration is now about 4 percent a year (a rate once considered unbearable...

...The problem has always been in admitting that this could come about not through the machinations of mad scientists or madder dictatorships, but through the best of intentions and most human of desires on the part of the folks next door...

...over conditions that used to keep them awake at night...

...Eugene J. Fisher, "The Pope & Israel," Commonweal, January 11, 1985...