Hagar & her sisters

...She rejoiced in and boasted of her motherhood, to the discomfiture and indignation of Sarai...

...Poor little Baby M. must at least raise the question: Does our own society's disposal of surrogate motherhood as one more commercial transaction, set adrift in the turbulent shallows of a free market economy, really represent a much higher order of social and moral wisdom than was attained so many centuries ago by those Amorites, Hurrians, and Hebrews...

...As is well known, a further development became important in the lore of Islam, which laid claim to Abrahamic ancestry through Ishmael...

...Modem perspectives on both womanhood and servility elicit our sympathies for Hagar, both in her initial pursuit of upward mobility and her subsequent rejection, degradation, and impediment...

...Recognition of surrogate motherhood as a normal social expedient is, in fact, explicit in ancient Near feastern law codes whose influence on the Bible has long been understood...

...The fact that each of the surrogate mothers who appear in the narratives just cited — Hagar, Bilhah, and Zilpah — is a slave of the woman for whom she bears offspring ttjn agreement with the custom of providing a" wife with a P«$onal female attendant who would not, in the ordinary course of things, serve as her husband's concubine, but who Wild, at her mistress's discretion, be used for her advantage in tfw way that those women were used by Sarai, Rachel, and ^cah...

...In some of the records of remotest history we arc informed that situations arose, and complications developed out of them, that arc strikingly suggestive of those under discussion today...

...Matters of Faith and Morals will appear shortly...

...Gad and Asher by Leah's with Zilpah), not to mention that wild and wandering desert stock of Ishmael...

...Her last son was born long afterwards (Gen...

...But it would seem also that Sarai's reprisal very likely had the backing of customary law, for the code of Hammurabi expressly states that, in analogous circumstances, a slave who used childbearing to claim social parity with her mistress was to be degraded, though not sold, and maintained in a servile status...

...But, without in the least denying the appropriateness of such reactions, it does seem fair and important to recall that, however mixed their motives may have been, Sarai and Abram appear to have been acting in accordance with the laws and customs of a society that had at least perceived surrogate motherhood, as they knew it, to be a practice needing the moderation of public standards and the guidance of approved procedures...

...Rachel's impatience over her childlessness was exacerbated by the impressive fertility of Leah, her elder sister, who had earlier become Jacob's wife (Gen...

...The Bible itself does not contain actual legislative provisions for surrogate motherhood, nor does it expressly identify that practice as a customary social institution...

...Hagar saw her pregnancy as an opportunity no longer to serve her mistress but to rival her...

...Had we only the Hagar story to illustrate surrogate motherhood in biblical narrative, we might be left to suppose that the practice was a bizarre aberration, disapproval of which was intimated by its outcome...

...JAMES GAFFNEY is professor of ethics at Loyola University in New Orleans...

...In that connection, the case of Hagar, the tone of its biblical narration, and the typical reaction to it of most modern readers, arc especially interesting...

...Bilhah, moreover, was no Hagar, and no thoughts arose of overstepping her surrogate restrictions...

...Most probably, then, in appealing to Abram against Hagar's opportunistic pretensions, Sarai was not simply appealing to an individual whom she could influence on personal grounds, but to the family's sovereign authority on grounds of socially approved conduct if not of explicit law...

...35:18...

...Nevertheless, in virtue of the use to which Sarai had put her, she could hope to achieve the status of a concubine, and of one especially favored by reason of her fecundity...

...Nevertheless, two could play at Rachel's game...

...30:3...

...The apparently earliest recorded case of surrogate motherhood took an unanticipated turn of which the Baby M. affair is strongly reminiscent...

...So once again a slave woman, Bilhah, was conscripted to serve as a surrogate mother...

...It was a society deeply convinced that public welfare depended critically on the orderliness of family life, and therefore on certain clear priorities and agreed-upon practical norms...

...Abram's wife Sarai, we are told in Genesis 16, wanted to be a mother but could not have a baby...

...It does, however, record the instances already cited as though they belonged to a recognized pattern of social behavior...

...For one who reads these patriarchal legends in the midst of 240: Commonweal current agitation over departures from ordinary conjugal reproductive procedures, it is hard to suppress the whimsical reflection that, taking these narratives simply as they stand, we should have to credit surrogate motherhood with the eponymous ancestry of fully one-third of the traditional tribes of Israel (Dan and Naphtali by Rachel's arrangement with Bilhah...

...Once again a wife wanted to be a mother and could not have a baby, and this time it was the beautiful bride for whose hand Jacob labored and endured so much...

...However, when Hagar experienced the pride and prestige of carrying her master's child, her surrogate role no longer sufficed...

...Such usages are envisaged by legal documents from "uzi, dating from the middle of the second millennium H.C.E., as well as by the famous code of Hammurabi, from toe first quarter of that millennium...

...In the case of y M., conventional views and legal assumptions about vernal rights have come into conflict with equally conven24 April 1987: 241 tional views and legal assumptions about contractual obligations...

...The fact that it was Sarai who authorized her impregnation by Jacob strongly suggests that she was a private serving woman of the sort previously referred to, not eligible for concubinage at the whim of her mistress's husband...

...So, even after the loss of her own fertility, Leah twice made use of a slave woman of her own, Zilpah, as a surrogate mother, producing two more sons for Jacob...

...Accordingly, when the child is born, it is Rachel, not Bilhah who names him...

...That point is worth noting in view of the feeling, spontaneous in most modern readers, that Hagar's unexpected behavior was a refreshing example of maternal self-assertion, that Sarai's reaction was spitefully vindictive, and that Abram's was a cowardly and callous decision merely to follow a path of least resistance in order to evade the cross-fire of two warring women...

...Surrogacy itself is remarkable for its antiquity...

...Precisely that kind of dilemma would not seem to have been possible in Mesopotamian societies of three and a half millennia ago, nor, probably, in later Palestinian societies that had drawn on a Mesopotamian heritage of legal wisdom and social custom...

...HAGAR & HER SISTERS: PRECEDENT FOR CONDUCT SURROGATE MOTHERHOOD IN THE BIBLE JAMES GAFFNEY However new, threatening, or wonderful surrogate motherhood may at first appear to the modern biologist, jurist, or moralist, readers of the Bible have reason to reflect that little more than the jargon is new...

...30:14-24...

...That such a development should disconcert Sarai is hardly surprising...

...Undoubtedly, in the story as it is told, neither Abram nor Sarai emerges for most of us as a noble or amiable character...

...There is, as already remarked, a curious similarity between trouble surrounding Ishmael's parentage and the current controversy about Baby M.'s...

...Soon afterwards, therefore, the successful arrangement was repeated and Rachel rejoiced, in frankly athletic terms, that Leah was losing her edge in the contest of maternity: "With mighty wrestlings I have wrestled with my sister, and have prevailed" (Gen, 30:8...

...And it tells the story of Hagar's conflict with Sarai in a way that, at least in the light of earlier extrabiblical texts, seems to take on a more general or typical significance attributable to legal provisions...

...But the practice appears again, two patriarchal generations later, and this time things go much more smoothly...

...The uaviorof a surrogate mother was controlled not by the terms 9 private contract, but by the public understanding of her • e«n a recognized order of domestic authority...

...The subsequent fate of Hagar and of her Ishmael is described five chapters later...

...Abram unheroically gave his embittered wife her way, and the pregnant Hagar became a refugee, rescued ultimately by angelic intervention...

...So she adopted a recognized expedient by having a slave woman, Hagar, serve as a surrogate mother — not, of course, for $10,000, and by natural rather than artificial insemination...

...In both cases, contrary to expectations, a surrogate mother ceased to regard her biological role as merely instrumental to another woman's maternal ambitions, but reinterpreted it in terms of her independent purposes and values...

...Different motives seem to have been operative, inasmuch as Hagar relished motherhood as raising her social dignity, whereas that was not a factor for Mary Beth Whitehead, who was simply unwilling to surrender for a set price a baby she had come to regard as her own...

...Soon thereafter, still another note of supposed modernity is struck when what we should describe as a fertility drug, mandrake root, is employed, apparently by both women, who are thus enabled to do without surrogate mothers, Leah producing two more sons and a daughter, and Rachel another son (Gen...

...Apparently, therefore, surrogate motherhood was not then "•t is now a matter of private contract, but a legally sustained PWogative attaching to definite domestic institutions...

...242: Commonweal...

...He is the author of Sin Reconsidered (Paulist, 19X3...

...Bilhah's narrowly restricted gestatory function is made quite unambiguous by Rachel's words to her husband: "Go in to her that she may bear upon my knees, and even I may have children through her" (Gen...

...Oddly enough, though, there is reason to believe that the basic complication common to both cases — a surrogate mother's maternal self-assertion — is proving to be a thornier issue for modern than for ancient law...