Contracting anguish
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL MUDS John Garvey CONTRACTING ANGUISH SARA, MELISSA, OR BABY M.? Judge Harvey Sorkow's ruling in the Baby M. trial seemed a secular baptism, because now the public knows her...
...Others have done so, but their arguments bear repeating: here you have an affluent couple who can afford to do so, paying a woman who needs the money to bear a child the wealthier woman is afraid to bear...
...I have a strong libertarian streak and ordinarily would be willing to agree that whatever goes on between consenting adults should be tolerated...
...The generous choice to have and raise a child is not in question, in the case of the Sterns or the Whiteheads...
...This raises the obvious question of legal protection for the children of such arrangement but it can be argued that they would be 00 more at risk than children born into the normally messy, risky world of ordinary family life...
...The prohibition of slavery, even voluntary slavery, says something about what we think of humanity...
...Murray Kempton, in the April 9 issue of The New York Review of Books, quotes some of the language of this chilling document...
...In prohibiting slavery, our system is wise...
...If a surrogate mother decides that she can't bear to part with the child of her womb, too bad ft)f the father...
...We now forbid women in every State but Nevada to rent their bodies for sex« Free love is at least not usually as steelyhearted as bought love...
...In the event that Whitehead suffered a miscarriage or endured a mandated abortion after the fourth month of pregnancy, she would be paid $1,000...
...Only a lawyer could fail to see how sickening this is...
...The judge's decision that the contract between Mary Beth Whitehead and William Stern is valid raises profound and disturbing questions, and creates a dreadful precedent...
...The contract specified that the fetus would be tested and, if "'physiological abnormalities" were detected, would be aborted "upon demand of William Stern...
...Consider the implications of the contract...
...Because of the potential for heartbreak, because of what it says about our attitudes towards women, children, and humanity in geO* eral, surrogacy should be repudiated...
...Judge Harvey Sorkow's ruling in the Baby M. trial seemed a secular baptism, because now the public knows her as Melissa...
...Thgy argue that abortion has made adoption much less likely option for infertile couples, and they point out that technoi...
...The law's only presence should be negative: contracts ftff surrogacy would be forbidden, surrogacy for money outlawed...
...people are not, like cars or cattle, things to be bought and sold...
...In return for money, a woman allows her body to be rented, bears a child, and gives up a child for money...
...They are products of a stupid age...
...The concept of surrogate motherhood is a challenge to this assumption...
...But the response kj the emotions their choice engendeiM should be questioned seriously...
...Perhaps the judge should have ruled that their behavior revealed the Stertts and the Whiteheads unfit to be parents Melissa should have been put up fitt adoption by parents who do not see chil* dren as cherished products...
...Our system does not want to place human life at the level of a commodity...
...Baby M. does not seem more like a real child to me now that I know her name...
...The defenders of the concept of surragate motherhood point to the real, palpg blc anguish of infertile couples...
...The ruling hardly ends the controversy, however...
...I haven't touched yet on other obvious issues in the case — issues of class and sexual politics...
...Our legal system does not allow a man to sell himself into slavery, no matter how much he might want to do so or how much a potential slave-owner might be willing to pay...
...The child is reduced to the status of desirable item, someone who is, in the end, bought...
...The culture we have drifted into can imagine no claim higher than individual desire, and no freedom other than the choice between alternatives which are in themselves neutral, their value depending only on our wills, our affections...
...The anguish is real, and the technol« ogy makes a solution possible...
...If the child is defective, no one has the right to force abortion, and there would be no money to forfeit...
...For $10,000, placed in an escrow account, Mary Beth Whitehead was to "assume all risks, including the risk of death," involved in bringing William Stern's baby to birth...
...232: Commonweal...
...I am not saying that the Sterns and Mary Beth Whitehead are willfully evil people...
...K^ than their suffering is at stake here...
...Here a man is allowed to treat a woman, the natural mother of his child, with terrible callousness: didn't he pay her for her services, and isn't the child therefore his property...
...There are limits to this, however...
...But wli is the cost to society, when a pa baby can be aborted for being defe and a woman whose womb is rented can be obliged to abort, and i same time is forbidden to form a lovil attachment to the child she carries...
...Any surrogacy agreement would be entered into at the risk of all parties involved...
...I hope the final reaction to this is the introduction of laws banning surrogacy or at the very least banning it as a cow* mercial enterprise...
...in the light of the judge's ruling Melissa Stern is a beloved, cherished commodity...
...It could be argued that most of us rush into substitutes for honest, up-front slavery as a result of this prohibition, but that's another column...
...ogy now can make it possible to have a child who carries your genes, despite biological problems which would have made this impossible in past years...
Vol. 114 • April 1987 • No. 8
