Editorials

...As it now stands, the sad struggle over Baby M will continue...

...there have been five televised debates, with thirteen more scheduled...

...The alternate plan promised by House Speaker Jim Wright is coming up...

...Eight years of aid, covert and overt, have not succeeded and there is no evidence that it can...

...Their major campaign interests focused on the candidates themselves...

...In the waning months of the Reagan administration, it is crucial for Congress to show its support of the peace plan by maintaining control of the purse strings and of the president and his Assistant Secretary for Latin Affairs, Elliott Abrams...

...Why, then, did the court not follow its own logic and reverse the custody decision of the lower court which awarded the child to the father...

...Faced with two women both claiming to be the mother of one child, Solomon bluffed, gambling that the real mother would cry out to spare the infant...

...Its delivery, in kind not cash, should be arranged through a neutral group, the Red Cross or the United Nations, or through a third country, possibly Canada or Spain...

...Rather than the occasion for political stock-taking, our campaign and election process has become a mechanism for obscuring and diffusing the issues...

...But even if the political means are at hand, they may readily be turned to instruments of a new form of struggle...

...again...

...Nonetheless, a cease-fire and the political evolution of the country should be supported by the United States bowing out of the action, at least militarily, and allowing the Sandinistas, the contras, and the democratic opposition to begin working within the framework of the Arias peace plan...

...Having never had a democratic society, Nicaragua's chances of establishing one under these conditions seem tenuous indeed...

...back into the fighting-provocations that could as easily be staged by the Sandinistas and contras, as by our own CIA...

...Now is the time, as the primary elections get under way, to begin taking notes for overhauling the whole system.es for overhauling the whole system...

...In both countries civilian governments remain unable to control the U.S.-supported-and-supplied military who tolerate the veneer of democracy to ensure continued aid...

...We do not know of, and cannot conceive of, any other case where a perfectly fit mother was expected to surrender her newly born infant, perhaps forever, and was then told she was a bad mother because she did not...

...The House plan should move the peace process along by building-in incentives, for example, by providing funds for the repatriation of contra soldiers and the resettlement of refugees now displaced in Nicaragua and elsewhere in the region...

...Disincentives to renewed fighting and a long, low-level guerrilla war are equally important, for example, by setting a cut-off date for the delivery of supplies to men under arms...

...about parental custody...

...When the court restored parental rights to Mary Beth Whitehead-Gould and revoked the adoption of the child by Elizabeth Stern, it reversed the ruling of the lower court...

...Nor was the Gapolinskys' sketchy knowledge about any of these issues much strengthened between September and the election in November...

...The Nicaraguan people are going to see more violence before they see peace...

...than any subversion the Sandinistas were ever likely to export to El Salvador, Honduras, or any other Central or Latin American nation...

...These goals can reasonably be negotiated with the Soviet Union and individual Central American nations...

...That policy has been defended on the grounds of national security...

...each will try to discredit and do away with its opponents...

...Still, several components of the court's decision in this case deserve to be followed by other courts-or better, written into the body of developing state laws about surrogacy...

...Finally, the length and exhausting pace of the campaign is coming to look more and more like a hazing than a honing process for the candidates themselves...

...Given the politics of defeating the earlier contra aid bill, passing some such plan is a foregone conclusion...

...Though they read the daily newspaper, the Gapolinskys' chief sources of information about the presidential campaigns were the televised debates and TV news...

...each will claim to speak for the people and the Nicaraguan national interest...

...Gina and Bill Gapolinsky were concerned about a variety of issues...

...When the campaign ends next November there will be the usual lamentations about low voter turn-out and the indifference of the American electorate...

...While surrogacy is still permitted in New Jersey, it is legal only if voluntary, i.e., if no money is exchanged and the mother is able to change her mind after the child's birth and to assert her parental rights...

...A few states have assumed a disproportionate influence in shaping the country's political agenda...

...As another presidential election year opens, Schell's report raises important questions about this country's political needs, the ways in which the candidates do and do not address them, and the electorate's ability to sort out and see through the candidates to the issues themselves...

...there are seven Democratic and five Republican candidates in the primaries...

...And there will be all of the political issues-the deficit, Central America, trade imbalances, unemployment, housing, world debt, the Middle East, arms control-still to be addressed...

...Where is the self-sacrificing parent in Solomon's story...

...They talked little with anyone about the election...

...The net result of the contra military actions has been to kill and maim civilians and, in tandem with Sandinista mismanagement, to ruin the economy...

...Both the Sandinistas and the contras will provoke and parry...

...major alternatives in conducting the country's business were at stake-or so the candidates claimed...

...Supplying the addiction of young people and the populations of our inner cities seems not to have been too high a price to pay to keep the Panamanian and Honduran military on our side...

...The Sandinistas have long claimed that the war necessitated many of the steps, such as closing La Prensa and conscripting young men into military service, which the contras and the Reagan administration have taken to be signs of antidemocratic convictions...

...Against the claims of the Sterns' lawyer, who argued that $10,000 was payment not for a child but for the surrogate's "services," Chief Justice Robert N. Wilentz noted contract stipulations that would withhold the full payment, or pay only a portion, if the child died before or at birth, even though services would have been fully rendered...

...The 1988 election is at hand...

...Now a cease-fire can create space and time for a more routine political life...

...Humanitarian'' aid should be just that-food, clothing, medical supplies, and shelter...

...Even with a cease-fire, there is likely to be a long and possibly heated struggle between the Sandinistas and the contras, and within each of their ruling elites...

...The decline of political coherence is further encouraged by the length and complexity of what has become a two-year presidential campaign, and the distorting effect of the media's efforts to demonstrate the newsworthiness of the whole shebang...

...We need to snap out of our self-induced confusion and begin connecting our pressing political and economic needs to the candidates' views, to a legislative agenda, and to a party platform...

...Getting all of that in place still does not mean there will be peace...

...If we abandon the contras now, who will ever trust the U.S...

...In Schell's portrait they were intelligent, hard-working people willing to articulate their self-interest and, in Gina's case, even to see that their self-interest was linked in important ways to the well-being of the poor and the blacks who shared Sherman Park's schools and neighborhood...

...The House vote cutting off aid to the contras at the end of February was one such decision...

...A presidential campaign was going on...

...But the decline of the political party and a cohesive political outlook is not the only problem (and if the Gapolinskys and their circle are any example, fragmentation and weak party affiliations are problems for Republicans and Democrats alike...

...The drug trafficking, the corruption, and the military domination that have become part of this alliance, may prove a bigger threat to the U.S...

...The Reagan administration has always hoped for the overthrow of the Sandinistas and fed, literally and figuratively, the contras' belief that they could achieve that through military action...

...about the validity of a surrogacy contract-knowing that none of its rulings could spare the child completely...

...First and most importantly, the New Jersey court declared surrogacy-for-pay to be a form of baby-selling, and invalidated the surrogacy contract prepared by the Infertility Center of New York...

...Testimony continues in Washington about drug trafficking and corruption among the military in both Panama and Honduras...

...The court said explicitly that Mary Beth Whitehead-Gould had never been found unfit...

...The court found the desire of the natural mother to bond with her infant and take on parental responsibility, despite having signed a contract, to be a value worth upholding in law: "We think it is expecting something well beyond normal human capabilities to suggest that this mother should have parted with her newly born infant without a struggle...

...There are too many primary campaigns, with their multiplicitous means of selecting delegates...

...Editorials A never-ending process In accepting the Nobel Prize for his Central American peace plan, Costa Rica's President Oscar Arias said: Peace "is not the product of a victory or command...

...Peace is a never-ending process, the work of many decisions...

...These recent revelations and the ones that, no doubt, are yet to come will point-as this journal often has-to the need to define precisely and narrowly our essential security goals (see, Commonweal, May 4 and June 15,1984 and June 21, 1985...

...THE GAPOLINSKY FACTOR Four years ago, curious to know what the American electorate was thinking about the nuclear question during the Mondale-Reagan election, Jonathan Schell began to interview a Milwaukee family he called the "Gapolinskys.'' The February 12 issue of Commonweal carried a review of History in Sherman Park, the book Schell eventually wrote about the political views of the Gapolinskys, their friends, relatives, former teachers, and local political leaders...

...In once-democratic Panama, General Noriega refuses to budge despite demonstrations and internal pressures from the Panamanian people and despite two indictments in Florida...

...There will be a president whose physical stamina, if not political astuteness, has been tested...

...We need not bankroll every army in the region and attempt to overthrow every government that does not abide by our preferences...

...Congress and the Democrats should resist this form of political blackmail by examining the premises and outcomes of Reagan's policy...

...nor were they canvassed by local Democrats or Republicans...

...THERE OUGHT TO BE A LAW Solomon had it easy...

...In fact, the Reagan administration has been conducting something else, an anti-Communist crusade with the assistance of highly dubious allies...

...Millions of dollars have flowed into the coffers of General Noriega in Panama and military leaders in Honduras, some of it apparently with the knowledge of the Drug Enforcement Agency, the CIA, and the Southern Command of the U.S...

...But as Schell quickly learned, their concerns had little political direction and they were not tied to any particular political agenda or political party...

...It also clarified the situation of the natural mother, which had been obscured both by the term "surrogate" and by the mother's agreeing in writing to relinquish her child...

...The Democratic House-and presidential aspirants-will be threatened with the specter of losing the Red Hordes on the banks of the Rio Grande...

...But except for Schell's conversations with them, would the Gapolinsksys have taken as much interest as they did...

...There will be provocations that will attempt to draw the U.S...

...Obviously, efforts must be made to take the Soviets up on their offers to reduce military aid to the Sandinistas-a process that may have begun with Daniel Ortega's October visit to Moscow...

...and there will be thirty-six state primaries or caucuses between February 8 and June 7. We have abandoned the smoke-filled rooms and choices by party bosses, but it is hard to see that voters like the Gapolinskys are much better off...

...Whether the Wright alternative becomes part of the peace process may depend on whether it pushes for a cease-fire and appropriates only the absolute minimum needed to forestall another administration request and to discourage the contras from attacking the civilian population for supplies...

...Army...

...most of 1984's issues have become even more pressing...

...Political parties once filled that role, providing an interpretive framework for connecting people's understanding of what needed doing with a larger political vision, with a candidate, and with a legislative agenda...

...Instead, eight years of Reagamania have only entrenched military domination in Honduras and El Salvador...

...It has no finishing line, no final deadline, no fixed definition of achievement...

...Fortunately, the outlawing of monetary gain, the great risks of a mother's backing out, and the spectacle of agony illustrated by the Baby M case are likely to put an end to the growth of the surrogate-motherhood business, and make all prospective parties to such an agreement think twice about the consequences, especially for the child...

...But linking that self-interest to a systematic and serious political outlook is a problem-for the Gapolinskys and for any voter who doesn't spend most of his or her waking hours thinking, reading, and talking politics...

...There will be a variety of appeals to the importance of maintaining our national credibility...

...about the sale/purchase of a woman's ability to bear children...

...The war has also kept the Sandinistas from entrenching themselves as a dictatorial power...

...The New Jersey Supreme Court faced a more complicated set of decisions in the Baby M case-decisions about motherhood...