Word: bethe
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EDITORIAL SERVICES: Christiana Walford (Director); Peter J. Christopoulos, Benjamin Lightman, David E. Trevorrow, Beth Bencini Zarcone...
...anyone but the central figures, and perhaps for them as well, mixed emotions are the only kind that seem fitting to bring to the New Jersey courtroom where a landmark case involving custody of a 9 1/2-month-old infant is being heard. Mary Beth Whitehead thought she knew herself in 1985, when she contracted, as a surrogate mother, to bear a child for William and Elizabeth Stern. But her certainties crumbled when she gave birth last March to the girl she calls Sara, the Sterns call Melissa and court papers call Baby M. In hours of emotional testimony last week, Whitehead...
...Mary Beth Whitehead seemed perfect. A housewife with two school-age children by her husband Richard, she had wanted to become a surrogate mother to help a childless couple. She claimed to want no more children of her own. After she met the Sterns for the first time at a New Jersey restaurant, the three became friends, trading phone calls back and forth. Whitehead signed a contract, promising among other things that she would not "form or attempt to form a parent-child relationship" with the resulting infant. The Sterns promised to pay her $10,000, plus medical expenses. They...
...bedroom window. The Whiteheads then fled with the baby to Florida, where they were tracked down by a private detective hired by the Sterns. Authorities took the infant and returned her to New Jersey. Last September, Judge Sorkow gave temporary custody to the Sterns, but he allowed Mary Beth Whitehead to spend two hours twice a week with Baby M. on the neutral turf of a local children's home...
...technologies. Because of the risks to the mother, the committee pronounced itself "not favorably disposed to the use of surrogate mothers for nonmedical reasons." But the members declined to issue an across-the-board condemnation. And they deplored the absence of reliable data from which to draw conclusions. Mary Beth Whitehead is a high school dropout who married at 16. Is that typical of surrogate mothers? Are they more likely % to be exploited or fulfilled, altruistic or driven by dark motives...