Word: motheral
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Israel's Law of Return, last revised in 1970, grants automatic citizenship to any immigrant who is "born of a Jewish mother or who has converted." Orthodox politicians, distressed at the Miller ruling, are insisting on an amendment that the Knesset has repeatedly rejected. It would require conversion "according to halakhah" (religious law) as interpreted by Orthodoxy. The Orthodox claim that, otherwise, rabbinical courts, which supervise marriages, will need to maintain two lists of Israelis: those qualified to wed under religious law and those who cannot because of questionable conversions...
Where next? Well, say he took an M.A. at the University of Chicago and decided to go on for the Ph.D. He met and married Margaret Martinson, the mother of two children by a previous marriage. When his first attempts at short stories were routinely rejected, Roth gave up his literary aspirations and buckled down to his academic career. He earned his doctorate and went on to teaching positions at the University of Iowa and Princeton. The Roths live in suburban Philadelphia, where he is a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His critical books include The Jewish...
...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 told the court that the experience of childbirth...
...certain to be appealed. Yet even when the final court has its final say, the echoes of Whitehead's anguished question will still hang in the air. If a society legitimates surrogacy, what has it done? Has it imperiled its most venerable notions of kinship and the bond between mother and child? Has it opened the way to a dismal baby industry, in which well-to-do couples rent out the wombs of less affluent women, sometimes just to spare themselves the inconvenience of pregnancy? Yet if surrogacy is prohibited, has a promising way for childless couples to have families...
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...