Word: sterne
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With his wife by his side and a phalanx of cameras clicking, the shy Hartpence boy who changed his name while attending Yale Law School in 1961 spoke tearfully about his home and his parents. In the past Hart has been reluctant to discuss his stern upbringing in the Church of the Nazarene or the fact that his family lived in 16 homes over 18 years. This time he compared his childhood with the uncomplicated lives of the kids on TV's Happy Days. Yet he stumbled when a fourth-grader asked him if he would ever return to live...
...delivered, not many people had given thought to the issues of surrogate birth. By last week, when the custody judgment was rendered, was there anyone still unschooled in its painful dilemmas? Even so, no one can have felt the lessons more deeply than the child's father, William Stern, a New Jersey biochemist who was awarded custody, or her mother, Mary Beth Whitehead, who lost the little girl she gave birth to as part of their surrogate agreement...
...nonjury trial put flesh on once abstract matters. It made plain the almost palpable tenderness of Stern and his wife Elizabeth, a pediatrician, both 41, and the no less compelling attachment of Whitehead, 29, and her husband Richard, 37, a sanitation worker. It savagely peered into problems of the Whitehead household -- his battle with alcoholism, their financial setbacks -- that raised doubts about whether surrogacy permits the more prosperous and sophisticated to exploit those who are less so. It offered the dismaying court spectacle of a mental-health expert disparaging Whitehead's skills as a mother because of how she played...
...procreate. In a crucial caveat, however, he said the contract was not automatically enforceable, because when conflicts arose the "best interests of the child" should prevail. Thus it was her best interests, and not the existence of a contract, that led him to award custody of Baby M. to Stern...
...neither Stern nor Whitehead had a claim to the service they were dealing with, any more than Faust had a claim to the soul he dealt the Devil. Stern is certainly not the Devil, and Baby M. is not Whitehead's soul. But the emotions that were being traded have a soul-like sanctity in the sense that they belong to the mysteries of the species and are commonly shared. This is what the Vatican suggested when it recently condemned all artificial practices regarding birth, and one does not have to agree with that blanket condemnation to appreciate its basis...