Word: sterne
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Elizabeth Stern diagnosed herself as having a mild case of multiple sclerosis. But the couple did not have a specialist confirm the diagnosis until late 1986, did not inquire whether the disease affected her ability to bear a healthy child, and did not seek to adopt a child. William Stern wanted a genetic link. Yet if Sorkow is to be believed, these facts reveal nothing about the Sterns' fitness to be parents...
...answered before the next such trial proves necessary: Are there any ethical limits on what one person may pay another to do? It is a question that rarely arises in the world of normal commerce, even in the modern service economy (of which the contract drawn between William Stern and Mary Beth Whitehead for her to bear his baby may stand as the oddest example). Problems of conscience do not crop up when you pay someone to deliver your paper or your pizza, or to answer your phone. Something is sought, someone is compensated, and if the bargain is just...
...bargain struck in the Baby M. case seems to have been wrongheaded from the start because it involved a set of emotions, mainly on the part of Whitehead but Stern's as well, that were either unanticipated or uncomprehended...
...feel a part. Purely in terms of fair labor practices, her provision of nearly a year's work for $10,000 raises an issue of equity. But the real issue lies in the nature of the service; and seeing the mess where their bargain has lead, one wonders if Stern or Whitehead even considered consequences that in hindsight seem inevitable...
...Picture Stern at the outset of the bargain. He and his wife want a baby, and here is the clean, modern, technologically miraculous way to get one. What he does not take into account is that he is engaging someone to feel sensations on behalf of him and his wife that properly belong only to him and his wife. What seems so easy mechanically turns out to be an impossibility, yet the sanctioning by contract obfuscates the reality. Instead of a simple deal, he has swung a deal whose complications are infinite, and infinitely surprising; they are not in anyone...