Word: sterne
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...judge wrote that Whitehead was "manipulative, impulsive and exploitive...a woman without empathy." Stern and his physician wife, he reasoned, would make better parents; they could surely provide more advantages for the baby than Whitehead, a high school drop-out, and her garbage collector husband. The Sterns, he noted, might one day give Melissa music lessons...
Sorkow thought it less worthy of note that the Sterns misrepresented themselves to Whitehead. The couple appealed to Whitehead's sympathy by telling her they were unable to have or adopt a child. The contract Whitehead signed stated that Elizabeth Stern was infertile...
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...