Word: stivers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Michigan, Surrogate Mother Judy Stiver agreed to be artificially inseminated by Alexander Malahoff for $10,000. When the baby was born last year, it turned out to be microcephalic and mentally retarded. Malahoff insisted on blood tests that might show he was not the father. As a macabre touch, these test results were announced on Phil Donahue's TV show. They disclosed that Malahoff was indeed not the father; Stiver had had sexual intercourse with her husband at about the same time as the insemination. Now the baby is in the custody of the Stivers, and both sides...
Three weeks ago, the nation recoiled at the story of a microcephalic child, called Baby Doe by the court, who apparently was born without parents. Judy Stiver, the surrogate mother who bore him after being artificially inseminated, claimed that Baby Doe belonged to Alexander Malahoff, who had contracted to pay Stiver $10,000 on delivery. Malahoff, who is separated from his wife, and who hoped the baby might reunite them, accepted the deformed child in the beginning, and had him baptized. Later he rejected the boy, contending Baby Doe was not his own. Last week a blood test proved...
...sense, he belonged to everyone for those three weeks, and that universal parenthood may be worth remembering. Baby Doe was the product of a beneficent social impulse. Malahoff wished him into existence, and Stiver provided the incubator, but the context and impetus for the birth were in the public realm, the generally, if warily accepted idea that if infertile people want children strongly enough, then modern science ought to offer a way. Thus arose the recent and remarkable inventions of surrogate parents and test-tube babies. No one is wholly comfortable with these mechanisms, including the principals, but when...
...glowing nor cooing, but, like Baby Doe, with a strep infection and too small a head, a sign of probable mental retardation? What happens when one is reminded of the numerical odds in such things, when normal reality intrudes on the man-made miracle? It was easy to condemn Stiver for feeling no motherly connection to the child, yet surrogate motherhood necessarily precluded those feelings, indeed made reasonable her self-imposed detachment. It was easy, too, to be appalled by Malahoff's rejection, but the baby he originally ordered up was to be his own, not another father...
...case of Stiver-Malahoff we observed a problem fairly simple to resolve. Malahoff has been taken out of the picture, and the Stivers now claim to be ready to accept their responsibilities. But the problem between Malahoff and themselves would never have arisen had Baby Doe arrived healthy. How far was this matter from a slightly different one in which some future Malahoff, while being proved the true father of an imperfect boy, decides nonetheless that a microcephalic baby was not what he had in mind? He would like to send it back, demand a refund. The law might stand...