Word: whitehead
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...anyone but the central figures, and perhaps for 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...
...decision is almost 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...
...crowded courtroom in Hackensack, N.J., listeners heard repeated last week the now familiar outlines of the story. William Stern, 40, a biochemist, and his wife Elizabeth, 41, a pediatrician, contracted with Whitehead early in 1985 for her to conceive a child through artificial insemination and carry it on their behalf. The three were brought together through the Infertility Center of New York, a for-profit Manhattan agency. The Sterns chose Whitehead, now 29, after reviewing and rejecting the applications of 300 women. Some drank. Some smoked cigarettes or marijuana. Some just did not look the part. The Sterns wanted...
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...
...deeply his Iran policy had split his own Administration. The previous % week, Shultz had won Reagan's grudging announcement that there would be no more arms sales to Iran, but the Secretary was not satisfied. Just before the NSC met, he dispatched Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead to testify at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Whitehead directly contradicted Reagan's repeated assertions that U.S. contacts with Tehran had caused Iran to moderate its support of terrorism. Said Whitehead: "I don't like to differ with my President, but I believe there is still some continuing evidence...