Word: whiteheaded
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...surface, Whitehead was paid to incubate another family's child. In fact, she was paid to experience maternal love, the forced cessation of that love, and a whole range of feelings in the process that are not ordinarily put up for sale. Those emotions, not Baby M., were the real, if hidden commodity in the transaction. And the transaction fell through because neither buyer nor seller had a grasp of the commodity in the first place...
...Whitehead's employment was the opposite of Jane Eyre's in that she was engaged not to nurture a growing child but simply to produce the entity so that her employer might enjoy the nurturing. Curiously, her work was not unlike a substitute soldier's, since it involved a potential risk of life for pay and provided a service to enhance a collective (a family instead of a country) of which she could not 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...
...Picture Whitehead at the outset of the bargain. She has a body to sell or to rent, a mobile incubator, and she could use the money. She weighs benefits against discomforts, and she goes ahead with the deal...
...deal like that, no terms make sense. They are bound to be violated (as Whitehead wound up violating them) because they apply to a realm of human conduct that is biological, erratic and deeply mysterious. If Whitehead had volunteered her pregnancy as an act of generosity to the Sterns, the matter would have involved the same ambiguities, puzzlement and pain. Money made matters considerably more difficult, since money imposed a legal cast on a service not reasonably regulated by laws, not reasonably regulated at all; but all such bargains are unwise, and when they work, more is owed to luck...
...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...