March 27: Baby M.

The Baby M. surrogacy case, involving a Jewish couple, Bill Stern (a son of Holocaust survivors) and his wife Betsy, and a young woman, Mary Beth Whitehead, who had contracted to be artificially inseminated with Bill Stern’s seed, began on this date in 1986 when Whitehead gave birth to a baby girl and decided not to surrender her for adoption. Judge Harvey Sorkow issued an order permitting the Sterns to take the baby from the Whitehead home, but she and her husband went on the run with her. The Sterns pursued them vigorously, even freezing their bank accounts. Four months later, Mary Beth became dangerously ill and the baby was seized while she was in the hospital. By the time the case reached the New Jersey Supreme Court — which invalidated all such surrogacy contracts — Baby M. had lived with the Sterns for over a year. They were granted custody while Whitehead received legal status as the child’s mother and visitation rights. When the child turned 18, she terminated Whitehead’s parental rights and formalized Elizabeth Stern’s maternity through adoption proceedings. “I’m very happy I ended up with them,” she told a reporter. “I love them, they’re my best friends in the whole world, and that’s all I have to say about it.” Whitehead, who now has five children, wrote a book about her experience, which was turned into a made-for-television movie.

“From 15 to 20 percent of American Jews experience fertility problems, and more than 3 percent — some 60,000 — of the children in Jewish homes have been adopted.”—Christine Benvenuto, Shiksa: The Gentile Woman in the Jewish World