The Baby in the Factory

By Roger Rosenblatt

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 him right. This established, the Stivers said they were willing to receive the child, thus granting Malahoff his money back, along with an end to a story nobody wanted to hear in the first place, one that, when it was finally played out, involved an array of several unattractive personalities, a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, the specter of baby selling, the suspicion of fraud and deception, and a tasteless denouement on a television talk show, where the M.C. spoke of "renting a womb."

But the sleaziness of this particular affair did not account for its disturbing effect on the public. From Baby Doe's birth on Jan. 10, he was seen and discussed as a piece of inferior merchandise, an imperfect creature come into the world as damaged goods. The mother disavowed motherhood; the father said "Not mine." Yet there was the child, frail but present. Deposited on the doorstep, he had to belong to someone.

In a 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 the baby shows up, glowing and cooing, most reservations dissipate in a hurry. A life has been created, after all, even if it has been done a bit oddly and at various removes.

What happens, on the other hand, when a baby shows up neither 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's. Oh yes, there was the matter of the deformity, which cried out for special kindness and scruples, so one might think that Stiver or Malahoff would have been willing to take Baby Doe, no matter what. But who would not hesitate before deciding to accept a retarded child if one really had the choice? And the circumstances did present a choice.

Choice may, in fact, be the key to the matter, the center of public uneasiness. On the face of it, or even in the heart of it, there is nothing wrong with the idea of surrogate parenthood, or with any indirect process by which a child is created because somebody wants him. The essential difference between such a procedure and an opposite one like abortion is that in the surrogate situation someone does want the child, the desire being compelling. Indeed, everyone concerned wants the child; the prospective family and the surrogate parent too, either for profit or as an act of philanthropy. It may be argued that adoption is a cleaner and less cumbersome method, for all its bureaucratic impediments, but this is not an issue enhanced by taking sides. A couple wants a child. If the insemination is artificial, the parental attitude is real.

The disturbing element here, however, the one this story exposed to the air, is the implication that these processes, which satisfy that basic human desire and which do so by manipulating a basic human act, are merely mechanical, technologically clever, new testaments to American know-how. Pregnant women often joke gently about their offspring "in the oven," but in a joke-less context, where the baby in question is being cooked up on consignment, there is cause for real worry. With all the potential joys of scientifically created parenthood, the last thing one wishes to encourage is the impersonal approach. What is being cooked up in each instance is not a cake or a car or a mail-order watch. It is a person, small-headed or not, and any situation that suggests otherwise is not just dismaying but dangerous.

In the 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 in his way, of course, but the heart of the issue is not legal. A procedure has been devised in which a human being is literally conceived as a manufactured product. Therefore, consciously or not, all the participants in that procedure tend to regard the product either as the flower of a growth industry or, if a flaw appears, as industrial waste.

This is probably why the story was so troubling, and why it ought to be. What we were viewing was not a mishap in a procedure to be condemned or abhorred, or even regulated with excruciating detail--though regulations will help--but rather something new and fragile, like a baby, to be watched with great and serious care. Technological parenthood may have the trappings of a business, but it is not a business; it is the answer to someone's most personal prayers. So it should be seen and handled. If the answer to a particular prayer happens to emerge deformed, it is no less the prayer's answer; and, as many parents of such "damaged goods" have discovered, they sometimes give more contentment to a family than whole and healthy children and thus provide answers to different prayers entirely.

The point is simply that these goods are people, however they may be produced. Nor is any child to be judged or treated as a factory reject merely because something is wrong with him One forgets these things from time to time, lost in pride at our advancement.

-- By Roger Rosenblatt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.