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BACKGROUND
Jewish Views On The
'Baby M' Dilemma
Rabbis disagree on the issue of
surrogate motherhood.
ELLEN RITTBERG
Special to the Jewish News
R
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Friday, January 23, 1987
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
abbinical specialists in
medical ethics have be-
gun to cope with the
controversal issue of sur-
rogate motherhood and its
possible implications for the
Jewish community.
The issue has received a
great deal of attention recent-
ly in the so-called "Baby M"
trial in Hackensack, N.J. The
case involves a childless cou-
ple — William Stern, the son
of Holocaust survivors, and
his wife, Elizabeth — who
paid Mary Beth Whitehead
to be a surrogate mother. The
Bergen County Superior Court
is being asked to decide if the
contract the Sterns and White-
head signed is legal, and to
whom Baby M belongs.
Moses lendler, who is both
a professor of talmudic law at
the Orthodox Yeshiva Univer-
sity and chairman of its
biology department, believes
the press and public are ignor-
ing the all-important moral
issue — whether a person
should "contract a perfor-
mance bond" to produce a
baby. He thinks not.
"One woman says, 'I'm go-
ing to rent your uterus, blood,
hormones, your whole body,' "
lendler says. " 'You will ad-
just to a new physiological
state. Your body will swell: "
Tbndler characterizes this
as a form of "enslavement"
and calls businesses that
match couples with women
for the purpose of surrogate
motherhood as "slave
markets."
"God said, `for ye are my
slaves.' He didn't say that
man is in man's service,"
Ibndler says.
There is also the danger of
pregnancy to consider, he
adds, because being pregnant
"imperils one's life."
"All kinds of complications
can result from pregnancy. Of
course, God set up the world
so that women would have
children, but women should
not have a child for another
person strictly for money."
If a couple cannot have
their own children, 'Ibndler
says, they can adopt a child.
"The greatest mitzvah is to
raise an orphan in your house
as your own."
Marc Gellman, a Reform
rabbi in Dix Hills, L.I., with
a doctorate in medical ethics,
agrees with 'Iblidler. Gellman
feels that some Jews explore
options such as hiring a sur-
rogate mother because Jew-
ish families in general are
"resistant to adoption?'
Hiring a surrogate mother,
however, "undermines the
sanctity of marital relations,"
says Gellman. "It creates a
class of people who are baby-
bearers for money. It makes
women objects for the pur-
poses of procreation. The
Jewish view of women is
much more noble."
Gellman compares the
Stern-Whitehead contract to
a contract to sell por-
nography. Gellman condemns
all contracts that involve one
woman bearing children for
another woman. "The basic
point from a Jewish perspec-
tive is that there are mothers.
Period. There is no such thing
as surrogate mothers:'
Rabbi David Feldman, of
the Conservative Teaneck
Jewish Center in New Jersey
who is the author of Health
and Medicine in the Jewish
Tradition, objects to the term
surrogate mother entirely.
Motherhood is an inalienable
right, he argues.
The mother, in this case
Whitehead, is the mother in
every sense of the word. "She -ci<
bled and had morning sick-
ness, gave the child nutri-
ments, genetic endowments,
the ovum. She is 100 percent
the mother," Feldman says.
Feldman adds that the
Whitehead-Stern contract is
not valid from a Jewish point
of view. "You cannot enforce
a contract against a natural
fact [Whitehead's biological
motherhood]," he says.
He adds that the woman
who entered into the contract
before becoming pregnant is
not the same one who deliv-
ered the child. "She could not
foresee how she would
change" as the result of giv-
ing birth, he says. "People
sometimes say things and
feel things before and during
childbirth that they don't
mean."
Feldman cites the Talmud
to explain his point. "After
childbirth, the woman was
supposed to bring a sacrifice
to the Ibmple," he says. "The
Talmud says the real reason
she brings that sacrifice is
because When she was exper-
iencing the pain of childbirth,
she might have sworn that
she would never have another
child. The sacrifice was the
atonement for swearing the
oath which the woman thought
she meant at the moment she
said it but which she did not
really mean."
Not all rabbis consider the
Stern-Whitehead contract il-
legal, however.
"If the woman signed the
contract, she should live up to
the terms of it?" says Bernard
M. Zlotowitz, director of the
New York Federation of Re-
form Synagogues. "She is a
mature woman. She under-
stood what she was getting
,=\