Death Threat by Baby M’s Mother Taped : Raised Idea of Killing Herself, Child in Phone Call to Father

The surrogate mother fighting for custody of Baby M threatened to commit suicide and kill the baby if the child was taken from her, tapes of a telephone conversation played in court today showed.

Mary Beth Whitehead, who bore Baby M for a childless couple and then decided to keep the infant, told the father, William Stern, almost four months after the March 27 birth that she would “rather be dead than give her up.”

At one point near the end of the tape, Baby M could be heard crying in the background. As the recording was replayed in court, Whitehead turned her head to the side and sobbed.

“I gave her life. I can take her life away,” Whitehead said during the roughly 45-minute conversation.

Whitehead fled to Florida with the child in May in defiance of a court order granting Stern temporary custody. From her parents’ home in Florida, Whitehead called Stern July 15 and demanded he stop trying to win the child.

“Forget it, Bill. I’ll tell you right now, I’d rather see me and her dead before you get her,” Whitehead said. “I can’t give her up. Can’t you understand?”

The tape was introduced in court by lawyers for Stern and his childless wife, Elizabeth, who argue the conversation is further proof Whitehead is unstable and an unfit mother for Baby M. Whitehead’s lawyers contend the tape shows only that their client was under considerable emotional pressure.

At the beginning of the conversation, both Stern and Whitehead sounded calm, but the conversation grew increasingly hysterical as Whitehead delivered her threats and Stern pleaded with her to give up the baby.

“You are playing with our lives,” Stern said toward the end of the conversation. “I want my daughter back.”

Whitehead said: “Well, Bill, how about, how about if there’s no daughter to get back?”

Stern’s wife testifies. Page 13.