Surrogate Mom Used Threats as Weapon: Expert

HACKENSACK, N.J. — A surrogate mother who threatened to kill herself and her baby didn’t mean it and was simply using “any weapon that she had handy” to keep the biological father from taking her daughter, a psychiatrist testified today.

Mary Beth Whitehead had no intention of carrying out the threats made in a telephone call to William Stern in July, Donald Klein, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, testified as the trial over the fate of Baby M resumed after a six-day recess.

Klein disputed reports that said Whitehead suffers from mental problems and would be an unfit parent. Those reports, he said, are inaccurate because they look at her only during a difficult period in her life.

‘A Terrible Fix’

“Mrs. Whitehead is in a terrible fix right now,” said Klein, who was called by Whitehead’s attorneys to testify in the unprecedented custody trial over the 11-month-old baby.

Klein was the first expert witness to disagree with the three reports prepared by mental health professionals hired by the baby’s court-appointed guardian, Lorraine Abraham.

Abraham has said she relied on the reports in recommending that Whitehead be denied custody and visitation rights immediately and that the baby be reared by Stern and his wife, Elizabeth.

The Tenafly couple hired Whitehead to be artificially inseminated with Stern’s sperm and bear them a baby. After the child’s March 27 birth, however, the 29-year-old Brick Township homemaker changed her mind, turned down the money and fled to Florida with the infant.

Sterns Now Have Baby

The child--called Sara by the Whiteheads and Melissa by the Sterns--is in the temporary custody of the Sterns.

Superior Court Judge Harvey R. Sorkow, the first in the nation asked to rule on the controversial practice of surrogate motherhood, will decide the contract’s validity as well as custody.

In the three reports and profiles, Whitehead was portrayed as narcissistic, impulsive, immature and of below-average intelligence.