‘Baby M’ Trial Weighs Views of Psychiatrist

A surrogate mother who threatened to kill herself and her baby did not mean it, she was simply using “any weapon that she had handy” to keep the biological father from taking her daughter, a psychiatrist testified Tuesday.

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

Klein disputed reports that Whitehead has mental problems and would be an unfit mother. He said the reports were inaccurate because they examined her only during a difficult period of her life.

‘In a Terrible Fix’

“Mrs. Whitehead is in a terrible fix right now,” said Klein, whom Whitehead’s attorneys called as an expert witness in the custody battle over the 11-month-old baby.

Klein was the first such witness to disagree with the three psychiatric profiles prepared by professionals hired by the baby’s court-appointed guardian, Lorraine Abraham.

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

The couple hired Whitehead to be artificially inseminated with Stern’s sperm and bear them a child, but after the birth March 27, the 29-year-old woman changed her mind, refused the money she was to be paid and took the infant to Florida.

Maturity, Intelligence Cited

In the three reports, Whitehead was portrayed as narcissistic, impulsive, immature and of below-average intelligence. Some of those characteristics led her to threaten to kill herself and the baby, another expert witness has testified.

Klein, however, said that her threat, made in a call that Stern secretly recorded, was “not even one that was particularly emphasized.”

“She was pressing for Mr. Stern to back off,” Klein said, and she “used any weapon that she had handy” to try to get what she wanted.

Whitehead later said that she made the threats only to make Stern understand that she could not give up the child.