Baby M Figure : Lawyer Runs Surrogate Baby Boom

It is certainly one of the strangest mating rituals in America.

Nervous, childless couples in their 30s and 40s, along with a group of very young, fertile women willing to bear their children, have flown in from all over the country to meet and pair off here in the renovated, two-story brownstone that is home to Noel Keane’s surrogate parenting clinic, the largest in the nation.

As the couples and potential surrogate mothers arrive and mill awkwardly about the lobby early on a Saturday morning, Keane, the controversial 48-year-old Dearborn attorney who arranged the disputed surrogate contract in the Baby M case, crisply directs traffic.

Job Interviews

Quickly, he ushers the couples into separate offices, where they wait to meet privately with potential surrogates. The young women, some carrying their own small children in their arms, then march through one by one, undergoing what amounts to job interviews. With Keane breaking the ice, the couples and surrogates size each other up; each couple then somehow tries to figure out which woman would be best to be artificially inseminated by the husband.

The following Friday, Keane flies to New York, where he speeds through a series of interviews with more childless couples in his second office in Manhattan’s East 60s, not far from a major sperm bank. That night, he is back on a plane to Detroit, in order to be in his suburban office early Saturday morning to meet once more with another group of couples and surrogates.

Keane, the most visible middleman in the ambiguous world of surrogate parenting, clearly does not have much time to waste these days. There seems to be a never-ending line of desperate couples knocking on his door, willing to part with small fortunes--ranging between $20,000 and $30,000, including fees and expenses--in order to have Keane arrange a child for them.

‘Baby M Hasn’t Hurt’

And nothing, not even the troubling legal and ethical issues raised by the Baby M custody case--in which closing arguments will be heard today in a New Jersey courtroom--seems to be slowing Keane’s business down.

“Baby M hasn’t hurt,” insists Keane, a rapid-talking man of medium build with an open, very Irish face. “If anything, business has picked up as a result, because more people than ever before are aware of the service that I provide.

“If Mary Beth Whitehead wins, I think a lot more people may hesitate about getting into surrogate parenting. But it won’t stop it,” says Keane, the target of a lawsuit filed by Whitehead, a former Keane surrogate fighting his clients William and Elizabeth Stern for custody of Baby M.

In fact, Keane, the son of Irish immigrants who has been widely credited with--and blamed for--founding surrogate parenting in the United States, is rapidly becoming a one-man baby boom.

“Noel is by far the biggest in surrogate parenting,” concedes William Handel, an attorney who runs the Center for Surrogate Parenting in Beverly Hills. “His program is probably as big as the next two or three combined.”

Keane now has more than 150 surrogate deals in the works, roughly equal to the total number of children that have been born through his program since he started it as a sidelight to his legal practice in 1976. Most of Keane’s Dearborn law partnership is now consumed by surrogate parenting, and his harried staff now needs a computer to keep track of all of the couples and surrogates working with him.

With no laws on the books anywhere in the country banning or regulating surrogate parenting, Keane keeps pressing forward, convinced of the moral soundness of what he is doing.

‘Happy Stories’

“There are so many happy stories,” Keane says, as he flips through a photo album of clients, surrogates and the children they have produced. “I’d love to be born into the homes of some of these couples.” He also insists that his surrogates, all volunteers, usually do not get involved just for the money; many, he says, are motivated by a desire to help others share the joy of having children.

“I know what I’m doing is right,” he says firmly.

A churchgoing Roman Catholic, he even had the presumption to issue a press release Tuesday lambasting the Vatican’s major pronouncement condemning surrogate parenting.

So, even while Keane is coming under mounting criticism for running an operation that his competitors charge is so loosely controlled that he is now the target of at least four lawsuits, no one disputes that Keane has established himself as the most dominant force in surrogate parenting today.

Keane Well-Known

“Ever since I first heard about surrogate parenting, I’ve heard about Noel Keane,” says Nadine Taub, a specialist in reproductive law at Rutgers University.

“I did research into this for three years before we did anything, and we decided to come to Keane,” says Ronnie Shoolis of New Jersey, who, with her husband, James, is a Keane client. “I think for him, it’s a business. But he’s the biggest, so if you are going to spend the money, why not come to him?”

Now, Keane acknowledges relishing every minute in the international spotlight his odd business brings. A frequent talk show guest in America and overseas, he enjoys speaking to seminars around the country and is now starting to lobby for state legislation that would regulate--and legitimize--surrogate parenting.

“I like what I’m doing; I’m really enjoying this,” says Keane, as he counts off a few of the national publications that are in the process of writing about him. “It’s a lot more fun than just being a regular lawyer in Dearborn.”

‘More Than a Business’

Shedding his origins in the law, Keane styles himself an entrepreneur today, a businessman who has become successful by providing a service that previously did not exist.

“But this is more than a business for me; it has to be,” he insists. “I’d hate to ever confuse being an entrepreneur with being in surrogate parenting.”

Still, Keane is not ashamed of the fact that he is becoming wealthy--pulling down, he says, between $100,000 and $150,000 annually--as a result of his surrogate program. “I didn’t get into this for the money, but it’s making me money now,” he acknowledges. Each couple pays Keane’s expenses plus $10,000 for his deal-making services, on top of the $10,000 and expenses paid directly to each surrogate. “Am I rich?” he asks. “No, but I’m getting rich.”

In fact, he is now diversifying. Among his current holdings are a large campground in rural Michigan, two office buildings in Dearborn and a beauty parlor and an ice-cream shop run by his wife, Kathy. “I don’t think I’m worth a million dollars, but I’m getting close to it,” he says.

Law Practice

The son of a Ford factory worker, Keane worked his way through college and law school, spending one stint as a clerk in the Dearborn Police Department. He was in private practice in Dearborn in 1976 when his sister, then head of the citizen complaint department for the city, told a local Arab-American couple who desperately wanted a child, but did not want to go through the adoption process, to go see Noel.

Keane was sympathetic. Before the second of his two children was born, his wife had difficulty becoming pregnant, and the Keanes had briefly considered adoption.

But he still did not know what to do with his clients, until he read a newspaper story of one California couple who had arranged a surrogate deal on their own. He then decided to advertise for surrogates in campus newspapers at local colleges. When the media publicized what he was doing, his business was established.

Target for Criticism

But now that he is the leader in such a controversial field, Keane is becoming a bigger and bigger target for criticism.

“In terms of Mr. Keane calling himself a practicing Catholic, I don’t want to say anything more than the fact that we consider surrogate parenting to be child-selling and immoral,” says Richard Doerflinger, assistant director of the office for pro-life activities for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“If a woman in Keane’s program becomes pregnant and the baby is stillborn, she gets $3,000, but if she turns over a live baby she gets $10,000,” says Wiley Bean, a Michigan attorney representing two former surrogates who have filed lawsuits against Keane. “It’s only Ph.Ds who call that providing a service. People on the street know it’s child-selling.”

Bean is now fighting Keane in court in a suit filed by a former surrogate who gave birth to a child with serious defects and who took the child back after Keane’s clients proved that it was fathered by the surrogate’s husband. Keane’s clients in the case are also suing him.

Child Died

In what has become known as the “Jane Doe” surrogate case, meanwhile, Bean represents another surrogate who was accepted into Keane’s program even though she had had a long string of pregnancies by the time she was 24. Her child from the surrogate program died shortly after birth. In that case, Bean is seeking an injunction in federal court to shut down Keane’s Michigan program.

“When Keane allows women to get into his program when they shouldn’t, just because they need the money, then there is something wrong,” Bean charges.

Meanwhile, some smaller operators in the surrogate parenting field say Keane’s high-pressure practice of throwing surrogates and couples together to be matched before the surrogate has been psychologically and medically screened can lead to disasters like the Baby M case.

“People hold him up as the epitome of surrogate parenting, and believe me, he’s not,” says Harriett Blankefeld, who operates Infertility Associates International Inc., a surrogate program in Chevy Chase, Md. She notes that Keane does not do any formal screening of the couples who come to him and that he does not require any proof of the wife’s infertility.

‘Regulate Ourselves’

“I think somebody has to take responsibility for the kinds of homes these children are going into,” she says. “Since there isn’t any government regulation now, we’d better regulate ourselves.”

But Keane remains unfazed. In fact, he is now trying hard to push the frontiers of surrogate parenting even further.

A Japanese couple have hired him to conduct in vitro implants into two of Keane’s hired surrogates, hoping that at least one will become pregnant. The wife’s eggs will be fertilized by her husband’s sperm in the laboratory before being implanted into the surrogates. Keane’s white American surrogates will thus be confronted with the prospect of giving birth to babies that will have no genealogical or racial ties to them.

Keane is also eager to set a precedent by providing babies for couples in which both the husband and wife are infertile; donor sperm and donor eggs would be fertilized in vitro and then implanted into a surrogate. He is eager to test such a case in court to see who would be declared the child’s parents.

As Keane talks excitedly about such experiments, it becomes clear that he has long since put to rest whatever moral qualms he may once have had about his business. He admits that he “didn’t feel good” about some cases, including one in which a couple who had hired him got divorced and then persuaded their surrogate to have an abortion. But he insists that the good his program does far outweighs the bad.

“Maybe God thinks it’s good too to bring life into the world,” he said. “Otherwise, how come these women are able to get pregnant?”