Surrogate Mom Says She Won’t Give Up Fight

RED BANK, N.J. — The surrogate mother of Baby M, stripped of the right to see her child again, said today that she and the baby “love each other very much” and that she will not accept one judge’s decision to uphold the surrogate parenting contract.

“There will never be a termination of the love I have for Sara. Nor will there ever be a termination to the need Sara has for her real mother,” Mary Beth Whitehead said in a statement.

On Tuesday, Superior Court Judge Harvey R. Sorkow issued the nation’s first ruling on a disputed surrogate contract. He upheld the contract, awarded custody of the year-old girl to William Stern and his wife and barred Whitehead from seeing her child again.

The judge was blunt and highly critical in his assessment of Whitehead, calling her “a woman without empathy” and “manipulative, exploitative, impulsive . . . and also untruthful.”

‘So Wrong . . . Unnatural’

In her statement today, her first since the ruling, Whitehead referred to the baby by the name she gave her after refusing to turn the infant over to her biological father. The Sterns have named the baby Melissa Stern.

“We will not accept the decision of one judge as the final determination of a whole society that we should be permanently separated,” Whitehead said.

“I believe that there is something so wrong and so harmfully unnatural about the surrogate practice that our New Jersey appellate courts will return Sara to me,” she said.

Whitehead’s attorney, Harold J. Cassidy, also released a statement saying they will continue their legal battle.

Cassidy said his appeal, expected to go directly to the New Jersey Supreme Court, will have at least 15 grounds for reversal and he has added two law professors and another law firm to the team fighting for Whitehead.