Woman Attempting to Reclaim Child in Surrogate Birth Case

In California’s first trial over surrogate parenthood, a young mother began testifying in private here Tuesday in an effort to reclaim the child she bore but gave up two days after his birth in 1986.

Nancy Barrass, 31, a Novato preschool teacher, said in documents filed in the Sonoma County courthouse that she was coerced into relinquishing her parental rights to her son and giving him to Dr. Tim and Charlotte Myers.

Echoing the highly publicized Baby M case, Barrass and the Myerses struck an agreement whereby Barrass was to be paid $10,000 for becoming artificially inseminated with Dr. Myers’ sperm and then giving the child to the Napa couple after he was born. Mrs. Myers, who is in her mid-40s, has had difficulties completing a pregnancy.

Barrass is asking Sonoma County Superior Court Judge Lloyd Von Der Mehden to invalidate that agreement, saying that she was coerced into signing the document.

Even if the agreement is ruled invalid, Barrass would be in for another court fight--over custody--with Dr. Myers, the legal and biological father.

Christian R. Van Deusen, the Santa Ana attorney who represents the Myerses, said that Matthew, now 19 months old, would be traumatized if he is taken from them.

“Adults can make mistakes and arrangements that they later cannot live with. But the child has no choice. There comes a point when the judge has to make the decision of what is best for the child,” Van Deusen said.

On Monday, the judge ordered the trial closed to the public. Attorneys for San Francisco-area newspapers have asked a state appellate court to open the proceeding. The trial over the contested adoption case is to continue at least until the end of the week.

In court papers asking that Barrass be given immediate custody, her lawyer, Teresa de la O, alleged that the Myerses and others, among them the entrepreneurs who helped set up the arrangement, engaged in an “elaborate scheme to evade California’s adoption laws and the protection those laws demand for the children and birth mothers.”

Barrass, who would not discuss the case, said in court papers that the Myerses’ original attorney, William W. Handel of Beverly Hills, threatened to “destroy her life,” and “see to it that she would lose custody” of her other child, a 7-year-old daughter.

Handel denied that charge. “It is astounding. I am sitting here shaking my head, wondering how these allegations can be made,” said Handel, who runs a surrogate parenting business and threatened to sue the woman for slander.

“I can’t imagine Nancy is going to prevail on this,” the lawyer added. “Unfortunately, her entire story is a fabrication, from beginning to end.”

In the Baby M case, the New Jersey Supreme Court held in February that paid surrogate parenting contracts amount to illegal baby selling. The court gave custody of the child to the father, William Stern, and his wife, Elizabeth, but allowed surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead-Gould visitation rights.

Barrass initially consented to give up the child, and the Myerses agreed to let her visit the child whenever she wanted, Barrass said in court papers. But by February, 1987, Barrass said, the Myerses began balking at the visits--even as she sought more time with the child.

“I feel really used,” Barrass said in an interview with the Independent Journal, a Marin County newspaper. “I was used by everybody, and everybody was making money off me.”

The California Legislature, meanwhile, failed to resolve the issue of surrogate parenting earlier this year, when separate bills to regulate and ban the practice died in committees.

“I do not doubt that it will continue to be a problem,” said John Miller, legislative assistant to Sen. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles), author of a failed legislative effort to regulate the practice.

“Our sense was that the legislature was not ready to deal with the issue at the time. My sense was that they really hadn’t made up their minds.”