Profit Is the Wrong Motive : Orange County case shows the miseries of commercial surrogateship

The custody issue before Solomon was difficult enough, in its time. Now a Superior Court judge in an Orange County surrogate parenthood case is trying to decide an issue almost as vexing. That is the possibility that a test tube baby could be found to have three parents--its genetic mother and father, and the birth mother who carried the fetus to term.

But if it seems that Pandora’s box itself has been placed into evidence--containing all the blessings and potential woes unleashed on society by modern reproductive technology--one thing is becoming clearer as the Johnson-Calvert custody hearing unfolds in a Santa Ana courtroom. The larger lesson is that surrogateship arrangements, for all their good intentions and possibilities, become hopelessly clouded by a profit motive, in this case a $10,000 surrogation contract.

Anna L. Johnson, the welfare mother who is the 3-week-old baby boy’s birth mother, has been all over the lot in her statements on this case. She acknowledged on the stand Wednesday that she had cashed two checks from Mark and Crispina Calvert at points during the pregnancy when she already had decided to keep the baby. And in another key admission, she said the Calverts at least twice had made payments early, which contradicted a key claim that the biological parents had breached the contract by paying late.

This troubling case turns out to be no breach-of-contract lawsuit at all, but rather a change-of-heart story about a poor woman whose burden of poverty complicated her initial decision to carry someone else’s child.

The record before the court now shows that Johnson wavered throughout her pregnancy on whether she considered the baby hers or somebody else’s. But that inconsistency does not mean that she does not truly feel that she is the mother. What it does suggest is a lack of preparation for changes that pregnancy brought about, and for its emotional consequences. The profit motive only complicated an unwise choice.