SURROGACY

Johnson’s attorney Richard Gilbert must know that Roe vs. Wade was based on the right to privacy, the right to do with one’s body as one chooses. That includes surrogacy. Gilbert is wrong. Surrogacy doesn’t set women back a thousand years; telling them what they can and cannot do with their own bodies sets them back. If Gilbert is so concerned about how poor women earn their money, they should be positively apoplectic over the South American maids earning slave wages cleaning houses like theirs.

A few bad apples such as Whitehead and Johnson are giving a bad name to something that works most of the time, and brings happiness to the parties involved. Judge Richard N. Parslow Jr. was absolutely correct in placing the child with its biological parents who will provide for it. Nine months does not a mother make. The only evil in this whole thing was William Handel’s $47,000 fee that forced the Calverts to resort to Johnson in the first place.

TERRI MITCHELL

Los Angeles