A year and a half after the ruling in landmark case, three adults and baby they battled over are still : Living With the Legacy of a Surrogate Birth

Christopher Calvert knows nothing about the books of newspaper clippings and the row of videotaped news programs that his parents keep on a shelf in the living room. When he gets older, he will be permitted to look at them. And he will see that they tell the unusual story of his life.

But it is not time for that yet. At 19 months, the restless toddler is far from able to understand the media frenzy that surrounded his arrival into the world, or the endless days that lawyers spent fighting over him in court. And for now, his parents think that’s just fine. Mark and Crispina Calvert say they want their son to have the carefree years any child deserves.

“We’ll explain it all to him when he gets older,” Mark Calvert said. “He has a right to know. But now he should get the chance to just be a normal kid.”

In his black-and-white checkered overalls and white sneakers, Christopher is 100% toddler: constantly in motion, he trots around the yard pointing to objects he only recently learned to identify, naming them in a sweet whisper. “Mooooo,” he says, pointing to a pale crescent in the evening sky.

It has been a year and a half since an Orange County Superior Court judge ruled in Johnson vs. Calvert, reshaping the legal definition of parenthood. He decided that the Calverts, an infertile couple whose egg and sperm had been implanted in a surrogate mother, Anna Johnson, were Christopher’s only legal and biological parents and that Johnson, who waged an emotional legal battle for the infant, had no rights to him at all.

The decision carved out a new and controversial concept: that carrying and delivering a baby do not necessarily make a woman the infant’s legal mother. An appeals court unanimously affirmed that decision in October, 1991. Now the state Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case, a landmark because it is the first to tackle the issue of parental rights for a woman who has no genetic link to the child she bears.

As thick stacks of briefs are filed, both sides look anxiously to the court for resolution. Both sides say they are optimistic they will win. But heartbreak, it seems, waits in the wings for one or the other.

Johnson, now 31, declined to be interviewed for this story. Her lawyer, Richard C. Gilbert, said the last 18 months have been deeply painful for her, marked by constant longing to see the little boy she still thinks of as her son, Matthew. Some months ago, it appeared that things might be looking up for Johnson, with a new marriage and another baby on the way. But those joys were short-lived; she lost the fetus, and her marriage is now dissolving, Gilbert said.

“She’s really suffering. She would just like to see the baby,” Gilbert said. “It’s been a living hell for her.”

Gilbert said the Calverts have repeatedly spurned Johnson’s requests to visit the child. The thing that has buoyed her during these long months has been the confidence that the state’s high court will grant her parental rights, allowing her to share in the little boy’s life, Gilbert said.

Co-workers at the hospital where Johnson works as a nurse are sympathetic to the ordeal she went through, Gilbert said. But in public, she tries to avoid the inquiring glances of strangers who recognize her face from newspapers and television programs, often wearing glasses and changing her hairstyle frequently to keep a low profile, Gilbert said.

The Calverts, too, must contend with strangers who want to talk about the case. Crispina says she gets tired of being “stared at, stared at, stared at.” But then there are people like the burly construction worker who greeted them in a coffee shop, saying with a smile, “Hey, isn’t that Christopher?” And Crispina, a nurse at Western Medical Center-Santa Ana, recalls that a patient still groggy with anesthesia pointed a finger at her and said, “I know you. You’re Cris, aren’t you? You’re the one with the surrogate case. I’ve been praying for you.”

“We are just real thankful for the outpouring of compassion we’ve gotten,” Mark Calvert said. “People sent gifts through our attorneys. They’ve offered us houses to hide away in. The public support has just been overwhelming.”

In Calvert’s voice is the tiniest hint that he still doesn’t understand why the public took such a passionate interest in the unique custody case.

“We’re not Keating, we’re not Noriega,” he said, referring to Charles H. Keating Jr., the disgraced head of Lincoln Savings & Loan, and Manuel A. Noriega, the former Panamanian strongman, both targets of intense media scrutiny who were convicted of crimes. “We’re just a couple who wanted to have a baby.”

Mark Calvert, 35, an insurance underwriting manager, and Crispina, 38, obviously revel in their son, who has his genetic mother’s dark shiny hair and wide eyes. The couple repeatedly interrupt an interview to chuckle at his antics, tickle him, blow bubbles for him, offer him sips of juice.

But simultaneously with those happy moments, they talk about their bitterness; about the months sacrificed to courtrooms and mobs of reporters, and the financial damage it wreaked on their lives. They sold a house on a quiet cul-de-sac near a park and bought another on a four-lane highway, using the difference to pay off medical bills from the conception and birth, and legal bills, which are not yet paid off.

Crispina had hoped to work part time once Christopher was born. Now the couple cannot afford that, so she works three 12-hour shifts a week at the hospital. They blame Johnson, obviously still angry that she sued them over rights to the baby. Mark Calvert said it is “doubtful” they will ever let her visit the boy unless a court grants her visitation rights, and then they would comply only “regretfully,” he said.

Johnson, a woman of modest means before she brought the lawsuit, still struggles financially, trying to raise her 4-year-old daughter as a single working mother, Gilbert said. Her friends help keep her spirits up, and she has “a strong backbone and a winning attitude,” Gilbert said. But he is uneasily aware of how much the state Supreme Court decision means to her.

“I just hope we win,” he said. “Because I don’t know what we’re going to have on our hands if we don’t.”

The Calverts look anxiously to the high court’s decision as well, saying they know they will win, but adding that they still worry that “some judge” will see the case differently than the lower courts have.

And they have to keep on with their lives in the meantime. They think about having a second child. They think about adoption. And despite the trauma of the case that now bears their family name, they even consider having another baby through a surrogate mother.

They would do it differently the second time, they quickly add. They are wiser now; they could make sure it didn’t go wrong again. Those words said, they turn their gaze to Christopher, who leans against his mother’s knee, smiling shyly at a visitor.

They look at him, and their eyes say: Yes. It was worth it. Yes.