Post-Birth Complications Deliver Families to Court

For the first week of their lives, the triplets were known only as A, B and C.

Danielle Bimber had no names for the boys because she never intended to be their mother. But leaving the hospital without them, her job seemingly done, the surrogate mom grew uneasy.

Where was the couple who had hired her? When would they come to the hospital to take the newborns home? Why had they stopped visiting after the first day?

After several sleepless nights, and with the hospital preparing to put the children in foster care, Danielle Bimber obtained permission to take the boys home, to join her two sons, ages 9 and 7, from a previous marriage, and her 4-year-old daughter with Doug, a self-employed appliance repairman.

And seven days after they were born, A, B and C became Matthew, Mark and Micah.

The Bimbers would soon become engaged in a bitter battle with the triplets’ biological father, a 63-year-old math professor who blamed complicated paperwork, in part, for his early absence. He said the Bimbers couldn’t provide for the kids as well as he could. At his age, he said, he wanted to “leave something behind when I die.”

Fourteen months would elapse before the dispute was settled, leaving one couple disappointed and the other exhausted.

And even today, legal and financial challenges remain in a case that touched on issues of money and class and the lifestyle the children could expect from two different families of vastly different means.

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Danielle Bimber, now 30, has lived in this former railroad town about 30 miles southeast of Erie all her life. After graduating from high school in 1992 and attending one year of college, she held minimum-wage jobs at a bank, a gas station and a fitness center.

But she says the job she’s most cut out for is being a mom.

Danielle says she decided to become a surrogate mother when a friend had problems getting pregnant. After all, her first three pregnancies and deliveries were relatively easy.

She didn’t do it for the money, she says, though the $24,000 surrogacy fee was sure to come in handy. Four months before the delivery, Danielle filed for bankruptcy, burdened by debt from her first marriage. On their 2003 tax return, the Bimbers would report income of only $11,400, well below the poverty line for a family of five.

“We were going to take the money that we got and get a camper and [Danielle] wanted to take a cruise,” Doug says. “That’s all down the drain because we’ve used that money for legal fees.”

Danielle arranged to become a surrogate through Surrogate Mothers Inc. of Monrovia, Ind., an agency she found on the Internet.

The firm connected Danielle with an egg donor from Texas and the intended parents: James O. Flynn, now the head of Cleveland State University’s Department of Operations Management and Business Statistics, and Eileen Donich, 60, a retired dentist who is Flynn’s girlfriend.

Danielle would meet Flynn once and Donich twice before agreeing to be their surrogate. She says the couple didn’t seem to be bothered by the prospects of triplets. The news didn’t elicit much reaction of any kind.

Flynn and Donich have strongly defended their actions in the days after the birth -- and before.

The couple met in 1996. Flynn never had any kids; Donich was a policeman’s widow and mother of two grown children. They did not marry, according to court documents, because they had come to rely on the pension she received.

Flynn has said he took a higher-paying job as department head that he didn’t want, and built a 6,000-square-foot home in the affluent Ohio community of Kirtland to accommodate his new family.

Flynn declined to be interviewed by the Associated Press. But in court testimony, the couple said paperwork issues, insurance problems and preparations for the newborns had delayed their return to the hospital.

Donich has said she contacted the hospital every day.

“I asked every single time, ‘Well, if we don’t come today and we come tomorrow, is that all right? Is that a problem?’ ” Donich testified. “They said, ‘Don’t worry about it. They’re on oxygen again. You can’t hold them anyway.’ ”

Flynn said they were waiting to gain physical custody of the triplets before naming them.

Hospital personnel sided with the Bimbers. They said the professor and Donich inquired about insurance coverage and equipment they might need but not about the newborns, and didn’t seem committed to taking the steps to take them home.

Sent home from the hospital three days after her Caesarean section Nov. 19, 2003, Danielle made daily checks with the surrogacy agency and with Donich.

“I expected them to get to the hospital and never leave,” Danielle says. “Never in a million years would I have ever thought that they would have just not come.”

So when Danielle got the OK from the hospital attorney to bring the children home Nov. 25, she was totally unprepared. As a friend drove her to the hospital, she called her husband to tell him the news.

“I had no plans, I had no room, I had no crib,” Danielle says. “I had nothing.”

Hamot Medical Center in Erie gave her diapers, bottles and other baby supplies; the infants would share her daughter’s old crib for two months.

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Like most states, Pennsylvania has no surrogacy law. The triplets’ fate would be in the hands of a judge.

In testimony, Flynn characterized Corry as an economically depressed city with few amenities and a poor school system, and described the Bimbers’ home as small and dirty. He said the Bimbers let their kids watch too much TV, questioned whether they put enough emphasis on education and accused the couple of making poor medical decisions.

By comparison, Flynn said he earned $136,000 a year, lived in an affluent community and has a biological connection to the children.

“We can do a better job in taking care of them. We can spend more time with them than other people -- than Danielle can do,” he said. “We can do a better job educating them and do a better job in taking care of their medical needs.”

First, Erie County Judge Shad Connelly gave the Bimbers temporary custody of the children in May 2004 after invalidating the surrogacy contract. He said it failed to name a legal mother for the triplets.

Then, in January, the judge came down firmly on the side of Danielle Bimber, giving her permanent custody, while acknowledging that she may have been careless with her finances. Connelly declared Danielle “the better caretaker by far.” Flynn had not impressed the judge.

“Throughout the custody trial,” the judge wrote, “plaintiff alternated between complaining about the amount of money he has spent in legal costs and boasting about the affluent neighborhood and schools of his alleged home in Kirtland, Ohio.”

The judge questioned why the professor didn’t take any days off work when the children were with him for 12 days last July.

He also raised concerns about Donich, noting that she usually watched the triplets and baby-sat four nearby grandchildren.

The judge ordered Flynn to pay $1,750 a month for child support and gave him weekend visitation rights; the children were given his last name.

But Flynn says he is not interested in joint custody, and in February, he notified the court he intends to appeal.

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The surrogacy agency has supported Danielle Bimber. They say what happened was a case of failed parenting, not failed surrogacy.

But the complications inherent in surrogate births remain.

A Pennsylvania state senator has proposed a bill requiring court approval of surrogacy contracts, counseling for surrogates and intended parents, and hospital protocols for dealing with surrogate births.

The complications in the battle over Matthew, Mark and Micah continue too.

The 23-year-old college student who donated the eggs for the pregnancy has asked the judge to preserve her parental rights.

Danielle says she has found it nearly unbearable to hear her family portrayed as unfit. Her husband worries about the legal bills. The drawn-out dispute has been more difficult than the actual work of caring for three toddlers, a preschooler and two school-age kids.

At lunchtime on a recent day, the triplets tussled over a place on her lap as Danielle juggled sippy cups and highchair trays. Doug takes breaks during his work day to drive their daughter to preschool, and friends and family also occasionally drop by to lend a hand.

Toys litter the floor. Above the growing expanse of family photos in the living room, a wallpaper border is imprinted with the words, “All things grow with love.”

“I do get stressed out, don’t get me wrong. There’s lots of times I’ve cried and cried and cried and called my attorney stressed out,” Danielle says. “And then I look at these kids and they’re worth it and I know I did the right thing.”