# The Baby M Case The Baby M case (In re Baby M, 1988) was a landmark surrogacy dispute in New Jersey that significantly shaped surrogacy law in the United States. Mary Beth Whitehead agreed to be a traditional surrogate for William and Elizabeth Stern, meaning she was both the gestational carrier and genetic mother of the child. She was artificially inseminated with William Stern's sperm and agreed to relinquish her parental rights after birth for $10,000. After giving birth in 1986, Whitehead changed her mind and refused to surrender the baby (referred to as "Baby M"). She fled with the infant to Florida, leading to a legal battle when the Sterns obtained a court order for the baby's return. The New Jersey Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the surrogacy contract was invalid and unenforceable as it violated public policy. The court held that paying for surrogacy constituted illegal baby selling and it went against Whiteheads voluntariness as she didn’t know before signing the contract how attached she would become to the child. However, using the "best interests of the child" standard, the court awarded custody to William Stern (the biological father) while granting Whitehead visitation rights as the legal mother. This case prompted many states to develop clearer laws regarding surrogacy arrangements and highlighted the complex ethical and legal issues surrounding reproductive technology and parental rights.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ ## Conversation With Rushika About This Contract Curious what you think. Based on the contractual arguments from last time, you could argue she didn’t fit the volitional test because she had no experience with taking a baby to term. This would make it very hard for anyone to get into surrogacy though because a couple would be highly skeptical about having a surrogate for the first time. A world without any surrogacy seems like a worse one because people who want kids with their own genetics but can’t cause of some other reason would be forced to adopt. Thoughts? We allow prostitution in this country to people who are poor and people who are not necessarily of sound mind. Either we must make a regulation changing incentives (like you can’t be paid money to be a surrogate, rather money gets donated to a charity in your name by the people paying for the surrogacy) so it’s not targeting poor people to sell their bodies or we allow that particularly drastic form of capitalism. In our world especially there’s lots of incentives to do it against your will as a woman. But that’s just capitalism. You can break and sell your body in numerous ways in our system. Are you suggesting the world would be a better place if the ability to do any terrible or hard labor wasn’t available at all for selfish incentives? You still can still do it but it always gets donated to charity? To be logically consistent you would have to do this with everything. That sounds intuitively good but this would deprive tons of poor people from making money and they would likely starve or live in bad conditions. If we allow some versions of doing terrible or hard labor what do we allow then? In this specific case of surrogacy, I feel we’d have a lot less people doing surrogacy if this act was put in place because people wouldn’t be as motivated to do it as they don’t get money. Less surrogacy and therefore less options for people to have children who can’t. Honestly, I have no idea what my opinion on this is. Capitalism makes this feel like a lose lose. I just don’t like capitalism That’s my whole problem and doing anything in this internal situation is a bandaid to our financial system at best. Like straight up if you wanna protect people from pressure then. Don’t make people sell their bodies to survive. Don’t make them need money to survive.