When Is A Mother Not A Mother? (cover story)

To the small and curious class of English words that have double and contradictory meanings, "moot," for example, and "cleave" the word "mother" can now be added. Within the space of a single dazzling week this fall, this hoary old noun was redefined so thoroughly, in such mutually exclusive ways, that what it means now depends on which edition of the newspaper you read. On October 23, 1990 in Orange County, California, Superior Court Judge Richard Parsiow decided that the rightful mother of baby Boy Johnson was not Anna Johnson, the black "gestational surrogate" who, for $10,000, carried him and birthed him, but Crispina Calvert, the wombless Asian-born woman who provided the egg from which, after in vitro fertilization with her husband's sperm and implantation in Johnson, the baby grew. The New Jersey Supreme Court put a damper on Baby M-style contract motherhood, now commonly referred to as "traditional surrogacy," as though it came over with the pilgrims, but it seems to have spurred science and commerce on to more ingenious devices.