#maybe if we didn’t treat adoption as a fertility treatment some of the issues listed wouldn’t be a thing

[valengory1234]

Would you believe this article is about adoptive parents?

[toongrrl-blog]

The Mommy Myth: Threats from Within (Part One)

Okay time to see the Moms “gone bad” and other Moms who required a lot of empathy but only got vilified on the media or were given anxiety inducing media. 

This was the era of the tabloid show like A Current Affair and America’s Most Wanted, “the crack baby epidemic”, depraved maternal figures, teen moms, smothering mothers, Lifetime movies where shit goes wrong, surrogacy, and the news that no you cannot let your kids go walking to the park by themselves. The era of sensationalism made no care for maternal ambivalence nor for the nuances of individual mother’s lives, only for black and white. Heroes or villains. No grey area. 

The “deviant mothers” featured were vilified for being supposedly narcissist and self-indulgent, odd given that I previously covered celebrity moms. But the celeb mom is portrayed as self-indulgent and narcissist on behalf of her kids and everyone who looks at her. Throwing money on diets, spa treatments, workouts, beauty treatments, and clothes were “necessary” as it was so someone had something pretty to look at. But have needs or desires that had nothing to do with your family, you were so bad! 

Scene: Suburban New Jersey, 1985. Dr. Elizabeth and Mr. William Stern wanted a baby but Dr. Elizabeth Stern was in her late thirties and had multiple sclerosis and they went to the New York Infertility Institute and were approved for surrogacy and hooked up with Mary Beth Whitehead, a homemaker and high school dropout with two children and a husband who was a sanitation worker. As she said:

I don’t have an education. I don’t have a skill. The only skill I know I do well is being a mother.

A contract was signed where Mary Beth would be paid $10,000 upon the Sterns receiving the baby, where she’d be impregnated with William Stern’s sperm and the Sterns would pay her medical expenses and a $7,500 finders fee to the Institute. On March 27, 1986 Mary Beth gave birth to a baby she named Sara and she had a change of heart and decided to keep the baby. The Sterns wanted the baby and the judge awarded temporary custody to the Sterns, who named the baby Melissa. When William came to pick up Baby M, the Whiteheads bailed for Florida with the baby, leaving their two older kids with the grandparents there and lived on the run (BTW this is a perfect scenario for a movie, I think Raising Arizona was loosely inspired by this).

Mary Beth’s actions flew in the face of what “surrogate moms were supposed to do”, they were supposed to be like Elizabeth Kane in 1980 and kiss the baby goodbye to a more affluent life (Kane eventually testified on behalf of Mary Beth). Or get pregnant and give the baby away to your infertile sister or be like Glenn Close in The Big Chill where she let her single friend sleep with her husband so she can have a baby of her own. Like Susan J. Douglas and Meredith Michaels, I subscribe to Mo’Nique’s school of thought regarding your friends and your man (maybe the Smug Marrieds should watch this and think twice about flaunting their rings to Bridget Jones):

People had a lot of shit to say about the Baby M situation, it involved issues like classism and sexism, who deserved the baby? The woman who carried her for nine months but was lower middle class and married to the garbageman or the biochemist who donated the sperm and paid the money? The trial started in the New Jersey Superior Court on January 5, 1987 where Whitehead was hit with several old-fashioned stereotypes about women: they can’t make up their minds and they are hysterical. Gary N. Skoloff, attorney to the Sterns, went Maddy Perez like the Whiteheads were a pot of chili. Skoloff listed 35 reasons why Mary Beth shouldn’t get the kid, amongst them was her mental health and her marriage to the garbageman with a alky problem. Also Mr. Stern recorded a phone conversation with Mary Beth unbeknownst to her. She was frantic: the Sterns had a judge freeze her family’s assets (which included the home, furnishings inside, car, and bank accounts). The media didn’t hear that or report it but they did on the desperate Mary Beth saying “I’m going to do it Bill....I’m going to do it; you’ve pushed me to it...I gave her life. I can take her life away”. The subtext also that being under educated and working class were not factors in making a good parent.

Honestly if your assets were frozen by someone who had the means and connections, wouldn’t you be unhinged? I think that Mary Beth needed to be treated for postpartum psychological issues rather than reviled as “The Crazy Woman” and don’t we make the worst arguments, imagine if you appeared saying and doing dumb shit like Bridget Jones and it was played on TV? Also on the tapes she was recorded as saying “I’ve been breastfeeding her for four months. Don’t you think she’s bonded to me? Bill, I sleep in the same bed with her. She won’t even sleep by herself...she knows my smell, she knows who I am--don’t I count for anything?” The media didn’t show that. More judgments came as her background opened up: her husband is an alcoholic, she and her husband separated for a while and she was on welfare in the past, her son had school issues (imagine how many affluent parents have kids with that problem), daughter Tuesday had frostbite when the furnace broke down (I’m not hating, winter in the East Coast sounds rough), and they went to the slut-shaming route when they got Mary Beth to admit she worked as a “barroom dancer”. 

And now it got really nasty: she didn’t play patty cake right (!), took pots and pans away from the baby and gave her a stuffed panda (uh I don’t know what kind of pots and pans they were around but I’m Latina), she dyed her prematurely gray hair brown (oh the horrors!)...a word from Karen Wheeler for now:

All these made her not an ideal mother. Okay am I getting some pissed off women in this post? Unicorn colored haired girls? Bottle blondes? Fake redheads? Anyone covering the grey? Henna heads? Well soon feminists and celebs like Our Queen Meryl Streep, Gloria Steinem, Carly Simon (one of our reigning Ladies of shady breakup songs), Lois Gould, and Betty Friedan all issued a statement of solidarity with Mary Beth Whitehead reading “By these standards, we are all unfit mothers”.  Thank Jesus for this action of solidarity because the media was playing one of it’s favorite games: pit women against each other. Dr. Elizabeth and Mary Beth were represented as doctor vs. housewife, barren vs. fertile, educated vs. under educated; so far the media was on Dr. Elizabeth’s and her husband’s side, which was okay for her but while the media cut her slack for being a quiet ride-along who was professional and educated and “of the right class” she got away with things that the media wouldn’t be kind with. While the media covered Mary Beth’s deteriorating mental health, they didn’t cover her testimony which read like a list of things that would normally get moms judged:

She wasn’t going to cut back on her work because “I didn’t realize how much time is required to raise a child.”

She claimed she was the “psychological mother” and therefore the true mom.

Her husband’s testimony said they’d have the kid in full-time day care (probably a nice day care like the academy in Daddy Day Care).

Activities with Baby M were trips to Bloomingdales.

During a cross-examination, Dr. Stern said she wouldn’t want to see the baby if Mary Beth was awarded custody

So what of Mr. Stern? He was basically cosplaying Ted Wheeler.

And he said “Fathers have feeling, too” which made him appear like the victim to the public when he had the means and access to a lawyer who went savage on Mary Beth. On April 1st (haven’t you heard, irony is dead), Judge Harvey Sorkow awarded custody to the Stern family on grounds that they provide better care than Mary Beth could (or afford). Mary Beth Whitehead was denied visitation rights by the judge, enabled the Sterns to adopt Baby M who was officially named Melissa Stern. Later that month it got bittersweet for Mary Beth: she regained brief visitation rights but got divorced and she remarried and had two more children, which the Sterns’ lawyer said was proof of “her personality problems” (wow imagine if the Duggars were tarred with that brush) while she tried to fight for longer visits. The next year saw Sorkow’s ruling thrown out by the appeals court on grounds of condoning baby selling, the adoption invalidated, and Mary Beth’s standing as mother restored. She got visitation rights, years later Mary Beth and older daughter Tuesday went on Dr. Phil where they talked about the case. Tuesday said the case contributed to the divorce and the strain was too much for the late Mr. Whitehead, who died from cancer years before their appearance. Mary Beth said she wouldn’t recommend this and if she had the chance, she’d never do it again, being a surrogate mother. At that time, Melissa was 16 and according to Mary Beth their relationship wasn’t good and she did attend Tuesday’s wedding though but claimed the Sterns made it difficult for the two half-sisters to have a relationship. Then five years later, Melissa was a junior at George Washington University as a sorority member and religion major and found it strange when the case was brought up in her Bioethics class, she hoped to become a minister and a mother and at 18 she allowed the Sterns to fully adopt her, terminating Mary Beth’s rights. 

And those fixing their lips to say that the Sterns had more rights because they could afford a “good life” for her? I leave this for you to watch.

So the media savaged Mary Beth Whitehead, a working-class white mother who gave birth to a healthy and chubby baby, how did the media treat poor, drug-addicted black mothers and their “crack babies”? (TL;DR, it was bad, very bad, you know it’s bad bad really really bad!). 

Up next...and for all you moms dealing with the judgements from an unhelpful world, here are words from Lois Foutley