Marybeth Whitehead
Mary Beth Whitehead is an American woman whose dispute with William and Elizabeth Stern over a traditional surrogacy agreement became known as the Baby M case. In 1988, the Supreme Court of New Jersey voided the paid surrogacy contract as contrary to law and public policy, restored Whitehead's parental status with visitation, and awarded custody to the child's biological father, William Stern, based on the child's best interests.
The case drew intense national attention and has been widely discussed in news coverage and legal scholarship for its influence on U.S. surrogacy law and debates over reproductive rights and adoption policy.
Background
Whitehead was born Mary Beth Messer in New Jersey, the sixth of eight children in a large working-class family. Leaving school at fifteen, she married young and became a mother at seventeen. In her memoir A Mother’s Story, she later wrote that she had “grown up believing that the purpose of my life was to have children.”Her parents, Joseph and Catherine Messer, lived in Holiday, Florida, where they followed the Baby M hearings from afar. Contemporary reports described the Messers watching televised coverage of the New Jersey court proceedings and reacting with shock as Judge Harvey Sorkow awarded custody of the infant to William Stern and upheld the surrogacy contract. Catherine Messer was quoted as saying she was “devastated” by the decision and felt her granddaughter had been “stolen,” while Joseph Messer questioned what rights grandparents possessed under such rulings. The couple's televised reaction, described by national reporters, became part of the broader human-interest coverage surrounding the Baby M case.
During cross-examination, attorney Harold Skoloff questioned Whitehead about her brother, Donald Messer, whom the court record described as having “abducted his two children from Monmouth County and taken them to Florida,” during a custody dispute. The line of questioning was viewed by contemporaneous reporters as an attempt to draw a parallel between Messer's actions and Whitehead's own decision to flee to Florida with Baby M, suggesting a family pattern of defying court orders. Whitehead testified that she had been unaware of her brother's situation. Two other siblings were also mentioned in press coverage for separate legal difficulties that year, illustrating the family's struggles during the period.
Whitehead, married and the mother of two, entered into a traditional surrogacy contract arranged through the Infertility Center of New York. The agreement provided that she would be artificially inseminated with William Stern's sperm, carry the pregnancy, and, after birth, relinquish her parental rights so that Stern's wife, Elizabeth, could adopt the child; Whitehead was to receive $10,000 plus expenses.