other in full that the contract she is to agree to is not reversible, is immense. Not all cases involving surrogate parenting result in battles for custody. Ironically, in some cases the battle is to decide which party will be forced to take the child as their own. One example of this unusual incidence occurred in 1982. Judy Stiver, a twenty-six year old house wife agreed to bare a child for forty-six year old Alexander Malahoff and his wife for a fee of $10,000 dollars. The Malahoffs had wanted a child to strengthen their marriage, but the couple separated during the pregnancy. It was then found that the baby would be born with microcephaly- a handicap that not only left the child with an abnormally small head (which is usually indicative of retardation), but the infant was also left without a home to be released into. The natural mother said that she felt no maternal bond with the baby but she agreed to the intravenous antibiotics to combat the baby’s life-threatening infection. Malahoff, however, instructed the medical staff to take no steps or measures to treat the strep infection or otherwise care for the infant. Both sets of parents then went on to renounce their responsibility for the child. The hospital obtained a court order authorizing doctors to treat the baby, and the infection was cured. The baby, however, had no home to be released into from the hospital and was consequently placed in foster care. The case became an example of the horrible possibilities such arrangements can entail when a baby is born with a handicap. This type of incident should be avoided by making it infinitely clear in the beginning of the process of the surrogacy agreement that, under no condition will there be a breech of contract. Although it may seem that all cases end in tragedy, there are in fact many cases in which the end result is precisely the way all deciding parties had intended it to be, with the child being placed in a happy and lov...
