Baby Knows Best

By Jill Smolowe

Remember Horton the elephant? One day he stumbles upon Mayzie, a bird who has no interest in hatching her egg. After coaxing Horton to mount a tree and sit upon her nest, she vanishes. As events unfold in Dr. Seuss's whimsical Horton Hatches the Egg, Horton sits resolutely, unbudged by jeers, inclement weather or nasty humans, who cart him off, tree and all, to be a sideshow in a circus. When Mayzie happens by Horton's tent and sees that most of the work is done, she demands her egg back. Just then, the egg cracks open and out pops a tiny elephant with wings. Horton triumphantly returns home to cheers with his baby. It's perfectly clear to all (save Mayzie) who the real parent is.

Parents of the '90s tend to read this 1940 story searching for dark lessons about birth parents, surrogacy and who knows what else. But small children still love it. That's because the Mayzie vs. Horton dustup affirms what they already know: real parents are people who are dedicated and unshakably there for you, day in and day out. Period. In their limited world view, the parent-child connection is not spun from DNA. Rather, it's woven with the mundane strands of everyday life, the countless gestures, large and small, that repeatedly reaffirm: I see you, I love you; I am yours, you are mine.

I say this as a mother who has come to parenthood through adoption. True, my daughter Becky and I don't "look alike" (an issue on people's minds last week, as if physical resemblance somehow legitimizes or alters the parent-child bond). But I assure you, Becky's claim on me is exclusive and has been in evidence since the age of 14 months, when she raced across a room yelling, "My mommy!" then tried to shove a child off my lap. I've met hundreds of adopted children; not one has needed a court or a mirror to figure out who his or her parents are.

Neither do Callie Marie Johnson and Rebecca Chittum. When nature and nurture collide, it's only the adults who require assistance sorting things out. But the truth is, in the nanosecond before the sides square off in these divide-the-baby cases, yanking our sympathies one way or another, even we know who the parents are. Instinctively, we know that no child truly benefits from a shattering of his universe. (Remember Kimberly Mays? Her five-year switched-at-birth nightmare left her, for a time, despising both sets of parents.) We want to believe, as King Solomon did, that real parents won't split their child in two.

Courts, however, will and do. If the parties in the Virginia mix-up choose to listen to a judge rather than their hearts and common sense, precedent favors the biological claim. Remember Baby Jessica and Baby Richard, each tearfully pried from adoptive parents to begin life anew with birth parents? More recent and extreme cases, like the two-year-old Maryland boy plucked from a loving foster mother to be reared by a biological mother who had killed his sister, have prompted legislators to pass laws that give more weight to the "best interests" of the child.

But that standard is fuzzy and provides little guidance when the clash involves an assortment of eggs, sperm and wombs. When Marybeth Whitehead decided to back out of her surrogacy contract, the court ordered a custodial arrangement that amounted to parenting by committee.

It shouldn't be that way. A child's claim on a mother--or father--should be every bit as unambiguous (and unbigamous) as the marital claim two adults make on each other. Except in cases of abuse or neglect, once that claim is forged, it should be unassailable. Kids know who their parents are; we should too.