TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93TT0220> <title> Aug. 16, 1993: Want a Child? Take My Son </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993 Aug. 16, 1993 Overturning The Reagan Era </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> ESSAY, Page 68 Want a Child? Take My Son </hdr> <body> Barbara Ehrenreich The only good thing about the Baby Jessica case is that they refrained from splitting her, Solomon-style, right down the middle. Apparently, the judges agonized for weeks and only narrowly ruled out an ounce-by-ounce surgical distribution of the baby among the claimants. Instead they decided to go with the ancient Law of DNA, which says that children should be as genetically similar to their parents as possible. This, of course, makes perfectly good sense if you are raising those children to be a source of transplantable organs--heart, kidney, liver, etc.--for your own eventual use. But if you are not raising your children to be organ donors--if you simply happen to enjoy their company--then there is no reason to pay any attention to the Law of DNA, which originated in the era of pterodactyls and lava pools. Consider: there are 5.5 billion people on earth, many of them still at the drool-soaked, incontinent stage so appealing to would-be parents. Of these, millions are unclaimed orphans; at least in Rio de Janeiro, homeless children are numerous enough that off-duty policemen are said to shoot them for sport. Could not some of those excess Brazilian street children have been shipped to the Schmidts instead of Jessica, who already had two enthusiastic parents on duty? Then there are all the thousands of affluent, unorphaned American children whose parents, for one reason or another, can no longer afford to care for them. Take my son--as the comedians used to say in the Borscht Belt--please. Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Schmidt: take him and send Jessica home to the DeBoers. All right, he's a little older than what you had in mind, but we are not talking about secondhand goods. My son is a fine, upstanding college student. He is not one of those fraternity types whose idea of a good time involves gang rape and a bout of projectile vomiting. Nor is he some freak you don't dare kiss good-night for fear of being impaled on the nose jewelry. In fact when he was Jessica's age, everyone wanted him. Strangers would come up on the street and say, "Hey, how much for that good-lookin' white kid in the stroller?" And I would of course be deeply flattered and mention what I took to be a reasonable sum. But let a child develop some expensive disease or learning disorder--or, as in my case, let him be accepted at one of our nation's finest Ivy League universities--and suddenly there are no more rival sets of parents to be found. Do the Schmidts or the Twiggs (who are battling for switched-at-birth biodaughter Kimberly in Florida) realize that the flip side of the Child as Genetic Property is the Child as Perpetual Liability? Have they been to The Gap to get an estimate on what it costs to minimally outfit a child or teen? Do they have any idea how much therapy their reluctant daughters are likely to need, not to mention orthodontia and family-planning visits? Are they aware of the bail required for your typical minor drug or driving infraction? Do they fully understand that if worse comes to worst and things get totally out of hand, Jessica may someday even want to go to college? Just as with my older child, I did everything possible to curb my son's academic ambitions. I tore up his homework whenever I could find it; I offered him funny-smelling cigarettes to smoke. I left brochures around the house promoting careers in landscaping, sanitation and the bicycle-courier profession. I sent his resume to Colin Powell. Still, I was proud, in a morbid fashion, when he was accepted at a university so cutting edge and intellectually advanced that you can be marked down for spelling "reality" without the quote marks. Naturally, I tried sending them "$25,000" instead of the first year's tuition, but this postmodern witticism fell flat in the university's business office. Desperately, I called and argued that I barely knew the boy--except for the occasional trail of destruction in the kitchen--and that for Mother's Day, year after year, he had always managed to find a lovely, floral-decorated card with the chilling inscription: "You've been like a mother to me." Furthermore, I told them I doubted I was his actual biomother, what with all this switching at birth. He could, for all I knew, be Kimberly or Jessica, who each have two sets of potential parents to bill. But the university officials only smiled maliciously and said, "Sorry, we've got the DNA tests to prove that he's yours within a 1% margin of error. Send $25,000 without the quote marks or we'll be coming by to take away your furniture, plus which we'll make the kid join the a cappella choir." Hence my implacable opposition to the Law of DNA. It distracts people like the Schmidts and the Twiggs from the millions of poor children who might actually have some use for their loving attentions. It forces them to focus these attentions on the minute number of children they are biochemically related to, even if those children want nothing to do with them. And what is infinitely worse, the Law of DNA also restricts each child to a maximum of only two parents. Maybe two was enough in the old days, when all you really needed from a parent was a viable DNA strand. But obviously, with college tuitions approaching the median family income, we need a whole new approach to the legal definition of kin. So here is my solution: send Jessica home to the only parents she knows. And as for the Schmidts and the Twiggs and all those other couples who are yearning for the vivid and moving experience of bioparenthood--they can start by sending me a check. </body> </article> </text>