In the folk tune “I Am My Own Grandpa,” intergenerational marriage, old-fashioned procreation and byzantine logic produced a circumstance under which the title was true.
In Barrington last week, truth proved stranger than novelty songs. A 7 3/4-pound baby born in Good Shepherd Hospital is, on one side of his family, his own cousin, more or less.
He is also, sort of, his own cousin on the other side.
Put another way, he has three mothers: birth, genetic and rearing, and they are all related.
James Alan Mack Jr., who turns 3 days old Sunday, may sound like someone from the darkest recesses of William Faulkner’s imagination, but he is in reality closer to what Michael Crichton might dream up.
Here’s how it worked: Linda Mack’s sister, Ann Scacco, donated the egg, which was fertilized at a California clinic by sperm from Mack’s husband, James Sr. The fertilized egg was then implanted in the womb of Katharine Huemann, James Sr.’s sister. The child will be raised by the Macks, after they legally adopt him.
More than just curiosity, Baby James is very close to the cutting edge-scientifically, legally and ethically-of the increasingly prolific world of surrogate motherhood.
The vast majority of cases involve a woman hiring out her body, usually for about $10,000, to carry to term either a fertilized egg from a woman who cannot do so or to carry a baby conceived from the sperm of a man and the egg of the surrogate.
The involvement of separate egg and uterine donors remains rare. In even fewer cases are both donors family members, specialists said.
Yet to the parents who will raise him, Jim Jr. is not thought of first as a triumph of reproductive science. Instead, they see an apparently healthy baby where not long ago there was the prospect of none.
“It’s a miracle. This is the best gift in the world,” Jim Mack Sr. said at a news conference with his wife on Friday. “My sister and her sister, there’s no way we could repay them.”
Linda Mack, 35, had a hysterectomy in 1978, three years before she married Jim, who’s also 35. Shortly after that, the couple moved from Crystal Lake to Bandon, Ore., where they run a well-drilling company.
They tried adoption and in 1991 were to receive twin boys, but at the last minute the mother changed her mind about giving them up.
Scacco, 38, of McHenry County, told Linda she’d like to help. Unaware of that offer, Huemann, 32, of Johnsburg, Ill., said she would like to be a surrogate mother for them.
After the couple found Pacific Fertility Center in Greenbrae, Calif., Scacco donated eggs, seven of which were fertilized in the lab by Jim’s sperm. The embryos were implanted in Huemann’s uterus. One of them took, and the result was on display at the news conference Friday.
When the time comes to explain to the boy how he was born, Linda said, they’ll give him a souvenir book of the process.
“The book is called `Your Pregnancy Week by Week,’ but I scratched it out and called it `Your Aunt Kathy’s Pregnancy with Our Baby Mack Week By Week,’ ” she said.
As one of an estimated 5,500 babies born in the United States through surrogate parenting since about 1979, Jim Jr. represents not even a hiccup in the national birth rate.
Surrogacy is opposed by the Catholic Church and has been outlawed by four states. Some biomedical ethicists have grave doubts about it. Many fertility specialists refuse to get involved. And lawyers believe the implications of such births are a long way from being settled.
Even some of the comments from Linda Mack revealed that in the most loving of situations, surrogacy remains a delicate matter.
“My mother said, `How could you do this?’ ” she said, adding that the woman learned to accept it after Linda taught her more about the procedure.
“My older sister said, `I couldn’t give up a child, but I could give up eggs,”‘ Linda said.
And Linda said she herself was not wholly comfortable with the procedure. “I felt a little jealous and a little uneasy that I couldn’t see the (pregnancy) progressing,” she said.
But all three had undergone psychological testing before the procedure and Linda said her sister-in-law, Katharine, “always said, `I’m mentally prepared (to give up the baby). Don’t you have a plane crash; I’m not prepared to have five children.”‘
Katharine, who was still hospitalized Friday, declined to comment. Linda said Katharine was recovering from her Caesarean operation, her fifth such procedure.
To help ease the pangs, Linda Mack said that, as befits a high-tech pregnancy, the Macks and the Huemanns kept in touch via fax machine and frequent phone calls.
The Huemanns explained the pregnancy to their four children this way, Linda said: “They explained Aunt Linda has parts that are missing. This is something we could do for her.”
However carefully the family members had to tread, it was a far cry from the most celebrated case of surrogate motherhood, known to the public as the “Baby M” case.
More Top Picks Best Baby Food Makers For Homemade Food
In that East Coast tangle, a classic case of surrogacy except for the outcome, William and Elizabeth Stern paid Mary Beth Whitehead $10,000 to allow an egg of hers to be fertilized by William’s sperm, to carry and deliver the child and then to turn it over to the Sterns.
When the baby was born in March 1986, Whitehead changed her mind and tried to flee with it. The courts eventually ruled that Whitehead was the baby’s mother and granted her visitation rights, but custody was given to the Sterns.
But advocates of surrogacy contend that such cases are the dramatic exception to an undramatic rule. Ralph Fagen, co-director of the Center for Surrogate Parenting, in Beverly Hills, Calif., contends that only 11 of the 5,500 cases have gone to litigation.
But Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Biomedical Ethics, said he wonders how many more cases there are in which the parties may not end up in court, but which produce bad feelings or demands for further payments.
“I’m made nervous simply when someone says they’re having a baby or making a baby for money,” said Caplan, whose book “If I Were a Rich Man, Could I Buy a Pancreas?” includes several essays on surrogate parenthood. “I don’t think anybody knows how many cases have been settled quietly.”
Yet he said he considered the Mack case to be different.
“I think it is ethically heroic for family members to step forward and have a baby for a relative,” he said. “That’s a neat thing to do. That’s the kind of thing we think, in some ways, families should do.”
Dr. Edward Marut was more skeptical. He is medical director of the fertility center at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, which does not do surrogacy procedures but refers prospective parents to other places if they insist.
Marut said he knows of no such clinics in Illinois, one of 35 states that has no laws regulating surrogate parenthood.
“I just don’t believe that a woman can very casually have a baby and give it away even to a family member without having at least some subtle psychological ramifications,” Marut said. “Women who give up babies for adoption willingly, I think they don’t go very long at any point in time for the rest of their lives without thinking about what might have been.”
One in six couples is infertile, defined as not being able to produce a pregnancy in a year’s trying, he said. Among couples in their 30s, the infertility rate doubles, he said.
It is only in the past 5 1/2 years, experts said, that technology has allowed an embryo to be implanted in a woman whose egg was not involved in the procedure.
Advancements in treatment mean that about three-fourths or more of all infertility patients now wind up being able to have babies, he said.
Couples can end up paying $35,000 to $60,000 for the procedure when they must hire a surrogate mother; the Macks said their procedure cost $10,000. The cost is never fully and only rarely partially covered by insurance, Fagen said.
At the Center for Surrogate Parenting, which claims to be the only surrogate clinic in the United States, the number of clients has been increasing by about 15 percent a year, said co-director Fagen.
“Surrogacy is very much on the increase,” he said, not only because the technology is more advanced but because female infertility is on the rise.
Fagen said his experience leads him to believe public acceptance of it may be on the increase, as well.
Parents are encouraged to tell their children about the circumstances of their birth, he said. And he believes that these children typically are well-adjusted.
“If you ever wanted a child who was wanted and planned for, this was a perfect example,” Fagen said.