TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081991/0819140.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.9 KB | 126 lines

                                                                                LIVING, Page 58

All in the Family


How does that gutsy South Dakota grandma feel about being pregnant
with her daughter's twins?

By J. MADELEINE NASH/ABERDEEN


    MOM PREGNANT WITH HER OWN GRANDKIDS!

    TWO-HEADED MOTHER GIVES BIRTH TO TWINS!


    Eyes twinkling, hands folded across her swelling belly,
Arlette Schweitzer imagines the headlines a tabloid might
concoct to sensationalize her admittedly unusual condition. The
exercise amuses her no end -- probably because there is nothing
the least bit bizarre about this cheerful 42-year-old librarian
who lives with her husband Dan, a fluffy white cat named Boom
Boom and a cocker spaniel named Special on a tree-lined street
in Aberdeen, S. Dak. What a visitor notices above all in their
cozy, split-level house is the photographs of smiling kids:
grandchildren, nieces and nephews and, over the living-room
sofa, two large color portraits of the Schweitzers' son Curtis,
26, and daughter Christa, 22.

    Now that Christa has, well, got her mother in a family
way, newspaper writers and TV crews are camped outside. Since
the New York Times put her on Page One, producers for talk
shows have kept calling, photographers have continually rung her
doorbell, and somehow, through it all, Arlette Schweitzer has
continued to radiate a sense of calm. "Christa has no . . . ,
" a reporter hesitantly ventures. "That's right," replies
Arlette, her voice as clear and as strong as a church bell.
"Christa has no uterus."

    When this misfortune was discovered eight years ago, her
mother patiently explains, Christa was only 14, and even then
she was absolutely devastated by the news. "When Christa was
just a little girl," recalls Arlette, "all she could talk about
was becoming a mother." Two years later, during a visit to the
Mayo Clinic, Arlette observed to a physician who examined her
daughter, "I wish you could transplant my uterus because I
certainly have no use for it anymore." The doctor looked at her
curiously. "He asked me how old I was. I said I was 36, which
I was at the time. Suddenly it was like a light bulb switched
on for all three of us. She was born without a uterus. I was
young enough to lend her mine."

    In February of this year, at the University of Minnesota
Hospital and Clinic in Minneapolis, eggs taken from Christa's
ovaries were fertilized with her husband Kevin Uchytil's sperm,
then implanted in Arlette's uterus. Ten days later, Arlette
telephoned her daughter and son-in-law, who live in Sioux City,
Iowa. "Congratulations!" she triumphantly exclaimed. "You're
pregnant." Not long thereafter, Christa, viewing an ultrasound
picture of her mother's tummy, saw two heartbeats and realized
that her mother would give birth to twins. "How lucky could I
be!" Christa said. "This just takes my breath away."

    Becoming a surrogate mother, stresses Arlette, is sort of
like running a triathlon: the experience may be exhilarating,
but it is not entirely painless. For 89 days, she had to inject
herself with hormones. "I still have scars on both my hips," she
says with a grin. "But as long as you know there's an end to it,
I think you can bear almost anything. For 89 days, I think you
could even walk on burning coals if you had to. I feel so
responsible. This really is a one-shot chance, and so I'm trying
to do everything right."

    Arlette grew up in Lemmon, S. Dak., where her father was
a jeweler. At 15, she surprised her parents by dropping out of
school to marry Dan, now a sales representative for the Keebler
Co. She had her children early and was for years a stay-at-home
mom. "I played house, and I loved every minute of it," she
says. Then when Christa was in third grade, Arlette went back
to school. For the past two years, she has taken charge of the
library at Aberdeen's Simmons Junior High. "My whole life," she
says impishly, "I've done in reverse. I feel like Frank
Sinatra. I've done it my way."

    The idea of surrogate parenting has kept professional
ethicists and jurists wringing their hands ever since the first
case surfaced in 1978. Is it proper to "rent" a womb by paying
a stranger to bear a child? What if the surrogate mother changes
her mind? But now a heartwarming situation has come along in
which the moral quandaries pale before that most basic of human
instincts: the desire of a parent to take on and take away the
pain of a child.

    With refreshing, down-to-earth pragmatism, Arlette, a
devout Roman Catholic, says she had no doubts about her
decision. "If you can give the gift of life," she asks, "why
not? If medical science affords that opportunity, why not take
it?" Far more problematic, in her view, is the more typical
situation -- such as that involving Mary Beth Whitehead in 1987
-- in which a surrogate mother is also the biological mother.
"These are Christa's eggs and Kevin's sperm," Arlette says.
"There's no doubt about whose children these are!"

    Asked by her seven-year-old grandson whether Grandma was
going to have a baby, Arlette replied, "Christa and Kevin's
babies are going to use Grandma's uterus until they're old
enough to be born." That made perfect sense to him. "Children
are very accepting," observes Arlette. "It's adults who cloud
the matter. Maybe it's not quite the same old birds and bees.
Maybe now there are birds and bees and butterflies too."

    So why not go ahead and congratulate the medical
butterflies responsible for this unorthodox biological event?
That's what Arlette and Dan and Christa and Kevin plan to do
when they welcome their miracle babies into the world this
October. "Dan will be up there coaching me," imagines Arlette
fondly, "while Kevin and Christa will be getting ready to grab
the babies and run." Then Arlette and Dan will settle back to
their normal role -- that of happy grandparents.