Breached Birth: Reflections on Race, Gender, and Reproductive Discourse in the 1980s Valerie Hartouni (bio) On September 19, 1990, Anna Johnson, a black, single parent of one, gave birth to a six-pound, ten-ounce white baby boy in Santa Ana, California. Two days later she surrendered custody of the boy to his genetic parents, Mark and Crispina Calvert, in order to avoid his being temporarily placed in a foster home while Orange County Superior Court Judge Richard N. Parslow, Jr., reviewed Johnson’s suit for parental rights and custody. The Calverts had contracted with Johnson the previous year to bring to term their in vitro fertilized embryo. In exchange for $10,000, Johnson agreed to be surgically impregnated with the Calvert zygote and to deliver the infant with whom she shared no genetic link once she was herself delivered. Claiming, however, that she had bonded with the fetus in the latter months of pregnancy and that the Calverts had, in any event, breached their contract both by defaulting on a prearranged payment schedule and by not caring adequately for her or the fetus—actions that, Johnson’s lawyers maintained, constituted “fetal neglect”—Johnson sued for custody. “The child is not genetically mine, but I have more feelings for him than his natural parents do,” she charged in a Los Angeles Times interview several months before the October delivery date. “If they are distant and uncaring now, what are they going to be like when he comes?” 1 Maintaining that they had done even more for Johnson than they had been required to do by contract—they had “dr[iven] her [End Page 73] to her doctor’s appointments, g[iven] her money, brought her food, and asked how she was doing”—the Calverts contended that if anyone had been victimized financially or emotionally by this alternative reproductive arrangement it was they, rather than Johnson. 2 By their account, Johnson had acted in an increasingly unpredictable and exploitative manner: she demanded, for example, that they accelerate their payments on the $10,000 owed her, which they did, and she then threatened to keep the baby if they failed to produce the remaining balance. In their view, it was individual greed rather than maternal need that had motivated Johnson to sue for custody. Circumstantially damning in this regard was not only the frequency with which Johnson had begun to appear on the popular talk-show circuit, but the public revelation, shortly after she filed suit, that she was facing two felony counts for welfare fraud. 3 Having allegedly failed to fully report her income for a ten-month period in 1989, Johnson was said to have received excess food stamps and AFDC benefits amounting to approximately $5,000 in overpayment. While this was certainly not “the crime of the century” as Johnson’s lawyer pejoratively characterized the district attorney’s earnest prosecution of the case, 4 during the Reagan/Bush years welfare fraud had come to exercise a decidedly devestating hold on the national imagination and was both represented and regarded as the crime of the decade. Indeed, within Reagan’s America, the always black, always urban, supposedly lazy welfare-dependent single mother or “welfare queen” functioned as a condensed symbol, deployed to “explain” not only the deeper pathology in black family life, but the destruction of the American way of life. 5 Although the felony charges against Johnson clearly worked to [End Page 74] discredit her testimony—lawyers for the Calverts lost little time in pointing out the wide shadow of doubt these charges cast on her integrity and the authenticity of her claims—in the end, I want to argue, it was largely irrelevant whether and in what sense they were actually true. Occupying and occupied by the category “black woman,” Johnson entered the public discourse an already densely scripted figure whose deviance, whatever its particular form, was etched in flesh. Situated within a racially stratified society in which color is always already constituted and read through a received, if ever shifting, stockpile of commonplace images, Johnson entered the public discourse in terms whose meanings were narrowly circumscribed historically, symbolically, and politically, terms that rendered the integrity and authenticity...