American Notes Babies

That a healthy test-tube baby was born in an Ann Arbor, Mich., hospital last week is nothing so extraordinary; some 2,000 children conceived outside the womb have been born since 1978. But this particular little girl was born to a woman who is not her mother. Last summer a woman who could not carry a child had an egg fertilized by her husband's sperm in a laboratory. The embryo was then transferred to the womb of another woman.

The surrogate mother, Shannon Boff, 23, of Redford Township, Mich., is an old pro at the stand-in trade: she had a baby last year through the standard artificial-insemination procedure in which the fertilized egg was hers. "I think I'm going into retirement," says Boff, a married student with a 3-year- old boy of her own. "Any more babies coming from me are going to be keepers."