All in The Family

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.