Surrogate motherhood has captured the attention of both the media and the legal profession in the past several years. Courts faced with litigation on surrogate motherhood have uniformly taken the position that these arrangements are contrary to public policy, and have refused to compel the specific performance of these contracts? It is my position that these rulings have been correct, and that if surrogate motherhood is to be considered legally acceptable in this country (which I think it should not be ) then state legislatures must act to legalize the contracts drawn up for these arrangements.

The procedure for surrogate motherhood is usually initiated by either a married couple, of whom the wife is infertile, or by a single man. In either case, a contract is made with a fertile woman; the woman is to be artificially inseminated with the man's sperm. Generally, this is done in exchange for a large sum of money. At the time that the baby is born, the surrogate mother surrenders the child for adoption by the wife (in the case of a married couple) and presumably by the father to regularize his relationship with the child.

The hospital emergency department- those who receive care there and those who provide it-has changed rapidly in recent years. The number of patients going to emergency departments is steadily increasing, and the care which they seek is not confined to traditional emergency care. More and more patients utilize the hospital emergency department for routine health problems, either as substitutes for personal health care providers or as replacements when their own providers are unavailable.

Physicians, nurses, and other health care providers in the hospital emergency department have changed from generalists to emergency care specialists. The rotating, on-call staff physician serving in a department with low priority is being replaced by the emergency medicine practitioner. Since 1980, the American Board of Emergency Medicine has been certifying physicians qualified in this new specialty, and the Emergency Department Nurses’ Association has been administering an examination for certification in emergency nursing.