Maman? Papa? Oncle?

Jeanine has provided riddle enthusiasts everywhere with a monster brain twister: When is a child neither his mother's nor his father's son, and yet both his parents' nephew and his foreign sister's cousin? The solution lies not in some maternity ward mix-up, or an incredible case of adoption and mistaken identity. Instead, as Jeanine revealed last week, the answer is found in her delivery in May of a son conceived by in vitro fertilization using an American-donated egg and her own brother's sperm — just eight days before a surrogate mother in Los Angeles gave birth to the baby boy's biological sister.

Jeanine's avowal marked the second time in less than a month that the retired schoolteacher from the southern French town of Draguignan made headlines — and caused ethicists to furrow their brows in dismay. On May 14, the 62-year-old woman delivered a strapping child, Benoît-David, becoming the oldest known Frenchwoman to give birth. As some newspapers playfully dubbed Jeanine granny-mommy, others examined the ethical questions involved in an older woman's using artificial means to conceive. Though 8,000 of France's annual 750,000 births involve in vitro fertilization reimbursed by state health insurance, the practice is illegal on postmenopausal women. Jeanine's pregnancy resulted from treatment in a Los Angeles clinic, which charged her $72,000 for the service.

But the stir Jeanine caused in May was nothing compared to the storm that broke last week when she confirmed reports that Benoît-David's biological father was her own brother Robert, 52. Left severely disfigured and nearly blind by a failed 1995 suicide attempt, Robert had been unsuccessful in finding a mate for himself. "Since I could no longer transmit my genetic patrimony because of my age," Jeanine told the daily Le Parisien, "I wanted to transmit his by creating life that would also allow our family name to carry on." Presumed to be husband and wife, the siblings arranged with the clinic for two eggs from the same donor to be fertilized with Robert's sperm, with one implanted in Jeanine and the other carried by an American surrogate. Eight days after Benoît-David's birth, Robert's daughter Marie-Cécile was delivered in L.A. and soon brought back to France.

The return of siblings (senior) to unite siblings (junior) has provoked a legal and ethical fury that risks making their expanding family anything but happy. With French law prohibiting surrogate birth, on grounds that it is commercial activity incompatible with ethical standards, Jeanine's role in delivering Benoît-David makes her his legal mother. Biologically, however, she's only his aunt. Robert's paternity, meanwhile, is unquestionable genetically but unacceptable under laws prohibiting sibling marriage and procreation. That makes Robert Benoît-David's legal uncle and biological father, and Jeanine both his aunt and recognized mother. As the son of Marie-Cécile's aunt Jeanine, moreover, Benoît-David is both brother and cousin to the little girl — who as a U.S. citizen will be able to attain French nationality only later in life.

"This case shows why globalization makes it impossible to limit international rules and standards to trade, and leave ethical matters for each nation to decide," says Noëlle Lenoir, president of the European Commission's Ethical Committee and a former justice on France's Constitutional Commission. "Today we're seeing the ethically disturbing result of commercial in vitro fertilization, and tomorrow it will be cloning and genetic engineering raising questions."

For now, justice officials in Draguignan are more concerned about the well-being of the two babies — and looking into the parenting aptitude of those who plotted their birth. Indeed, press reports depict Robert and Jeanine — who live with their 80-year-old mother — as recluses who have had difficulties with outsiders, as well as one another. Police were repeatedly called in to investigate reports of battery, with one 1993 investigation finding "members of this family expressing ferocious hatred." That report also noted severe "disagreements over inheritance" — a financial motive some speculate may have led them to produce the children in the first place.

Jeanine remains defiant before the outcry, telling Le Parisien, "I committed no moral fault, and my conscience is serene." But that very attitude in the face of the ethical questions that Benoît-David and Marie-Cécile's conception pose has left many French wondering whether the children would be better off growing up in a less complicated family.