Because of the swerve with Peter finding Aunt May when he was searching for his daughter in the much maligned "Final Chapter" storyline of the 1990s, there's some question about whether the writers were going in a different direction with the hints that Baby May was alive, before being ordered to do otherwise.

As editor Glenn Greenberg recalled, it was meant to be ambiguous.

Quote Originally Posted by Glenn Greenberg
I vividly remember all the little bits and story elements that Bob Harras absolutely insisted had to be in the "Revelations" story line. Among them was the sequence where the Parker baby is apparently delivered to Alison Mongrain, and Norman Osborn tells her to make sure it's never seen again.

Some of us on the editorial staff (myself included) absolutely disagreed with this sequence being included, because it raised a question that shouldn't have been raised. We strongly felt that the baby story line should have a clean, clear, definitive ending, and that there should be no lingering doubts or mysteries about the baby's status. If the baby's dead, then let's say the baby's dead and move on. I remember discussing this matter with Harras, and his response was that his way of ending the baby story line "gives hope to the readers who have been waiting for the birth of the baby, it lets them believe that the baby is still out there somewhere, alive, and maybe Peter will find her someday. It'll keep them coming back."

The problem with that was that there was NEVER going to be a resolution. In fact, Harras said that he didn't want the baby referred to again once the Clone Saga was over. He even wanted it established in the first post-Clone Saga issue, SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #241, that six months had elapsed since the end of "Revelations, " so we could just skip over Peter and Mary Jane's mourning period and show that they were pretty much back to normal and Spider-Man was his old, wisecracking self again. Harras wanted the Spider-Man books to move on and away from the Clone Saga as quickly as possible… but he also wanted to play with readers' expectations.

When some of us editorial staffers privately discussed the situation, we agreed that Harras's approach was very unfair to the readers. Deliberately dangling a plot thread in front of the readers and then just as deliberately abandoning it, with absolutely no intentions to ever resolve it, just didn't seem like the right thing to do, but at that point, we knew better than to even try to talk our editor in chief out of something he obviously felt so strongly about.

Then again, if we hadn't done it Harras's way, there probably never would have been a SPIDER-GIRL comic book series. As I'm sure many of you already know, writer Tom DeFalco eventually picked up on the Harras-dictated plot thread and ran with it, creating an entire "alternate reality" in which the baby was eventually recovered, alive and well, and grew up to become a web-slinger in her own right. SPIDER-GIRL has certainly earned the critical acclaim it's gotten-it's a fun, enjoyable comic, and it's managed to stick around for several years, escaping cancellation more than once, so I guess something good CAN come out of something bad!