Just that possibility is the intriguing premise of a recent Victor Koman. The premise is a bit futuristic, but hardly un-imaginable in a day of test-tube babies, non-surgical ovum transfer, and frozen embryos kept available as potential lives for years. cal novel with characters who seem like real people you can come to care about. Dr. Evelyn Fletcher is a middle-aged doc-tor who had an abortion at 19, regretted it, and devoted her life to trying to develop an alternative that would not involve killing the potential baby. She works for years, and finally be-lieves she has a procedure that will make it possible-remov-ing a fetus intact from a woman who wants an abortion, and implanting it in a woman who wants a baby. But the ethics committee at her hospital refuses to sanction even animal ex-periments, so she continues working in secret.
Finally she has an opportunity. One couple, Karen and David Chandler, have been trying and failing for years to have a baby by every technique known to modern medicine. Then a young, successful woman with a live-in lover, Valerie Dalton, walks into Fletcher's clinic seeking an abortion. The blood types and other factors match, so Evelyn Fletcher contacts the Chandlers, who immediately agree to try the experiment. It works; seven months later little Renata is born.
But the baby contracts a rare disorder that requires bone marrow transplants. Only marrow from the genetic mother can save her. Dr. Fletcher contacts Valerie, and eventually the story of what she's done comes out. There's a lawsuit, the Board of Medical Quality Assurance pulls her license, and the whole imbroglio becomes a media event.
The device of putting a trial, with a sharp lawyer on each side, at the center of the story facilitates both a careful exposi-tion of various sides of the issues raised and intelligent chal-lenges to each point of view. As the issues are explained, de-bated, and refined, several characters actually change their minds about the value of the procedure Dr. Fletcher dubs 'transoption.' Over the course of the book, a careful analysis of the valid rights of various parties involved in decisions about pregnancy emerges. But this is far from a dry-as-dust philosophical tome. feelings about, since it kept me up reading a couple of nights when I should have been in bed. Victor Koman has managed to fuse a serious, fair-minded, and sensitive explication of one of the more emotional issues of our time with a page-turner of a story.
Southern California readers will especially enjoy the evoca-tion of our area through telling and accurate descriptive de-tails. The descriptions of medical procedures reflect painstak-ing homework. Transoption is obviously a fictional procedure, but as pre-sented in this book it's just plausible enough to make you think it could be developed. Whether it would end up defusing the abortion issue or simply serve as another focus for hostility is a question to which I can't pretend to have an answer. But Koman's novel will not only entertain readers, it will help those on all sides of the abortion issue clarify their thinking.
Mr. Bock is the Register's senior columnist.
Medical Novels:
Double Dose of Fear
By Brad Linaweaver
Special to the Journal-Constitution different kind. ...Mr. Koman offers a courtroom drama that focuses on one of the most controversial issues of our time.
With the recent Supreme Court decision sure to rekindle nating questions. What if one day a woman goes to the hospi-tal to have an abortion and is asked to sign a pregnancy termi-nation contract? What if the doctor who removes the unwanted fetus, in compliance with the contract, then transplants the fetus to another woman who has desperately been trying to get pregnant but has found no viable method until now? What if technology renders abortion an obsolete technique?
Transoption is the term Mr. Koman gives to this operation. The breakthrough is based upon a method by which any woman's womb can be made hospitable to any fetus.
Mr. Koman develops the idea in high romantic style. The doctor who performs the unauthorized surgery is Dr. Evelyn Fletcher, one of the best realized characters this reviewer has ever seen. Condemned by some as a Frankenstein, hailed by others as a saint, she undergoes the torment that has always been the reward for medical trailblazing.
The ethical time bomb is set off after the birth of the trans-planted baby. It is discovered that the child needs a bone mar-row transplant from her original mother. Secrecy can no longer be maintained. The mother agrees to save the infant but is persuaded by a litigious boyfriend to sue for custody. The most dramatic portion of the book covers the courtroom battles over Baby Renata and the accompanying protests. There is real brilliance here. Mr. Koman shows how transoption would lead to rifts and new alliances in the abortion wars.
He posits that the march of science could make possible the first pro-choice/pro-life alliance among those who will see transoption as a boon. But he does not avoid the satirical im-plications either: There is a second alliance of pro-choice and anti-abortion forces who oppose giving women this particular alternative, the first for political reasons, the latter for reli-gious ones. Before this gripping novel ends, Dr. Fletcher must put up with being called a Nazi by overheated partisans of both left and right. Mr. Koman is asking those who would defend life or choice to really think about what the words mean.
It does not ruin the denouement to praise Mr. Koman for his demonstration, both intellectually and emotionally, of what it will mean to the world when there are literal co-mothers. can do: it gives us a new context.
Brad Linaweaver is the author of Moon of Ice and The Land Beyond Summer. About the Author
Victor Koman is the author of eight novels and is at this moment working on his ninth. A native Californian, Koman wrote the underground classic millennial-noir novel The Je-novels won the Prometheus Award in their
