'Don't try to rationalize it. It's your body. Go ahead and get sliced up. Just don't pretend you're not killing our baby.'
Without a glance back at her, Ian strode away into the night.
That was the last conversation they had ever shared. When Evelyn visited a Santa Monica doctor the following evening, she went alone, lonely and scared. When the deed was done, she slipped into the darkness to seek out a hotel room nearby. She spent two days there, in bed, coping with the physical and spiritual pain of her decision.
It was in that drab room with its window overlooking the bright and beautiful Pacific that Evelyn first came to realize that there had to be a way out of the horrendous morass of death and guilt that surrounded abortion.
She returned to her classes the next Monday and never slowed down. She entered medical school four years later, concentrating on reproductive endocrinology. If she found out the how and why of pregnancy, she could find a way to free women from abortion.
Studying birth and death would be her life.
'
It was twenty years later that she experienced her final, cru-cial insight. Soaking in the antique tub in her small bathroom, she read through a stack of medical journals at a swift but-for her-leisurely pace. Every fifteen minutes or so, she would drain two inches of cooling bathwater and add the same amount from the hot tap. She also added more jasmine-scented bath foam in order to maintain the heat-trapping layer of bubbles that surrounded her.
The effect of all this on her magazines elicited clucks of dis-approval from any colleagues who happened to see one of the warped, stained periodicals on her desk at the medical center. Letting a copy of the New England Journal of Medicine degen-erate to such a condition was equivalent to using the Bible as a doorstop.
Her usual riposte was that she, at least, read the bloody things.
Immersed in the issue of Microsurgery Proceedings she held inches above the surface foam, Fletcher quickly scanned through articles until one headline fairly leaped out at her face. It was not a particularly dramatic title: 'Some Progress in Vas-cular Reattachment and Nerve Connection in Transplanted Rat Cerebral Tissue.' The body of the article, though, outlined a delicate and egregiously complicated microsurgical laser tech-nique for attaching the minuscule blood vessels and nerve junctions of a rat brain inside the cramped environs of an-other rat's skull.
One would not expect a rat to survive such cavalier treat-ment, but the one in the article did. Not only that, it also ex-hibited a small degree of motor response and ate what the brain's previous owner had been trained to eat. The rat died a week later, succumbing to foreign tissue rejection. Such an article might not in itself have intrigued someone interested in reproductive endocrinology except that it out-lined in fairly rigorous fashion each step involved in the mi-crosurgical process. And Fletcher had just finished reading an article in Fertility Week that outlined the latest progress in nonsurgical ovum transfer in the cattle industry. Adrift in the warm, softly undulating waters of the bathtub, Evelyn laid the magazine down on the stack nearby and closed her eyes. Thoughts and images associated freely in the open frontiers of her mind. This was the time in which her wildest dreams occurred. Not in sleep, that lost, aimless time when unbidden symbols clashed pointlessly in obscure meaning. In the world between full alertness and relaxed bliss lay the realm of focused imagination.
Jasmine drifted into her nostrils. Steam dripped from the mirror and the walls. She was once again in placental warmth, her body supported, her mind free to wander.
Non-surgical ovum transfer sounded promising for human infertility. It was no answer to abortion, though, because the fertilized ovum could only be removed before it implanted in the uterine wall. A woman would have to know she's pregnant less than five days after conception in order to have the egg lavaged out. As a treatment for infertility, it had-as the au-thors suggested-great promise. To remove an embryo that had already implanted, though, involved cutting or tearing away infinitesimal connections between the embryo and the forest of capillaries in which it nests. Connections that grow stronger, thicker, and more complex with every passing day.
By the time a woman realizes that she's pregnant, the fetus has already made itself at home. Still... She knew that late-second-trimester abortions were some-times performed in such a way that the fetus survived only to die of intentional neglect outside the womb. Such stories chilled her, just as she was warmed by the apocryphal tale of the woman who changed her mind after such an event and took the living child home with her.
A fertilized egg is viable outside the womb; it can even be frozen and stored indefinitely. A fetus is generally viable out-side the womb after the twenty-fourth week or so. But for twenty-three weeks the fetus requires a uterus in which to attach itself. To remove it at any point during those twenty-three weeks is invariably fatal.
Unless one found another uterus, she mused. She sat up in the tub. That had always been her stumbling block. Abortuses were by their nature unwanted. Who would care for them if they survived?
Yet another bloated state bureaucracy? She was well aware of the sickening abuses within the government- financed orphanages and mental hospitals. But if another woman wanted it, if non-surgical ovum transfer could solve infertility, then surgical embryo transfer could solve abortion and infertility at the same time!
The two branches of medicine that seemed so vastly and inalterably opposed fused together in her mind. She closed her eyes and slid to chin depth in the warm waters. The scent of jasmine filled her as a bold new future formed out of dark-ness. Her career choice now made total sense to her. She would no longer need to justify aborting some pregnancies while ini-tiating others as merely 'giving women a full choice.' She would become the
