conduit between the two. One woman's choice to end a pregnancy would become another woman's opportunity to begin one.
It all seemed so sensible, efficient, and-she savored the word-moral that she felt an ancient guilt floating free from her as if it were being washed away by the water in which she reposed. This was the way. She had met her destiny face to face.
'
'Totally out of the question!'
Dr. Jacob Lawrence stared at her with undisguised contempt. He was fifteen years older than Fletcher and sometimes be-haved as if he had been born a century before. As a member of the ethics committee at Bayside, though, his support was cru-cial to any future research she proposed. The man with the thinning white hair gazed at Fletcher with rheumy eyes over his horn-rims. 'You can't seriously ask the board even to review a request for such a project, let alone approve it.'
'I'm not asking for an actual project,' she said. 'Just a study of the potential ethical questions. Obviously, there has to be a groundwork in animal research before we could even contem-'
'I don't care about the research. Things such as this should not even be open to discussion.' He looked at her again, frown-ing. 'You think something like this is even possible?' Fletcher spoke quickly, eagerly. 'The fetus does all the work in a pregnancy. It generates the hormones, it makes the deci-sions. I'm certain that microsurgical attachment to the uter-ine wall of the recipient would be sufficient to allow the fetus to gestate in the new envir-'
'All right.' Lawrence waved a hand for silence. Fletcher fin-gered the pencil in her hand; she knew better than to smoke in Lawrence's presence. Bayside's assistant administrator looked down through his spectacles at the pages before him. 'I'm not going to leave this up to the ethics committee alone. I'm going to send it to an outside consultant. UCLA has an expert in infertility. I read something by him in JAMA last month. Works with pregnant women a lot. Ian Brunner.'
Evelyn's fingernails plunged into her hand.
Lawrence rubbed his nose. 'Ever heard of him?'
'Yes.' She sat back, stunned. She knew what the outcome would be. 'But wouldn't there be better qualified people at USC?'
Lawrence cleared his throat. 'My dear, I am a Bruin.'
And that settled that. '
It took Dr. Brunner two weeks to return a twenty-page de-nunciation, which she never saw. It took an additional two years of tabling and extensions by the ethics committee before they issued their own determination. Quoting liberally from Dr. Brunner's analysis, the committee essentially stated that surgical embryo transplantation was impossible, and even if it weren't, the ethical conundrum posed by using the fetus of one woman as seed stock for another made the entire proce-dure reprehensible from any viewpoint-ethical, moral, or legal.
'Two years wasted,' Fletcher muttered over her coffee.
'What do you expect?' asked the lovely woman across from her. Adrianne Dyer possessed the kind of body that filled her tight uniform in ways that caught the eye of nearly every male patient, orderly, intern, resident, and doctor. It was not her fault, and she permitted no entanglements to mar her professional conduct. Fletcher liked the taciturn young woman and sought to trans-fer her to the Reproductive Endocrinology section. Right now they drank coffee in the cafeteria and discussed the scotched project.
'Hospitals will always be conservative,' Nurse Dyer said. 'They have lots of money to think about.'
'Yes.' Fletcher nodded. 'Why risk it on saving a few lives?' Dyer shrugged, tossing her head in a way that sent a cas-cade of reddish-auburn hair whipping over her shoulder. 'So work without their approval and give them a fait accompli.' Fletcher grinned. 'That'd sear their stethoscopes.' Her good humor faded almost instantly. 'I've been doing theoretical work and instrument design, but if I so much as thought about try-ing, I'd lose my privileges so fast my head wouldn't have time to spin.'
'Reword it and resubmit it to a different committee.' Dyer took a long draught of coffee while she watched Fletcher through deep hazel eyes. 'It's worth the struggle.' She fin-ished off the cup. 'I'd like to help.'
'Thanks. You know about me. What brought you to the point of wanting to help a mad doctor?' Dyer shrugged again. 'You don't need to suffer a personal crisis to determine what's right and wrong. What you said makes sense. If you have a certain perspective.'
Fletcher thought quietly for a long while. Dyer said nothing more, allowing the silence to continue. That afternoon, Fletcher forced through the nurse's trans-fer to RE. For the next six years they worked together, hypoth-esized, tinkered, researched, and conspired together. Though they rarely met outside the hospital, they spent countless days in Fletcher's office in after-hours' discussions. They imagined every possible ramification of surgical embryo transfer. It was Adrianne who coined the term transoption. Evelyn considered the word transortion for 'transfer birth' as an alternative to abortion, 'bad birth.'
