The Truth about Abortion

WARNING: this story is both graphic and shocking.

BIRTHDAY PARTY

            “You’re working late tonight, aren’t you, Dr. Blake?” the young man said.

            “Tax deadlines move for no man,” Blake said.

            “No kidding,” said the young man. “My wife and I filed our first return together just a week ago.”

            “I didn’t know you were married,” Blake said cheerfully. “Will you be needing my services soon?”

            The young man laughed. “I hope not! Two people is all our square footage can handle. Summer and I are waiting to have children until we’re at least in our late twenties.”

            Blake smiled. “Oh—you misunderstand me. Not that kind of service. I’m not an obstetrician.”

            “I’m sorry. Your badge said maternity, so I assumed,” said the young man.

“That’s right—but I never see the inside of a delivery room. I’m the official custodian for the maternity ward.” He paused, watching the confusion on the young man’s face. “I am the highest-paid kind of custodian in the world. I clean up society’s messes, with the same tools any custodian uses—a vacuum and a trash disposal.”

            The young man suddenly understood, and he struggled to keep his face still. Had Blake just suggested that he and his wife would need that kind of service? Surely the doctor had been joking.

            “I think,” Blake continued, “that I have the most interesting job in the world. Do you know why?”

            This conversation was suddenly uncomfortable. “Why?” said the young man.

            “Every day I commit what many people in this country believe to be murder, many times—a dozen little murders,” Blake said. “Of course, I know that the unborn is not really human, so killing it is not murder, any more than swatting a fly is murder. On the other hand, however, it sometimes feels pretty similar.”

            “What do you mean?” said the young man.

            “I mean, if I had ever murdered someone, and gotten away with it, and then came to this hospital to do the sort of work I do, I might think that killing the unborn feels pretty much like killing the born. I’m not saying they are the same. I imagine, however, that they feel just almost exactly the same. It’s all in how you look at it.”

            “I’m not sure I agree,” said the young man.

            Blake laughed. “I can go further. Think about this: the law says the unborn is protected in the third trimester, right?”

            “I don’t remember,” said the young man. “It’s your job, so I guess you should know.”

            “Well, take my word for it, then,” said Blake. “Now just this afternoon, a young woman came to me who had been pregnant for two trimesters exactly—minus one day. If she had come to see me one day later, the thing in her stomach would have had the government’s stamp of approval. The right to life and liberty and everything else. But since she saw me today, I got to feel what it feels like to stop a heartbeat, one day before that heartbeat continued forever.”

            “You’re messing with me,” said the young man. “That’s pretty sick.”

            “Why is that sick?” said Blake. “I was paid to do it. You paid me to do it—your taxes, your votes, your choice.”

            “People who vote that way are trying to protect women,” said the young man, a little frustrated. “They know that a baby doesn’t suddenly become human on a certain day.”

            The doctor looked shocked. “Is that what you believe? And you’re calling me sick?” He shook his head. “If you vote pro-choice, either you believe that a fetus becomes human at midnight on a certain day, or you have to believe at least some abortions are murder.”

            The young man shifted in his chair and was about to speak. Before he could, the doctor leaned over the counter and smiled. “I’m just joking! But I’ve made you upset, and I’m sorry. There’s a pot of coffee for you around the corner. I just came by to tell you. Do you want any?”

            The young man didn’t notice the way Blake gripped the counter with white knuckles, or that his hands were shaking, or that he was sweating.

            Get up out of your chair, thought Blake. You always get coffee around this time. Every night you get up out of your chair, you go to the break room, you get your coffee and you come back. Get up, get up, get up!

            The young man got up, thanked Blake, and went down the hall to the break room. He looked happy to have escaped.

            Blake went behind the now empty counter, which was marked Hospital Security, and pressed a button on a disc recorder below a bank of surveillance screens. A disc emerged. He placed it in his pocket and strode away, picking up the duffel bag he had brought with him.

            As he moved, his steps and breathing sped up. This was a big night. It was enormous. This night would mean something.

            He went up an elevator, down a hall, and through a door. The hospital wasn’t quiet, even this late. But this room was unoccupied.

            He locked the door behind him, then took a roll of black tape from his pocket, stepped up on a chair, and wrapped the tape all the way around the little plastic bubble in the ceiling, totally obscuring the camera concealed there.

            He turned to a table against the wall. The table supported a lump covered in a cloth. He removed the cloth, revealing a tank full of fluid, into which a dozen wires and tubes plunged. Suspended in the fluid was a fetus, a tiny, clearly underdeveloped child, eyes still smooth and legs still bent and head the size of a small apple.

            He plunged his hands into the tank and began detaching wires and tubes. He was shaking, his face contorted with concentration.

When he was finished, he placed both hands around the fetus, holding it like a football, and pulled it out.

There was a white cloth on the table beside the tank. He set the dripping fetus down. Its limbs were twitching and its mouth opened to emit fluid, but it made no sound. He’d left one tube attached, which fed blood in and out of the fetus’s stomach, and was stuck there by a strip of tape.

“You can’t breathe yet,” he said to the fetus. “Some babies your age can, but you, unfortunately, are not ideal.”

He unzipped his duffel bag and began bringing up shining things. The fetus coughed, which is to say, it moved its mouth and more liquid came out. No real noise could be heard.

“Sometimes I wonder at the stupidity of people,” he said. “That young man out there in the hallway for instance.”

The fetus jerked at the sound of his voice.

“What he doesn’t understand,” he said, “is that lots of things become human over time. A patch of grass, for instance, is not human. I can step on it and nobody minds. But cows eat the grass and human eat cows. Once that happens, the molecules in the grass have become human, and I would be put in jail for damaging them.”

He brought up some duct tape from his duffel bag. He took the fetus’s hand between his thumb and forefinger, then with his other hand, unrolled a strip of tape. Then he began to wrap it firmly around the arm—it covered the tiny limb from armpit to wrist. The fetus jerked and squirmed at the sensation. It skin was not nearly tough enough for that treatment and a little blood leaked around the adhesive.

“You,” said Blake, grunting as he wrapped, “are like a blade of grass. You aren’t human yet, but soon you will be. Or, at least, you would have been—“ he looked at his watch— “in thirty minutes. In thirty minutes' time, you would have entered the third trimester. That’s why I chose you.”

He finished wrapping and reached in his bag for scissors.

“I picked you out specially. Induced labor while your mother was unconscious. Brought you here secretly to keep you alive. In fact, for these few hours I’ve been gentler and more caring to you than your mother ever could have been. Now, however, I’ve got a job to do. Midnight could have been your salvation, little non-human. But now it is your doomsday.” The doctor shook his head and chuckled. “Now that was a bit melodramatic. Good thing there are no microphones.”

Blake’s makeshift tourniquet was complete.

“Now this may hurt,” he said. “It all depends on you. Just how far has that nervous system come along?”

He took the scissors from the counter, held the taped arm gently, and snipped off the fetus’s pinky finger. Blood flowed, but the fetus didn’t seem to feel too much pain. It squirmed from the cold of the steel and its mouth opened and closed.

“Not too bad?” said the doctor. “Well, better for you, I suppose.”

He snipped two more fingers.

“Now a few miles east of here,” said the doctor, “is the state border. They have different laws there, so that if I were to hop across that border with you still intact in your mother’s tummy, you would suddenly become human. They would put me in jail for laying a finger on you.”

He snipped off the fetus’s injured hand at the wrist. This was not difficult, as the bones in the wrist were not fully formed, but it did cause a dangerous spurt of blood, coloring the cloth under the fetus.

"If I went west," Blake continued, "the next state has a different law. There, you would only become human once you had the ability to live outside your mother. Which means, if I were to destroy all the incubator units in that state, I could make millions of fetuses in that state nonhuman. Or if I were to invent a new kind of incubator allowing fetuses to survive from an earlier age, it would have the opposite effect; at the exact instant that the concept of the new incubator appeared in my brain, millions of things like you, which had previously been useless blobs, would suddenly be conduits of the human race, protected by state law. Neat, don't you think?"

As he spoke, Blake wrapped the fetus's stub in tape.

“You see,” he continued, “the word ‘human’ is just a word. Someone made it up. Someone else wrote it down. And then people began to cling to it, as if it represented some great separation between ourselves and every other creature. In reality, however, ‘human’ is just a legal designation. Right now, the government of this state has deemed you nonhuman. And so you are. It’s that simple.”

The doctor pulled a vial from a drawer. It was full of white powder. “This is lye,” he said. “I watched Fight Club once and wanted to see what would really happen if this stuff ever touched flesh. Tell me what you think.”

He put on a glove, pinched a little of the powder, and put it on the fetus’s leg. Instantly it began to hiss and ate into the soft flesh, reaching the bone in just a few seconds. The doctor watched the little stream of smoke rise, saw the face of the fetus contort, watched the limbs writhe.

“It looks like you can feel some pain. Well, at least you won’t be denied all of the human experience,” he said.
            He set the lye down and wrapped the wound in more tape.

“Do you want to know why they have deemed you nonhuman?” he said. “It isn’t because you are small. It isn’t because you are helpless. It isn’t because you haven’t developed. It is because you are ugly.”

He took a scalpel and sliced a long cut in the fetus’s leg. He wiped the blood with the edge of a towel and smiled. He sliced again and wiped that up too. Two parallel lines. Skilled hands. Perfect.

“It’s true,” he continued. “If you looked human, no one would dream of touching you. But you don’t look human. You look like a nightmare slimeball, something nobody wants to look at or touch. Even better, you’re hidden away inside a woman’s belly. Out of sight, out of mind. And then, of course, you can’t vote, while most pregnant women and the men who got them that way, can.”

He picked up a cleaver. It was a clumsy tool, something he had bought at a garage sale and brought in his coat pocket.

“I feel a bit silly,” he said, raising it above his head. He laughed. “Like something out of a bad movie. Well, here goes.”

He brought the cleaver down and chopped off a leg. Immediately he peeled off more tape and used it to stop the blood that trickled into the white cloth, the color spreading like a rose in bloom.

“This all works to my advantage,” he said, putting down the cleaver. “If you weren’t so ugly, none of this would be possible. I have never experienced any emotions quite like these. My heart rate is up. My hands are almost shaking. I have never been so agitated, so excited. This must be—it has to be close—to what murder really feels like. I should almost say thank you.”

He picked up a hammer.

“But,” he said, raising the tool, “you can’t understand me. And you can’t speak. That, you poor little blob, is your real failing.”

I have to savor this, he thought. This won’t happen again soon. I won’t get a chance like this again. I have got to feel every sensation the first time.

He brought the hammer down as hard as he could.

After that he was quiet for about a minute.

That was something, he thought. Really something. I’m sweating. I’m panting. I’m shaking.

It’s like I’ve ridden a roller coaster up toward Heaven.

There was red on his shirt, and red on his white coat, and red on his pants, and red on his shoes, and red in his hair, and red smeared and slurried on his hands.

He brought the hammer, cleaver, scalpel and scissors to the sink and washed and dried them. Then he rinsed his hands and hair, took off his coat and shirt and put them in a trash bag. He opened his duffel bag, where he had packed himself a clean shirt and coat. After putting them on, he turned back to the mess on the table.

“Ten seconds to midnight,” he said, checking his watch.

He moved to his bag and pulled out a birthday candle and a lighter.

He stuck the candle in what used to be the fetus’s head. It wouldn’t stand up. He pressed it down into the brain matter and it leaned a little, but remained erect.

He checked the watch again.

“Five...four...three...two…one!” he exclaimed, tapping his watch. He lit the candle.

Then he closed his eyes and started singing:

“Happy birthday to you,

            “Happy birthday to you,

            “Happy birthday, coulda-been-human!

            “Happy birthday to you.”