Terminal Experiment (8 page)

It had happened thirteen years ago, during their first year of marriage. Peter remembered it all vividly.

October 31, 1998. Even back then, they didn’t eat at home often. But they’d always thought it rude to go out on Halloween — someone should be in to give treats to the kids.

Cathy made fettuccine Alfredo while Peter put together a Caesar salad with real bacon bits crisped in the microwave, and they collaborated on making a cake for dessert. They had fun cooking together, and the tight confines of the tiny kitchen they’d had back then made for plenty of enjoyable contact as they squeezed past each other, jockeying for access to the kitchen’s various cupboards and appliances. Cathy had ended up with flour stains in the shapes of Peter’s handprints on each of her breasts, while Peter had her handprints on his bum.

But after they’d finished eating the salads and had made a good start on the pasta, Cathy had said, without preamble, “I’m pregnant.”

Peter had put his fork down and looked at her. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“That’s — ” He knew he should say “That’s wonderful,” but he was unable to get the second word out. Instead, he settled for “interesting.”

She chilled visibly. “Interesting?”

“Well, I mean, it’s unexpected, that’s all.” A pause. “Weren’t you — ” Another pause. “Damn.”

“I think it was that weekend at my parents’ cottage,” she said. “Remember? You’d forgotten to—”

“I remember,” said Peter, a slight edge in his voice.

“You said you’d have a vasectomy when you turned thirty,” Cathy said, a tad defensively. “You said if by then we still didn’t want to have kids, you’d do it.”

“Well, I wasn’t bloody well going to do it on my birthday. I’m still thirty. And, besides, we were still discussing whether to have a child.”

“Then why are you angry?” asked Cathy.

“I — I’m not.” He smiled. “Really, darling, I’m not. It’s just a surprise, that’s all.” He paused. “So, if it was that weekend, you’re what? Six weeks along?”

She nodded. “I missed my period, so I bought one of those kits.”

“I see,” said Peter.

“You don’t want the baby,” she said.

“I didn’t say that. I don’t know what I want.”

At that point, the doorbell rang. Peter got up to answer it.

Trick or treat, he thought. Trick or treat.

Peter and Cathy had waited another three weeks, weighing their options, their lifestyle, their dreams. Finally, though, they made their decision.

The abortion clinic on College Street had been in an old two-story brownstone. On its left had been a greasy spoon called Joes — no apostrophe — that advertised a breakfast special with two “egg’s” any way you like them. On its right had been an appliance store with a hand-lettered sign in the window that said, “We do repairs.”

And in front of the clinic there had been protesters, marching up and down the sidewalk, carrying placards.

Abortion is murder
, said one.

Sinner, repent
, said another.

Baby’s have rights too
, said a third, perhaps produced by Joe’s sign maker. A bored-looking police officer was leaning against the brownstone’s wall, making sure the protesters didn’t get out of hand.

Peter and Cathy parked across the street and got out of their car. Cathy looked toward the clinic and shivered, even though it wasn’t particularly cold. “I didn’t think there would be that many protesters,” she said.

Peter counted eight of them — three men and five women. “There’re always going to be some.”

She nodded.

Peter moved next to her and took her hand. She squeezed it, and managed a slight, brave smile. They waited for a break in the traffic, then crossed.

As soon as they arrived at the other side, the protesters closed in on them. “Don’t go in there, lady!” shouted one. “It’s your
baby
!” shouted another. “Take some time,” shouted a third. “Think it over!”

The cop moved close enough to see that the protesters weren’t actually touching Cathy or preventing her from gaining access.

Cathy kept her eyes facing straight ahead.

Eggs any way you like, thought Peter, Repairs done here.

“Don’t do it, lady!” shouted one of the protesters again.

“It’s your
baby
!”

“Take some time! Think it over!”

There were four stone steps leading up to the wooden doors of the clinic. She started up them, Peter right behind.

“It’s…!”

“Don’t…!”

“Take…!”

Peter stepped ahead to open the door for Cathy.

They went inside.

Peter had had his vasectomy the following week. He and Cathy never spoke again of that episode from their past, but sometimes when her sister’s daughters were visiting, or when they ran into a neighbor taking a baby for a stroll, or when they saw children on TV, Peter would find himself feeling wistful and sad and confused, and he would steal a look at his wife and see in her large blue eyes the same mix of emotions and uncertainty.

And now, they had to face that moral issue all over again.

There was no way to put a scanning skull cap on a fetus, of course. But Peter didn’t need to scan all electrical activity in the unborn child’s brain — all he needed was equipment to detect the high-frequency soulwave. It took him days of work, but he eventually managed to cobble together a scanner that could be laid on a pregnant woman’s belly to detect the soulwave inside. The unit incorporated some of the scanning-at-a-distance technology from the Hobson Monitor, and employed a directional sensor to make sure the mother’s own soulwave wasn’t mistakenly picked up.

The soulwave was exceedingly faint, and the fetus was deep within the woman’s body. So, just like a telescope taking prolonged exposures to build up an image, Peter suspected this sensor would probably have to be in place for about four hours before a determination could be made of whether the soulwave was present.

Peter went down to his company’s finance department. One of the senior analysts there, Victoria Kalipedes, was just beginning her ninth month of pregnancy.

“Victoria,” Peter said, “I need your help.”

She looked up expectantly. Peter smiled at the thought. Everything she did these days was expectantly. “I’ve got a new prototype sensor I’d like you to help me test,” he said.

Victoria looked surprised. “Does it have to do with my baby?”

“That’s right. It’s just a sensor web that’s laid over your belly. It won’t hurt you, and it can’t harm the baby in any way. It’s, well, it’s like an EEG — it detects activity in the fetal brain.”

“And there’s no way it can hurt the baby?”

Peter shook his head. “None.”

“I don’t know…”

“Please.” Peter surprised himself with the forcefulness with which he said the word.

Victoria considered. “All right. When do you need me?”

“Right now.”

“I’ve got lots of work to do today — and you know what my boss is like.”

“Placing the sensor will only take a few minutes. Because the signals are so faint, you’ll have to wear it for the rest of the afternoon, but you’ll be able to go on with your work.”

Victoria got to her feet — no easy task this late in her pregnancy — and went with Peter to a private room. “I’m going to describe to you how the sensor should be placed,” said Peter, “then I’ll leave you alone and let you put it on yourself. It should fit under your clothes without difficulty.”

Victoria listened to Peter’s instructions, then nodded.

“Thank you,” said Peter, as he left her to undress. “Thank you very much.”

At the end of the day, he had the results. The sensor had had no trouble detecting the soulwave coming from Victoria’s fetus. Not too surprising: had the baby been removed at this late point in the pregnancy, it would probably have survived on its own. But how soon into a pregnancy did the soulwave first appear?

Peter flipped through his computerized Rolodex until he found the number he wanted: Dinah Kawasaki, a woman he had taken some courses with at U of T who now had an obstetrics practice in Don Mills.

He listened nervously to the electronic tones as the computer dialed the number. If Dinah could convince some of her patients to help him, he’d soon have his answer.

And, Peter realized, he was afraid of what that answer might be.

Thirty-two of Dinah Kawasaki’s expectant patients did agree to participate in testing Peter’s scanning equipment. That wasn’t surprising: Peter had offered a fee of $500 per patient simply for wearing the scanner for four hours. Each patient was one week farther along in her pregnancy than the one before.

Peter would eventually want to do studies throughout their individual terms on multiple women, but the initial results were clear. The soulwave arrived sometime between the ninth and the tenth week of pregnancy. Before that, it simply did not exist. He’d need much finer studies to show whether it arose from within the fetal brain, or — less likely, Peter thought — somehow arrived from outside.

Peter knew that this would change the world, almost as much as the realization that some form of life after death actually existed. Some would still quibble with the interpretation, but Peter could now say categorically whether or not a given fetus was a person — whether or not its removal would be simply sucking out an unwanted growth or an act of murder.

The implications would be profound. Why, if the Pope could be convinced that the soulwave really was the physical signature of the immortal being, and that the soul only appeared ten weeks into pregnancy, perhaps he’d remove his restriction on birth control and on early abortion. Peter remembered that back in 1993, the then-Pope had originally told women who had been raped by soldiers in Bosnia-Herzegovina that they would be damned unless they brought their babies to term. And the current Pope still refused to allow birth control in famine-torn areas, even when babies would starve to death once born.

Of course, the women’s movement — of which Peter considered himself a supporter — would react, too.

Peter had always had a hard time with abortion, especially in industrialized countries. Perfectly reliable, unobtrusive methods of birth control existed. Peter had always accepted intellectually that a woman had the right to an abortion on demand, but he’d found the whole issue distasteful. Surely unwanted conception was something best avoided in the first place? Surely birth control — by both partners in a relationship — wasn’t too much to ask? Why cheapen the wonder of reproduction?

It had taken all of ten minutes on the net to dig up the statistic that one in five pregnancies in North America ended in abortion. And yet, of course, he and Cathy had conceived all those years ago without planning to. Him a Ph.D., her with a degree in chemistry — two people who should have known better.

Nothing is ever as simple in the concrete as it is in the abstract.

But now, perhaps, there was justification for after-conception birth control. The soul, whatever the soul might be, arrived only after sixty or more days of gestation.

Peter was no futurist, but he could see where society would go: within a decade, laws would doubtless change to allowing abortion on demand up until the arrival of the soulwave. Once the soulwave was present in the fetus, the court would rule that the unborn child was in fact a human being.

Peter had wanted answers — cold, hard facts. And now he had them.

He took a deep breath. He was a rationalist. He knew that there had always been only three possible answers to the moral question raised by abortion. One: a child is a human being from the moment of conception. That had always seemed silly to Peter; at conception a child is nothing but a single cell.

Two: a child becomes a human being the moment it exits from the mother’s body. That had seemed equally silly. Although a fetus draws nutrition from the mother until the umbilical cord is severed, the fetus is developed enough to support itself, if need be, weeks before the normal end of a pregnancy. Clearly the cutting of the cord is as arbitrary as the cutting of the ribbon to open a new mall. The fetus is a human being with an independent heart and brain — and thoughts — prior to emerging into the world.

So all Peter had done was prove what should have been intuitively obvious. Option three: somewhere between the two extremes — between conception and birth — a fetus becomes a human being in its own right, and with its own rights.

That option three turned out to be correct should have been expected. Even many religions held that the arrival of the soul occurred sometime in the middle of pregnancy. Saint Thomas Aquinas had allowed abortion to the sixth week for male fetuses and the third month for females, those being the points at which he believed the soul entered the body. And in Muslim belief, according to Sarkar, the
nafs
enters the fetus on the fortieth day after conception.

Granted, none of those coincided with Peter’s figure of nine or ten weeks. But the certain knowledge that there was a specific point at which the soul did arrive would — the thought occurred to him again — would change the world. And, of course, not everyone would think it a change for the better.

Peter wondered what it would be like to see himself burned in effigy on TV.

It had been just over nine weeks since Cathy had told Peter about her affair. Things had remained strained between them throughout that period. But now it was necessary that they have a serious talk — a talk about a different crisis, a crisis from their past.

Today was Monday, October 10 — Canadian Thanksgiving. Both of them had the day off. Peter came into the living room. Cathy was sitting on the love seat, doing the New York Times crossword. Peter came over and sat next to her.

“Cathy,” he said, “there’s something I have to say.”

Cathy’s enormous eyes met his, and suddenly Peter realized what she was thinking. He’d made his decision, she thought. He was leaving her. He saw in her face all the fear, all the sadness, all the courage. She was struggling for composure.

“It’s about our baby,” said Peter.

Cathy’s face changed abruptly. She was confused now. “What baby?”

Peter swallowed hard. “The baby we, ah, aborted twelve years ago.”

Cathy’s eyes were moving back and forth. She clearly didn’t understand.

“Next week, my company will be making a public announcement about the soulwave,” he said. “At that time, some additional research will be revealed. But — but I wanted you to hear about it first.”

Cathy was silent.

“I know now when the soulwave arrives in a child.”

She read his manner, read his hesitancy. She knew his every gesture, his whole body-language vocabulary. “Oh, God,” Cathy said, her eyes wide in horror. “It arrives early, doesn’t it? Prior to when we — when we—”

Peter said nothing.

“Oh, God,” she said again, shaking her head. “It was the nineties,” she said, as if that summed it all up.

The nineties. Back then, the abortion issue, like most others, had been simplified to a ridiculous sloganeering level: “Pro-choice” — as if there were another faction that was anti-choice; “Pro-life” — as if there had been a group that was against life. No grays were allowed. In the Hobsons’ circle — educated, well-off, liberal Eastern Canada — pro-choice had been the only stance to take.

The nineties.

The politically correct nineties.

Peter shook his head. “It’s not clear,” he said. “We did it right around the time the soulwave would have first appeared.” He paused, not knowing what to say. “It might have been okay.”

“Or it might have been … might have been…”

Peter nodded. “I’m so sorry, Cathy.”

She chewed her lower lip, confused and sad. Peter reached out and touched her hand.