Marin
The defense called Dr. Gianna Del Sol to the stand, to establish that there was nothing she would have done differently if she’d been the primary physician to treat Charlotte instead of the referral. But when they called Dr. R. Romulus Wyndham, an OB and bioethicist with a list of credentials that took a half hour to run through, I started to worry. Not only was Wyndham smart but he was movie-star pretty, and he had the jury eating out of his hand. “Some tests that flag abnormality early are false positives,” he said. “In 2005, for example, a team from Reprogenetics kept growing fifty-five embryos that were diagnosed as abnormal during preimplantation genetic diagnosis. After a few days, they were shocked to find out that forty-eight percent of them-nearly half-were normal. Which means there’s evidence that embryos with genetically flawed cells might heal themselves.”
“Why might that be medically important to a physician like Piper Reece?” Booker asked.
“Because it’s proof that termination decisions made too early might not be prudent.”
As Booker took his seat, I rose in one smooth motion. “Dr. Wyndham, that study you just cited-how many of those embryos had osteogenesis imperfecta?”
“I…I don’t know that any of them did.”
“What was the nature of the abnormality, then?”
“I can’t say, precisely-”
“Were they major abnormalities?”
“Again, I’m not-”
“Isn’t it true, Dr. Wyndham, the study could have been showing embryos with very minor abnormalities that corrected themselves?”
“I suppose so.”
“There’s also a difference between waiting to see what happens to a days-old embryo and a weeks-old fetus, isn’t there, in terms of the point when you can safely and legally terminate a pregnancy?”
“Objection,” Guy Booker said. “If I can’t run a pro-life rally in court, she can’t run a pro-choice rally.”
“Sustained,” the judge said.
“Isn’t it true that if doctors followed your wait-and-see approach and withheld information about fetal conditions, it might make it harder to terminate a pregnancy-logistically, physically, and emotionally?”
“Objection!” Guy Booker called out again.
I walked toward the bench. “Please, Your Honor, this isn’t about abortion rights. It’s about the standard of care that my client should have received.”
The judge pursed his lips. “All right, Ms. Gates. But make your point fast.”
Wyndham shrugged. “Any obstetrician knows how hard it is to counsel patients with fetal abnormalities to terminate pregnancies when, in one’s medical opinion, the baby won’t survive. But it’s part of the job.”
“It might be part of Piper Reece’s job,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean she did it.”
We had a two-hour recess for lunch, because Judge Gellar had to go to the DMV to apply for a motorcycle license. Apparently, according to the clerk of the court, he planned to take a Harley cross-country next summer during his month off the bench. I wondered if that was what had made him dye his hair: black went better with leather.
Charlotte left the minute court was recessed, so that she could visit you at the hospital. I hadn’t seen Sean or Amelia since this morning, so I stepped out onto the janitor’s loading dock, a door most reporters didn’t know existed.
It was one of those late September days that felt like the long fingers of winter tugging the hem of New Hampshire-cold, bitter, with a biting wind. And yet, there still seemed to be a big crowd gathered on the front steps, which I could only just make out from where I was standing. A custodian pushed out the door and stood beside me to light up a cigarette. “What’s going on up there?”
“Freaking circus,” he said. “That case about the kid with the funky bones.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard it’s a nightmare,” I muttered, and hugging my arms to stay warm, I picked my way to the edge of the group in front of the courthouse.
At the top of the stairs was a man I recognized from the news: Lou St. Pierre, the president of the New Hampshire chapter of the American Association of People with Disabilities. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, he had a degree from Yale Law, was a Rhodes scholar, and had won a gold medal in the breast stroke at the Paralympics. Now, he traveled both in his customized wheelchair and in a plane that he piloted himself to fly kids around the country for medical treatment. His service dog sat by the side of St. Pierre’s wheelchair, unflinching, while twenty reporters jammed microphones close to its nose. “You know why this lawsuit is so captivating? It’s like a train wreck. You can’t tear your eyes away, even though you’d rather not admit these kind of torts exist,” he said. “Plain and simple: this topic is loaded. This is exactly the kind of lawsuit that makes your skin crawl, because we’d all like to believe that we might love any child that comes into our family-instead of admitting that, in reality, we might not be that accepting. Prenatal testing reduces a fetus to one trait: its disability. It’s unfortunate that prenatal testing automatically makes the assumption that a parent might not want a child who’s disabled, and that it implies it’s unacceptable to live life with some sort of physical impairment. I know plenty of parents in the deaf community who would love a child just like them, for example. One person’s disability is another person’s culture.”
As if on cue, his service dog barked.
“Abortion’s already a hot-button issue: Is it okay to destroy a potential life? Termination takes that one step further: Is it okay to destroy this potential life?”
“Mr. St. Pierre,” a reporter called out. “What about the statistics that say raising a disabled child is stressful to a marriage?”
“Well, I agree. But there are also statistics that say it’s equally stressful to raise a child who’s a prodigy or an athletic superstar, and you don’t see any doctors advising parents to terminate those pregnancies.”
I wondered who’d called in the cavalry-Guy Booker, no doubt. Since this case was technically a malpractice suit, he wouldn’t invite another attorney from outside his practice to cochair Piper’s defense, but he made sure to stage this impromptu news conference all the same to stack his odds of winning.
“Lou,” another reporter asked. “Are you going to testify?”
“That’s what I’m doing right now in front of all you good people,” St. Pierre preached. “And I’m going to keep on talking in the hopes that I can convince anyone who’s listening never to bring another lawsuit like this to the great state of New Hampshire.”
Excellent. I’d lost my case because of a guy who wasn’t even a valid witness for the defense. I trudged back toward the loading dock door. “Who’s talking?” the custodian said, grinding his cigarette butt underneath his boot. “That dwarf?”
“He’s a Little Person,” I corrected.
The custodian stared at me blankly. “Isn’t that what I just said?”
The door banged shut behind him. I was freezing, but I waited before following him inside: I didn’t feel like making small talk with him the whole way up the staircase. He was, in truth, the perfect example of the greased slope Charlotte and I were dancing down. If it was acceptable to want to terminate a fetus that had Down or OI, what about when medical advances made it possible to see your child’s potential beauty, or her level of compassion? What about parents who wanted only a boy and learned they had conceived a girl? Who would be allowed to set the bars for access, and for rejection?
As much as it pained me to admit it, Lou St. Pierre was right. People were always saying they’d love any baby that came along, but that wasn’t necessarily true. Sometimes, it really did come down to the particular child in question. There had to be a reason why blond-haired, blue-eyed babies got plucked out of adoption agencies like ripe peaches but children of color and children with disabilities might linger in foster homes for years. What people said they would do and what people actually did were two very different things.