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 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.