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.
CHAPTER 14
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.