The Terminal Experiment

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.

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.