But let’s say you’re a doctor - physician not morally averse to terminating a patient’s pregnancy – and the circumstances are neither frivolous nor dire.
Let’s say that on a given day you are consulted by two young women, both pregnant, both doubtful as to whether they should be.
Now, remember such a choice is ultimately the mother’s but because your patient is seeking guidance, everything you say, regardless of how clinically objective – yes, even the tone of your voice – may sway here decision.
Yours is a position of enormous responsibility. Like it or not, the very expression on your face could save or extinguish a life.
Your first expectant mother is Caterina.
Caterina is unmarried, obviously in her teens, obviously poor.
You ask her age, and she tells you, and at once you realize she has overstated her years by one or two or three.
Caterina is in the first trimester of her pregnancy.
You ask if she had been pregnant before. Caterina shakes her head.
Studying her, you wonder.
You inquire of her general health; no problems, she says.
And the health of the father?
Caterina shrugs; her eyes fall.
She has lost contact with the father of her unborn child. All she knows is he was twenty three, a lawyer or a notary or something like that. He lives nearby, she thinks; she is not sure. The affair was over quickly, little more than a one night stand. No child was expected – nor how is it wanted.
What, Doctor, is your advice?
Later the same day, you are consulted by a second expectant mother.
Her name is Klara. Klara is twenty-eight, married three years, the wife of a government worker, she has the look of a women accustomed to anguish.
Concerned for the ultimate health of her unborn, Klara explains that for each year of her marriage she had a child and each had died; the first within twenty-one months, the second within sixteen months the third within several days.
Disease? You ask.
Klara nods. She suspects that any future child would be equally susceptible. For you see, her husband is also her second cousin. Both Catholics, they receive papal dispensation to marry though now Klara questions their wisdom in asking permission.
And there’s something else...
One of Klara’s sisters is a hunchback; another sister, the mother of a hunchback.
Klara is in the first trimester of her fourth pregnancy. The odds are against the health of her child. Time is running out.
And it is only later that you learn – Klara’s husband is not, as she has said, her second cousin. He is her uncle.
So what, Doctor, is your advice?
In addition to all immediate considerations – physical, moral, religious – the dilemma of whether to terminate a pregnancy is philosophical question.
Might this life, if left to live, affect the consciousness or even the destiny of mankind?
Yet if the profundity of this question is diminished by the balance which governs all life, there is evidence in the two true stories you have just read; the unwed mother with unwanted child; the married mother with the graves three infants behind her.
For if you, as the hypothetical physician, have opted in both cases for abortion – then you have respectively denied the world the multifaceted genius of Leonardo da Vinci – and spared humanity the terror of Adolf Hitler.
They are The Rest of the Story.
Adapted from Paul Aurandt’s
MORE OF PAUL HARVEY’S THE REST OF THE STORY
