At college, when she was president of the Students for Life club, she had plenty of conversations about the moral quicksand of abortion, and she used her brother as an example. Ben may not have been the child her parents had expected, but he was the one they got. Having a child is a terrible risk, no matter what. You might have a healthy baby who then gets a heart condition, diabetes, addicted to opioids. You might raise a kid who gets her heart broken, who miscarries her own baby, whose husband dies fighting overseas. If we are meant to only have children who never encounter difficulty in life, then no one should be born.
Had Janine’s mother done what the doctor suggested at that prenatal appointment, Ben would never have existed. She wouldn’t have seen the triumph on his face when he finally learned how to tie his own shoes, when he brought home his first friend from school. He wouldn’t have been there on the day her dog Galahad was hit by a truck, the day everything went wrong, when no one could make her stop crying and Ben just crawled into her arms and hugged her.
Now, Janine glanced at Joy, who was curled sideways in her chair, her face buried in her hands. She wished she had been standing at the fence today when Joy came into the clinic to have her abortion. She might have kept her from making the decision she had.
It was too late for Joy’s baby. But that didn’t mean it was too late for Joy.
Janine sat up a little straighter. Even Norma McCorvey changed her mind. She had been Jane Roe in Roe v. Wade. In the 1970s, when she was twenty-two, she found herself pregnant for the third time. She lived in Texas, where abortion was illegal unless the mother’s life was at risk. Her lawsuit went all the way to the Supreme Court, and of course, you know how that turned out. She became an abortion advocate, until the nineties, when she did an abrupt one-eighty. From that moment, all the way till she died in 2017, she asked the Supreme Court to overturn their decision on her case.
What led to her change of opinion? She was born again.
Janine smiled to herself.
Born again.
She didn’t think it was any coincidence that the term for letting God back into your heart had, at its core, birth.
—
IZZY SAT ON THE FLOOR beside the body of Olive Lemay. Her hands were still shaking with the effort of trying to resuscitate the woman, but she had known that there wasn’t a prayer. The gun had gone off at close range. The bullet had torn through the older woman’s heart. Even as Izzy had tried to stanch the flow of blood, she had felt Olive’s hand come up to cover hers. She had seen the fear in the woman’s eyes.
“That was a very brave thing you did,” Izzy whispered fiercely.
Olive shook her head. Her eyes held Izzy’s.
Sometimes, being a nurse doesn’t matter. Being human does.
So Izzy eased up the pressure on Olive’s chest. She grabbed Olive’s hand with both of her own and she stared into the woman’s eyes, nodding in answer to the question that hadn’t been asked.
She had been in this profession long enough to know that people sometimes seemed to need permission before they left this world.
The first death she ever saw was when she had been a nursing student, and had a patient with metastatic breast cancer. The woman was a former beauty queen, now in her fifties. She’d been in the hospital before for palliative care and for rehab after a pathological fracture. But this time, she had come back to die.
One quiet night, after her family left, Izzy had sat down beside the sleeping woman. Her head was bald from the chemo; her face was gaunt, and yet somehow it only served to make her features more arresting. Izzy stared at her, thinking of the woman she must have been, before cancer ate away at her.
Suddenly the woman’s eyes blinked open, a lucid and lovely sea green. “You’ve come to get me, haven’t you?” she said, smiling softly.
“Oh no,” Izzy replied. “You’re not going for any tests tonight.”
The woman moved her head imperceptibly. “I’m not talking to you, honey,” she said, her gaze fixed somewhere over Izzy’s shoulder.
A moment later, the woman died.
Izzy always wondered what she would have seen, had she been brave enough to turn around that night.
She wondered if she would be shot, like Olive.
She wondered how long it would be until an autopsy was done, and someone found out she was pregnant.
She wondered, if her life ended today, whether anyone would be waiting for her on the other side.
—
IF HE HAD NOT BEEN given detention by the nuns in seventh grade, Louie Ward might never have become an obstetrician. In the school library, he picked up a book that was lying on the table—a biography of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Out of sheer boredom Louie started to read. He didn’t put the book down until he was finished. Louie was convinced that this man was speaking directly to him.
He began to read everything he could that the reverend had written. Life’s most persistent and urgent question, Dr. King had said, is what are you doing for others? He read those words and thought of his mama, bleeding out on the floor.
Like his mentor, Louie wanted to be a doctor, but a different kind: an ob-gyn, because of his mother. He worked hard enough to get a full scholarship to college, and then another to medical school.
When he was a resident, he came in contact with multiple women who had unplanned, unwanted pregnancies. As a practicing Catholic, he believed life started at conception, so he referred these patients to other doctors, other places. Much later in his career he would learn that although 97 percent of doctors had encountered a patient who wanted to terminate a pregnancy, only 14 percent performed abortions themselves. When the gap was that great, it was not like abortions stopped. They just got done unsafely.
One Sunday, Louie’s priest was giving a homily about the parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke. A traveler, beaten and left for dead on the side of the road, was passed by a priest and a Levite—neither of whom stopped. Finally, a Samaritan offered his help, even though historically Samaritans and Jews were enemies.
On the day before Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed, he had talked about that parable. He considered why the priest and the Levite might have walked past the beaten man—maybe they thought he was faking; maybe they were worried for their own safety. But most of all, he mused, the reason they passed was because they were thinking of what would happen to themselves if they stopped—not what would happen to that man if they didn’t.
Louie knew in that instant, he had to be the Samaritan. So many of the women he met who were seeking abortions were, like him, southerners of color. These were the women who had raised him. These were his neighbors, his friends, his own mother. If he didn’t interrupt his own journey to help them with theirs, who would?
It was the one truly miraculous moment of Dr. Louie Ward’s life.
At that moment Louie realized why his mama had gone to see Sebby Cherise. It wasn’t because she was having the child of a prominent married white man. It was because she had been protecting the child she already had, at the expense of the one she hadn’t wanted to conceive. This was a variation on a theme he had heard from patients: I have a child with a disability; I don’t have the time to parent another one. I can barely feed my son; what will I do with a second baby? I already work three jobs and take care of my family—there isn’t any more of me to go around.
So although Louie still went to Mass like clockwork, he also became an abortion provider. He flew several times a month to offer his services at women’s clinics. The only person who didn’t actually know what he did for a living was his grandmama.
She was in her nineties by the time Louie went back home to confess. He told her about the runner who had worked her whole life to secure a spot on the Olympic team, and then found herself pregnant after a condom broke. He told her about the woman who learned, in an opioid treatment program, that she was twelve weeks along.
He told her about a lady from a small, narrow-minded place who had been so blinded by the sun of a respected married man that she believed he would support her and claim their child as his own, only to learn that wasn’t how the world worked. They both knew who Louie was talking about. Grandmama, he said. I think Jesus would understand why I do what I do. I hope you can, too.