Transcript
Narrator (0:00)
Now the rest of the story. Abortion. What about it? Let's imagine you are a doctor, and 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 yours. Doctor, is a position of enormous responsibility, for, like it or not, your advice, even the very expression on your face, could rescue or extinguish a life. Your first expectant mother is Katerina. Katarina is unmarried, obviously in her teens, and obviously poor. You ask her age and she tells you, and at once you realize that she's lying. She has overstated her years by one or two or three. Katerina's in the first trimester of her pregnancy. You ask if she has been pregnant before. Katerina shakes her head, studying her. You wonder, you inquire of her general health. No problems, she says. And the health of the father? Katerina shrugs and her eyes fall. She has lost contact with the father of this unborn child. All she knows is that he was 23, a lawyer or a notary or something like that. She says he lives nearby. She thinks she's not sure. The affair was over quickly, little more than a one night stand. No child was expected. Nor now is one wanted. All right, Doctor, what's your advice now? It's later, the same day, and you're consulted by a second expectant mother, and her name is Clara. K L A R a. Clara is 28, married three years, wife of a government worker. She has the look of a woman accustomed to anguish, concerned for the ultimate health of her unborn. Clara explains that for each year of her marriage she has had a child, but each has died. The first within 31 months, the second within 16 months, the third within several days. Disease, you ask. And Clara nods affirmatively. She suspects that any future child would be equally susceptible for several reasons. Her husband, she explains, is also her second cousin. Both of them are Catholic. They received papal dispensation to marry, though now Clara questions their wisdom in asking for that dispensation. And there is something else. One of Clara's sisters is a hunchback. Another sister, the mother of a hunchback. Clara is in the first trimester of her fourth pregnancy. The odds are against the health of her child, and time is running out. And it's only later that you learn Clara's husband is not, in fact, as she has said, her second cousin. He is, in fact her uncle. Now, Doctor, what is your advice? In addition to all of the immediate considerations, physical, moral and religious, in the dilemma of whether or not to terminate a pregnancy, you face a philosophical question. Might this life, if left to live, affect the consciousness, perhaps even the destiny of mankind? In the two true stories which you have just heard, an unwed mother with an unwanted child and a married mother with the graves of three dead infants behind her both wanted an abortion. If you, as the hypothetical physician in both cases, had said yes, then you would have denied the world the multifaceted genius of Leonardo da Vinci. And you would also have spared humanity the terror of Adolf Hitler. So now you know the rest of the story.