It was Dr. Fletcher's fault. Valerie glared at the woman, at her black and silver hair, at her starched white demeanor. She acted as if she cared about Renata, about Valerie-indeed, about everyone. Was it a sham? Just so much bedside manner repeated rote? What really lurked behind that doctorly exte-rior?
Was she trying to help all women and unborn children, as Johnson implied? Or was Ron more correct that she had used her and Karen as a means to test her theories?
She knew Ron's reasons for being here. What were Johnson's? He seemed sincere to the point of a stroke, yet he used every nasty rhetorical technique available. Stuff she'd seen Ron use in other trials. He knew how to play the jury, just as Ron did. Was that the key? Would the best player win re-gardless of who was right or wrong?
"He's in!" Ron returned to the table, scraping the chair across the linoleum to sit. "He'll be available tomorrow to give expert testimony on embryo transfer. And here's something I didn't know; he's on the ethics committee of his own hospital, so he really knows the implications of Fletcher's actions."
"Tomorrow." Valerie finished her coffee in one swallow. It went down bitter despite the two packets of Equal. "What about today?"
Ron grinned and looked across the room at Karen. "Leave that to me." " Karen sat in the witness stand, determined to answer the questions without overreaction.
"We had exhausted all other-"
"Just a yes or no answer," Czernek said coolly. "Did you en-ter the Bayside University Medical Center fertility program to become pregnant by any means possible?"
"Yes."
Rather than stroll around before the bench in Johnson's manner, Czernek stayed close to Karen, facing her to ask his barrage of questions in a clipped, businesslike manner.
"Were you aware that your problem could have been solved by the medically accepted method of non-surgical ovum trans-fer?"
"We'd tr-"
"Yes or no?"
"Yes, but-"
"So you knew about non-surgical ovum transfer?"
"Yes. We tried-"
"Just yes or no, Mrs. Chandler. Did you know that clinics performing the procedure regularly contract with women as conscious, informed ovum donors?"
"Yes."
"And you knew that the Bayside clinic had a frozen supply of fertilized and unfertilized eggs available for you to pick and choose the traits you want in a child?"
"Yes." Karen burned to tell the jury about her failures with the procedure.
"Yet you instead allowed Dr. Fletcher to implant an embryo in you by surgical means?"
"Yes."
"And you allowed this even though you knew that such an embryo must have been torn from the womb of another woman?"
Johnson popped up. "Objection! The question is argumen-tative and establishes nothing new." Judge Lyang nodded. "Sustained."
"Were you aware that the embryo must have come from an abortion?" Czernek asked.
"Yes," she answered firmly.
"And yet you allowed Dr. Fletcher to perform this proce-dure?"
"Yes."
"And you carried this child to term and gave birth to it?"
"Yes."
"And you filled out a birth certificate naming you and David Chandler as the mother and father even though the child bore no genetic relation to either of you?"
"Dr. Fletcher told-" She stopped just as Czernek opened his mouth. "Yes, I did."
"And you had no compunctions about that? You didn't think that perhaps there was something dishonest or perhaps even illegal about it all?"
"I object!" Johnson said. "Mrs. Chandler is not a legal ex-pert."
"Sustained."
Czernek rubbed the bridge of his nose. "It's a simple ques-tion, Mrs. Chandler. Did you suspect that you were involved in something that was wrong?"
"No, I did not."
"I see. And now that you have been caught, do you feel any remorse?" Johnson shot to his feet again. "Objection, Your Honor! The question of remorse is totally irrelevant."
Judge Lyang sustained.
Czernek shrugged and turned to face Karen. "I have no more questions." On his way to the witness stand, Johnson glared at the more experienced lawyer, turning his head so that his expression was hidden from the jurors' view. Czernek smiled cordially and regained his seat.
"Mrs. Chandler," Johnson began, his hands in his pants pock-ets, jacket bottoms draped over his wrists. "Please tell the court why you had to seek out the services of a fertility clinic." She looked at the women in the jury, speaking softly. "David and I had always wanted to have children, and we tried right from our wedding night. But nothing ever seemed to happen. We went to doctors, and they determined that it was sort of both our faults." She lowered her head for a moment, then looked up, this time at the men. "I had very poorly developed ovaries, and David had an industrial accident when he was twenty and had a very low sperm count."
"And what options did you consider?"
"Non-surgical ovum transfer was one method," she said, glancing over at Czernek in pleasure that the truth could now get out. "Of course, since David couldn't contribute the sperm, we used eggs that had already been fertilized."
"Did you actually undergo such an operation?"
"Yes. Four times."
The spectators began to trade whispered sounds of aston-ishment. Johnson stepped close to Karen.
"What was the outcome of each?"
"I miscarried all four."
The murmuring in the courtroom increased an increment. The judge gaveled for quiet. The sounds abated momentarily.
"At what point did these pregnancies spontaneously abort?"
"All of them within the first three weeks."
"And were these your first attempts?"
"No. We had tried in vitro fertilization with donor ova and sperm."
"How many tries there?"
"Three."
"Any other methods?"
"Yes," she said in an almost ashamed tone. "Three attempts at artificial insemination before my problem was properly di-agnosed. But that was long before I found Dr. Fletcher."
"So altogether, how many times had you tried orthodox methods of artificial impregnation?"
"Ten times."
"And the outcome each time?"
She looked straight at the jury. "They all miscarried."
"How soon after each procedure?"
"All within the first three weeks, when they took at all."
Johnson gazed at the members of the jury as if to drive his point home. Actually, he scanned their faces for some sense of their reaction. He read sympathy on most, but the two young women seemed a bit put off by the idea of such colossal ef-forts. One of the older men, too, appeared embarrassed by the clinical details.
"Did Dr. Fletcher," he asked, "say why she suggested surgi-cal embryo transfer? Transoption, as she calls it."
"She said she suspected that a more fully developed embryo might have a better chance of thriving. We were at our wits' end. We'd tried everything else under the sun." Tears welled in her eyes. She pressed at them with a tissue. "We just wanted a baby."
Terry held up his hand and nodded in sympathy. He ran the hand through his curly mop of hair and said, "Did Dr. Fletcher ever speak to you about abortion?"
"Yes."
"What did she say?"
Karen put her hand in her lap and crumpled the tissue in its grasp. "She said that transoption was something that she hoped would make abortion obsolete."