She raised a finger in emphasis. "It's immoral to forbid that. Everyone has the right to expel or evict an unwanted guest from her home. But she neglected to take the argument to its reasonable conclusion-that nobody has the right to evict a houseguest by resorting to murder. A woman has a right to expel a fetus, not to kill it."
She glanced at Burke for a moment. The woman shook her head again. She clearly rejected the implication. Fletcher pounded her fist on the chair arm. "I could have just refused to perform abortions and fought to keep women enslaved. In-stead, I searched for years to find a way to protect our rights. Transoption is the method you should welcome, not reject!"
Judge Lyang tapped her gavel lightly. "Counsel will instruct the witness to avoid addressing the spectators."
"Sorry, Your Honor," Fletcher said quickly. "I thought I was addressing Jane Burke's testimony." Lyang smiled in a pleasantly sardonic manner. "Continue."
Johnson nodded thanks toward the judge. Doing great, Doc. Just keep the logic and the passion going together. "In his testi-mony," he said, "Pastor Decker made it sound as if transoption were a crime against man, woman, and God. Did your deci-sion to perform the transoption take account of religious con-siderations?"
Fletcher addressed the jury, this time concentrating on the older men. "Mr. Decker claims to have personal knowledge of what God does or doesn't want. I don't buy that. If God exists at all, he wouldn't work through such scatterbrained, fuzzy thinkers. Decker and others have declared that transoption is an offense to God because it puts fetuses in jeopardy. I will grant that it is a dangerous operation. There is a high risk of morbidity."
Decker nodded in triumph, poking Rosen lightly in the ribs. Rosen shifted over to the far side of his seat, leaning on the armrest to listen intently.
"But remember our source," she continued. "Victims of abor-tion." She looked from one juror to another. "Suppose you found a baby that had been abandoned, thrown out of its home. It has no way to take care of itself. It will die; the homeowner knew that when she evicted it. Yet you know of a home where the child would be welcome. Wouldn't you take the child there? Is that not in fact a most Christian thing to do?" She glared at Decker. "Would the infant Moses not have died if Pharaoh's daughter hadn't taken him in?" She faced the jury once more, her voice rising. "Isn't such a rescue in fact a most humane, a most human act? Let's go further and ask, what if the home-owner had asked you to take that child out of the house and abandon it to die? Or even ordered you to kill it? What would you do?" Fletcher took a deep, trembling breath.
"I'll tell you what I did. I found a new home for Renata. Be-cause I knew that if I didn't save that baby, no one else would. And that is what Mr. Decker and his cronies conveniently over-look: That despite transoption's risk, it saved a child's life. It can save the lives of millions more." She threw the pastor a killing glare. "If he is so concerned with saving lives and souls, he should be transoption's most fervent supporter. He should be rescuing all the abortuses he can. I wonder if he really wants to help women or simply control them."
Decker glowered at her with cold anger. James Rosen stared at her in loose-jawed shock, a new vista of possibilities open-ing up before him. He had read many times of epiphany but had never felt the surge of emotion that accompanied such a clarity of revelation. His heart raced as he saw not just an isolated operation but a world transformed. Where once the scat-tered bodies of infants lay, there rose adoption centers. Where clinics now filled their trash bins with dead preborns, there could arise a new choice for women, a new chance for the preborn.
A poke from Decker shattered his vision.
"Sure," the pastor whispered with acid sarcasm. "I can just see us with our hands up feminist cunt-"
"Shut up." Rosen stood without looking at Decker and moved to a seat five rows back. He sat, visibly shaken, and backhanded the tears from his cheeks.
Fletcher saw the exchange. She looked Rosen in the eye.
"Why," Johnson asked, "did you take Valerie Dalton's fetus? Was it your intent to harm her in any way?"
"She didn't want her fetus. I removed it. She didn't ask that anything special be done with it after its removal. At that point, her contract waived any claim to what became of the fetus. I determined that it was immoral and unethical to kill that fetus or merely let it die, so I transopted it into a willing recipient. What I have done is neither criminal nor immoral. The AMA and the state of California had granted me the power to com-mit murder and call it abortion. I refused to exercise that power. Like the woodsman in the tale of Snow White, I pretended to commit the act for the queen while secretly permitting the child to live. I found a way to eliminate the moral dilemma of pregnancy termination.
"For you cannot make people behave morally by passing a law or blowing up a building. But you can make a moral choice technologically possible. You can make it fashionable, accept-able. You can make it as cost-effective as the immoral choice. You can make it marketable, easily available. And then I guarantee that people will make the right choice if you just leave them alone.
"All that I have done with my life is on trial here, so my life itself is on trial. Why? Because a bit of tissue was legally aban-doned by Valerie Dalton. I saw in it a human quality that she and the state chose not to acknowledge. I gave that tissue to someone who saw in it the same quality I did and wished to nurture it. Within her body, it grew into the baby named Renata. She is a distinct, individual human being, not chattel over which we can squabble about ownership. She is a human being in her own right. And Karen Chandler-by contract, by birth, and by choice-is her mother."
Rosen and several others applauded. More joined in just as Judge Lyang slammed the gavel for attention.
"Quiet down, please."
Johnson smiled, spreading his arms expansively. "I have no more questions for the witness."
"I do."
Czernek stood. Valerie grasped his sleeve, looking up at him.
"What?" he whispered.
She almost spoke, then shook her head and said nothing. Her fingers released him.
"I'd like to ask you," he said, "Doctor, whether you think society has any say in what is or is not right or wrong."
"Who are society?" Fletcher looked around the room. "Ev-eryone except me? Society is composed of individuals. The sum total of their separate choices is their `say.'" She leaned for-ward to gaze at Czernek with just the barest smile on her lips. "If fifty-one percent of society approved of infanticide or sla-very, should I approve of it? Would you?"
"Just answer the question."
"No, `society' has no say distinct from the choices of indi-viduals." She settled back in her chair.
"Immoral laws and primitive opinions should be ignored with impunity, even if society has to be dragged kicking and screaming toward a new respect for life and rights. Those in the pro-life or pro-choice camps who refuse to embrace transoption are enemies of both life and choice and will alienate themselves from the main-stream consensus that will form around transoption as it did around adoption." Czernek's voice boomed out at its most theatrical level. "Oh, you're a fine one to defend life and rights. You've been per-forming abortions for years, but you save one fetus, and that gives you the high moral ground."