The Cider House Rules

by John Irving

There was never any spring in that part of Maine, except that period of time in March and April distinguished by thawing mud.

He was an obstetrician, but when he was asked—and when it was safe—he was an abortionist, too.

Everyone called her Mom. No one (including his grown children and his grandchildren) called him anything but Professor.

Thanksgiving with the Drapers was an experience in family guaranteed to make other families feel inferior. Mom would outdo herself at momness.

Looking at them, Dr. Larch had his own ideas as to why they could not successfully breed. Lack of the essential concentration, Larch thought; Larch suspected that the Winkles never stopped moving long enough to mate.

He was an obstetrician; he delivered babies into the world. His colleagues called this “the Lord’s work.” And he was an abortionist; he delivered mothers, too. His colleagues called this “the Devil’s work,” but it was all the Lord’s work to Wilbur Larch.

Homer Wells began reading David Copperfield to the boys’ division, just twenty minutes a crack, no more, no less; he thought it would take him longer to read it than it took Dickens to write it.

“Sometimes,” said Dr. Larch, “when a woman is very strong and knows that no one will care for this baby if she has it, and she doesn’t want to bring a child into the world and try to find it a home—she comes to me and I stop it.”

it was still Homer’s cautious opinion that Dr. Larch played God pretty well.

“I’m not saying it’s right, you understand? I’m saying it’s her choice—it’s a woman’s choice. She’s got a right to have a choice, you understand?” Larch asked.

when one of the Haven Club members had a car that wouldn’t start, he went looking for Raymond Kendall’s daughter, who kept jumper cables in her sturdy wreck and had been taught by her father how to use them.

A Cadillac meant nothing to Mrs. Grogan; it was the people themselves who appeared expensive to her.

Your disapproval is noted. It is legitimate. You are welcome to disapprove. But you are not welcome to be ignorant, to look the other way, to be unable to perform—should you change your mind.”

a kind of stubborn goading had developed between Dr. Larch and Homer Wells that Nurse Angela had never expected to see existing between two people who so clearly loved and needed each other.

“I hope we’re not interrupting anything.” You are interrupting two abortions, one birth, one death, two autopsies, and an argument, thought Homer Wells,

The young man was doing whatever young men do while peering under the hoods of cars,

“See you in two days!” Nurse Edna said to Homer, too loudly. “Two days,” Homer repeated, too quietly.

And how do I say, “I miss you”? he wondered—when I don’t mean, “I want to come back!”?

“Someone with all your responsibilities should have all the help he can get.” “Someone with my responsibility should stay responsible,” Larch said.

“The slut,” another one said. “What makes her a slut?” the foreman asked sharply. “Who you seen her sleepin’ with?”

“Me loving you—that’s okay. And you loving me, and Wally—that’s okay, too? Right,” he said.

“I asked her to marry me, but she wouldn’t,” Wally told Homer in their shared bedroom. “She said she’d wait for me, but she wouldn’t marry me. She said she’d be my wife, but not my widow.”

“We’re just good pals,” she told her father; Ray hadn’t asked. “I can see that,” Ray said.

Homer was staring at Florence Hyde. It was riveting to him to see someone enjoying her pregnancy.

“Hospitals aren’t perfect, they’re just expected to be,” Nurse Caroline said. “And doctors aren’t perfect, either; they just think they are.”

A knife fight with Mr. Rose would be like being pecked to death by a small bird, thought Homer Wells.

“Look,” said Lorna. “There’s a war, have you noticed?” “So what?” said Melony.

“These same people who tell us we must defend the lives of the unborn—they are the same people who seem not so interested in defending anyone but themselves after the accident of birth is complete!

How do they justify such a concern for the fetus and such a lack of concern for unwanted and abused children?

“Consider the so-called rhythm method,” wrote Wilbur Larch. “Here in St. Cloud’s we see many results of the rhythm method.”

It seemed to Homer that Debra had always denied him access to anything more than her friendship. Why was she now incensed that he asked no more of her than that?

And so the women decided it. Candy and Homer would share a room with two beds on the ground floor of the girls’ division; how they arranged the beds was their own business.

but—because of an ignorance of French and an innocence of sex—the French song (which was filthier than any limerick Wally Worthington would ever know) was mistaken for a pleasing ditty

Candy’s example—as the first happily pregnant woman in any of their memories—was a present to them all.

That’s Ceylon,” the Englishman said. “Two thirds tea and one third rubber and prayer.”

“Maybe I’ll end up a lobsterman,” Homer said. “And I’ll send you a subscription to The New England Journal of Medicine,” Dr. Larch said.

He was an orphan who’d had a family for less than a month of his life, and he was not prepared to not have a family again.

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses.

For fifteen years, Wilbur Larch had been amazed that the three of them—Homer and Candy and Wally—had managed it; he wasn’t at all sure what they had managed, or at what cost.

“It’s dumb that I have to be sixteen before I get a driver’s license,” Angel told his father. “Right,” said Homer Wells. “They should make an exception for kids who grow up on farms.”

He had heard her say, so many times, that a society that approved of making abortion illegal was a society that approved of violence against women; that making abortion illegal was simply a sanctimonious, self-righteous form of violence against women—it was just a way of legalizing violence against women, Nurse Caroline would say.

(Homer Wells, who did not know that his heart had given out, had read the same article.)

“But what will happen to you, Wilbur—if we expose you?” Nurse Edna asked, a slim tear making its difficult way down her wrinkled cheek. “I’m almost a hundred years old, Edna,” he said softly. “I suppose, I’ll retire.”

Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to perform them—have no choice, either. What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman’s freedom of choice, too. If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice—and so would you.

she didn’t know Homer Wells, but she had sympathy for sexual entanglements. Her present sexual entanglement grew impatient at the bar,

Sometimes, when he was especially tired, he dreamed that abortions were legal—that they were safe and available, and therefore he could stop performing them (because someone else would do them)—but he was rarely that tired.

“I don’t know who she is, but she sure is difficult.” “She was always that,” said Homer Wells.

she died just a month short of her hundredth birthday; the festivities the family had planned for that event would doubtlessly have killed my grandmother, had she lived until then.