A Spark of Light

by Jodi Picoult

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? —REVEREND DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

When Wren was six, her grandmother had died in her sleep. Strangers had said over and over that dying in your sleep was a blessing, but as she stared at her nana, waxen white in the open coffin, she didn’t understand why it was a gift. What if her grandmother had gone to bed the night before thinking, In the morning, I’ll water that orchid. In the morning, I’ll read the rest of that novel. I’ll call my son. So much left unfinished. No, there was just no way dying could be spun into a good thing.

Boy, she told Louie, don’t you let nobody tell you who you can’t be.

Coal, with time and heat and pressure, will always become a diamond. But if you were freezing to death, which would you consider the gem?

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, Dr. King had said, what are you doing for others?

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.

Louie believed that those white men with their signs and slogans were not really there for the unborn, but there for the women who carried them. They couldn’t control women’s sexual independence. To them, this was the next best thing.

But who says there’s only one way to be normal?”

You don’t look at another person’s plate to see if they have more than you. You look to see if they have enough.

Violence, from one angle, looked like mercy from another.

When you cradled a liar’s head in your lap, it felt just like anyone else’s.

“It’s not the goodbye that hurts the most. It’s the hole you’re left with.”

Sometimes you can’t tell how consuming love is until you can see its absence.

Wren shook her head, now that she realized that this woman who was anti-contraception was also anti-abortion. Wasn’t that counterintuitive? If you didn’t want abortions, shouldn’t you at least be throwing free condoms and birth control pills out to anyone who would take them? Shouldn’t that woman have been cheering for Wren to come to the Center and get the Pill, instead of berating her?

It was a piece of life, but so was a sperm, an egg. If life began at conception, what about all those eggs and sperm that didn’t become babies? What about the fertilized eggs that didn’t implant? Or the ones that did, ectopically? What about the zygote that failed to thrive when implanted and was sloughed off with the uterine lining? Was that a death?

The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists did not recommend resuscitating babies born at twenty-three weeks. At twenty-four weeks, it was up to the parents and doctors to decide together. At twenty-five weeks, the American Medical Association suggested resuscitation, but also said that the ability to survive was not a sure thing. There were plenty of babies diagnosed late in the second trimester with anomalies that were incompatible with life. If those babies were born past twenty-nine weeks, they would feel pain when they died. In those cases, was abortion murder, or mercy? If you decided this was an exceptional case, what about if the mother was a heroin addict? What if her husband beat her so bad she broke bones several times a year? Was it ethical for that woman to carry a baby to term? He got it, he really did. In that boggy mess of blood and tissue were recognizable parts. They were familiar enough to be upsetting. The bottom line was this: a zygote, an embryo, a fetus, a baby—they were all human. But at what point did that human deserve legal protection?

Whether or not you believed a fetus was a human being, there was no question in anyone’s mind that a grown woman was one. Even if you placed moral value on that fetus, you couldn’t give it rights unless they were stripped away from the woman carrying it. Perhaps the question wasn’t When does a fetus become a person? but When does a woman stop being one?

“No one is forcing women to have abortions if they don’t ask for them. It’s the difference between supporting free will and negating free will.”