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.

It was the sun of a universe of women who had run out of time and had run out of choices, who needed a beacon to look up to.

No matter how many times you let someone go, it never got any easier.

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.

Eighty-eight percent of abortions happened in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, Louie knew, but the antis acted like those fetuses were already eight pounds and holding their own bottles.

“What we do here,” he said, “what I do. Sometimes it lets children be children.”

“If you and I both told people our stories, even the most pro-life advocates would see mine as a tragedy. Yours is a crime.”

“It’s funny. The logic goes that as a minor, you can’t exercise free will to consent, because you don’t have the mental capacity to do so. But in your case, the fetus is getting the protection you’re not, as if its rights are worth more than your own.”

The average anti-choice protester is”—he lowered his voice—“a middle-aged Caucasian male.”

“Do you think I wanted this? Do you think anyone wakes up and says, I think I’ll go get an abortion this morning? This is the last stop.

There are plenty of women who can’t have children, who would do anything to adopt.” “Really?” Joy said. “Then where the fuck were they when I was in foster care?”

You could take all the precautions in the world, and bad things still happened.

These women claimed to be pro-life and insisted the fetus was sacred, until it happened to be inside them and didn’t square with their life expectations.

A day or two later, after he performed their abortions, these same women would call him a killer again

This is actually really rude

“Willie, you can stand on top of Mount Everest and shout that life begins at conception all you want, but if this hospital was burning down and you had to decide between saving a fertilized egg in the IVF lab or a baby in the maternity ward, which would you choose?”

The vast majority of protesters were men, and it made perfect sense to Louie—the male of the species felt threatened by the biology of women.

There was, of course, the history, too. Women had been property. Their chastity had always belonged to a man, until abortion and contraception put control of women’s sexuality in the women’s hands. If women could have sex without the fear of unwanted pregnancy, then suddenly the man’s role had shrunk to a level somewhere between unnecessary and vestigial.

“Sometimes we have to make choices when we don’t like any of the options,”

Was it a person? No. 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?

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.

the question wasn’t When does a fetus become a person? but When does a woman stop being one?

“you don’t have to be grateful for something that’s your right.”

If Planned Parenthood was defunded, it wouldn’t stop abortions. Abortions would literally be the only things they could afford to do.