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.

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?

She wondered if the only way any of us can find what we stand for is by first locating what we stand against.

No matter what Hugh had said to gain George’s trust, he was well aware that there was and always would be a seminal difference between them, and it had to do with morality. Hugh would never take a life because of his own beliefs.

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

Women were capable of taking aspirin if they had a headache, and the intrinsic risk of aspirin was far greater than that of any of the abortion medications that currently existed. If a woman chose a medication abortion, why did the mifepristone have to be taken in front of a doctor, as if she were an inpatient in a psychiatric ward who couldn’t be relied on to swallow a pill?

Biology and evolution and social mores allowed Joe to leave; Joy was the one stuck with the pregnancy. Even though there had been two of them in that bed.

Hope could do that to a person, Louie knew. Paralyze you inside and out.

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.

When it came down to it, at the end, you did not think. You felt. What did she feel? That you will never cease to underestimate yourself. That love is fleeting. That life is a miracle.

“If the antis frame their opposition to choice as antiracism, it looks like they’re trying to help Black women. But a law that keeps Black women from having abortions also keeps white women from having them. The only person who can give birth to a white baby is a white woman. Those same white women are working outside the home and bucking traditional family values, and by 2050 whites will be in the minority. When you look at it like that, it’s a little clearer who those billboards are really benefiting.”

To live was always a conditional verb.

One day, he said, astronomers would only be able to track the stars of the Milky Way, and not other galaxies—they would have moved out of sight, like the last chapter of a book that had been torn away. Maybe we were already only seeing part of the story, already missing chapters.

“The only miscarriage here, Your Honor, is a miscarriage of justice,” Mandy interrupted.

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.

THINK OUTSIDE MY BOX. MAY THE FETUS YOU SAVE TURN OUT TO BE A GAY ABORTION PROVIDER!

Sometimes you can’t tell how consuming love is until you can see its absence. Sometimes you can’t recognize love because it’s changed you, like a chimera, so slowly that you didn’t witness the transformation.

Studies have shown that when presented with a list, the default of the brain is to pick whatever is first. The same holds true for voting, and ballots. But sometimes there are no choices, Olive realized. What does the brain do when you’ve run out of options?

“It’s not about making the right choice,” Graciela said. “It’s about making the right choice for you.”

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?

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

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

She cried because even though she had taken every precaution possible, she had wound up—like her mother—boxed into bad choices because of a man.

White men had once owned Black men’s bodies. Now, white men wanted to own women’s bodies.