Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

“Will you still say that,” Bob mused, “if we wind up with the biggest wrongful birth payout in New Hampshire?”

“You don’t know that-”

He shrugged. “Depends on what her medical records turn up.”

A wrongful birth lawsuit implies that, if the mother had known during her pregnancy that her child was going to be significantly impaired, she would have chosen to abort the fetus. It places the onus of responsibility for the child’s subsequent disability on the ob-gyn. From a plaintiff’s standpoint, it’s a medical malpractice suit. For the defense, it becomes a morality question: who has the right to decide what kind of life is too limited to be worth living?

Many states had banned wrongful birth suits. New Hampshire wasn’t one of them. There had been several settlements for the parents of children who’d been born with spina bifida or cystic fibrosis or, in one case, a boy who was profoundly retarded and wheelchair-bound due to a genetic abnormality-even though the illness had never been diagnosed before, much less noticed in utero. In New Hampshire, parents were responsible for the care of disabled children their whole lives-not just till age eighteen-which was as good a reason as any to seek damages. There was no question Willow O’Keefe was a sad story, with her enormous body cast, but she’d smiled and answered questions when the father left the room and Bob chatted her up. To put it bluntly: she was cute and bright and articulate-and therefore a much tougher hardship case to sell to a jury.

“If Charlotte O’Keefe’s provider didn’t meet the standard of care,” Bob said, “then she should be held liable, so this doesn’t happen again.”

I rolled my eyes. “You can’t play the conscience card when you stand to make a few million, Bob. And it’s a slippery slope-if an OB decides a kid with brittle bones shouldn’t be born, what’s next? A prenatal test for low IQ, so you can scrap the fetus that won’t grow up and get into Harvard?”

He clapped me on the back. “You know, it’s nice to see someone so passionate. Personally, whenever people start talking about curing too many things with science, I’m always glad bioethics wasn’t an issue during the time polio, TB, and yellow fever were running rampant.” We were walking toward our individual offices, but he suddenly stopped and turned to me. “Are you a neo-Nazi?”

“What?”

“I didn’t think so. But if we were asked to defend a client who was a neo-Nazi in a criminal suit, could you do your job-even if you found his beliefs disgusting?”

“Of course, and that’s a question for a first-year law student,” I said immediately. “But this is totally different.”

Bob shook his head. “That’s the thing, Marin,” he replied. “It really isn’t.”

I waited until he’d closed the door to his office and then let out a groan of frustration. Inside my office, I kicked off my heels and stomped to my desk to sit down. Briony had brought in my mail, neatly bound in an elastic band. I sifted through it, sorting envelopes into case-by-case piles, until I came to one that had an unfamiliar return address.

A month ago, after I’d fired the private investigator, I had sent a letter to the court in Hillsborough County to get my adoption decree. For ten dollars, you could get a copy of the original document. Armed with that, and the fact that I had been born at St. Joseph Hospital in Nashua, I planned to do some legwork and ferret out the first name of my birth mother. I was hoping for a court intern who might not know what he or she was doing and would forget to white out my birth name on the document. Instead, I wound up with a clerk named Maisie Donovan, who’d worked at the county court since the dinosaurs died out-and who had sent me the envelope I now held in my shaking hands.

COUNTY COURT OF HILLSBOROUGH, NEW HAMPSHIRE IN RE: ADOPTION OF BABY GIRL

FINAL DECREE

AND NOW, July 28, 1973, upon consideration of the within Petition and of the hearing and thereon, and the Court having made an investigation to verify the statements of the Petition and other facts to give the Court full knowledge as to the desirability of the proposed adoption;

The Court, being satisfied, finds that the statements made in the Petition are true, and that the welfare of the person proposed to be adopted will be promoted by this adoption; and directs that BABY GIRL, the person proposed to be adopted, shall have all the rights of a child and heir of Arthur William Gates and Yvonne Sugarman Gates, and shall be subject to all the duties of such child; and shall hereafter assume the name of MARIN ELIZA BETH GATES.

I read it a second time, and a third. I stared at the judge’s signature-Alfred something-or-other. For ten dollars I had been given the earth-shattering information that

1. I am female

2. My name is Marin Elizabeth Gates

Well, what had I expected? A Hallmark card from my birth mother and an invitation to this year’s family reunion? With a sigh, I opened my filing cabinet and dropped the decree into the folder that I’d marked PERSONAL. Then I took out a new manila folder and wrote O’KEEFE across the tab. “Wrongful birth,” I murmured out loud, just to test the words on my tongue; they were (no surprise) bitter as coffee grains. I tried to turn my attention to a lawsuit with the thinly veiled message that there are some children who should never be born, and winged a silent thank-you to my birth mother for not feeling the same way.

Technically, I was your godmother. Apparently, that meant that I was responsible for your religious education, which was sort of a colossal joke since I never set foot in a church (blame that healthy fear of the roof bursting into flames), while your mother rarely missed a weekend Mass. I liked to think of my role, instead, as the fairy-tale version. That one day, with or without the help of mice wearing tiny overalls, I’d make you feel like a princess.

To that end, I rarely showed up to your house empty-handed. Charlotte said I was spoiling you, but I wasn’t draping you in diamonds or giving you the keys to a Hummer. I brought magic tricks, candy bars, kiddie videotapes that Emma had outgrown. Even when I visited directly from a stint at the hospital, I’d improvise: a rubber glove, knotted into a balloon. A hair net from the OR. “The day you bring her a speculum,” Charlotte used to say, “your welcome is officially rescinded.”

“Hello,” I yelled as I walked through the front door. To be honest, I can’t remember a time I ever knocked. “Five minutes,” I said, as Emma tore up the stairs to find Amelia. “Don’t even take your coat off.” I wandered through the hallway into Charlotte’s living room, where you were propped up in your spica cast, reading.

“Piper!” you said, and your face lit up.

Sometimes, when I looked at you, I didn’t see the compromised twist of your bones or the short stature that came part and parcel with your illness. Instead, I remembered your mother crying when she told me that she had failed to get pregnant yet another month; I remembered her taking the Doptone out of my ears at an office visit so that she could listen to your hummingbird heartbeat, too.

I sat down beside you on the couch and took your gift du jour out of my coat pocket. It was a beach ball-believe me, it wasn’t easy finding one of those in February. “We didn’t get to go to the beach,” you said. “I fell down.”

“Ah, but this isn’t just a beach ball,” I corrected, and I inflated it until it was as firm and round as the belly of a woman in her ninth month. Then I pushed it between your knees, the ball wedged tight against the plaster, and began to strike the top of it with an open palm. “This,” I said, “is a bongo drum.”