LIFE CHOICE
Walter Roberts
If this putative God hadn’t wanted there to be cloning, he shouldn’t have endowed us with the intelligence, ambition and curiosity to achieve it.

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She felt a bit like a contestant in ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ who is on the fifteenth question and has it down to 50:50. But her ‘studio’ was a room in a private medical establishment in a non-EU Mediterranean country. There was no guaranteed prize, no sympathetic presenter and no audience willing her to give the correct answer. There might not even be a ‘correct’ answer. Her ultimate question was a moral, not a factual, one. And it was one she had set herself.

Rome, where they had stopped off for a penultimate consultation with the Italian doctor, was a fascinating place. She was looking forward to the few days Andrew and she would spend there in tourist mode on the way back. They hadn’t been before but, even on a brief first encounter, they recognised it had something special. It was an aura of - how could she put it? - spirituality might be the word.

Not that she was a convinced believer, at least not in the Deity. (What would her Covenanting ancestors have made of that or - maybe worse in their eyes - her infatuation with the Papist stronghold?). She liked to think of herself still as a Christian, albeit separated from the Kirk. If Jesus really was the source of the wonderfully humane philosophy attributed to him then he had her vote. But an omnipotent and magnanimous God? She found that a pretty difficult concept, particularly after what had happened.
Stop trying to avoid the question; concentrate.

Still, what if there was a God........What would he make of her playing Him? Or at least abetting others to do so? She wasn’t trying to play God, though. She was going with the tide of progress, that’s all. It couldn’t be halted. If it had been, we would all have a life expectancy of about 40. If this putative God hadn’t wanted there to be cloning, he shouldn’t have endowed us with the intelligence, ambition and curiosity to achieve it. OK, it was open to abuse. But proper regulation should prevent much of that. Medical use of proscribed drugs had not been abandoned because some numpties abused them. So.....

Face the issue.
Granted, if Andrew’s software business hadn’t benefited hugely from the recovery of the IT market after the slump of the early years of this first decade of the 2000s, she couldn’t have afforded the choice. The procedure was still only performed privately, and expensively, in this clinic and a few others, mostly in lightly regulated states. Even if it were to be sanctioned in the UK, it would be some time before it would be available on the NHS.

That was another thing. People were terrible hypocrites. Everybody solemnly declared that nothing was more precious than health. Yet when it came to funding the NHS properly it was a different story. A penny or two on income tax to pay for an adequate service? Certainly! But let any party go to the hustings on that platform and they would find that the train had left without them. She found that kind of sanctimonious materialism shocking, almost scary. Come on now, concentrate.

Being in this room should be scary. Not physically. It was hardly a birth she would be going through; not at this point anyway. It was only the extraction and re-insertion of an egg cell. But any medical process was liable to induce apprehension. And this was the cutting edge of medicine. Ugh! Not the happiest of phrases that.

So why was she unafraid? Maybe it was because she had not finally decided on it yet. Cloning was such a forbidding concept, both because of the uncertainties which still surrounded it and because of the general public aversion to it. But then, there had been an adverse reaction to in vitro fertilisation too initially but that had largely passed. Mind you, the very word ‘cloning’ was unappealing. The similarity to ‘clowning’ was too close. It was as if the most serious of topics was being mocked.

She had been through the full technical outline. It had been difficult to remember which was which between cells and genes - not to mention axons, enzymes and the rest of it - and how many millions there were of each. She had, however, grasped the big picture as it were of a male cell being implanted into an egg cell which had had the nucleus removed; of the egg being stimulated with electricity to fuse the cells; and of the egg being implanted in the uterus.
Back to the forefront of her mind came the face of her adored son. Her dead boy. Through the incipient tears, which she was learning how to stem, she smiled at his image. She couldn’t help it. Neither could anyone else when he was alive. He had possessed an innocently magic ability to make people’s facial muscles relax when they looked at him.

It was as if he had been granted this gift to compensate for his natural vulnerability. And how vulnerable he had been. Medical science had come a long way in meeting the threats to Down’s syndrome kids, especially heart ailments. But there were other deadly assailants around. She cursed herself for the ten thousandth time. Why had she let his cough go uninvestigated even for such a short time? It had seemed fairly innocuous and Duncan had come so well through his first few years. Her constant, unrelenting guard had relaxed just once but that had been enough. By the time she sensed the danger and noticed the temperature increase, the lobar pneumonia to give it its coldly clinical name, had exerted its fatal grip.

She still had no clear recollection of the week subsequent to the frantic rush to the famous ‘Sick Kids’ hospital, the desperate prayerful vigil (oh yes, she had been ready to believe in God then) and the dreaded sympathetic words from the doctor. Only two things had penetrated her wildly disturbed mind - her culpability and her determination to somehow salvage something of her son. Andrew had known that, even if he had wanted to, it would have been futile to resist her fiercely insistent demand. Dr Androtti had been located urgently and through him arrangements had been made for a cell to be extracted from Duncan’s poor lifeless body and preserved. Only then apparently had she succumbed to intense but healing grief.

It was mainly for Andrew’s sake that she had had Duncan. Andrew loved the girls dearly but she knew instinctively how much he would like to have a son. Virginia, then eight and Rosemary, six, were happily established at primary school and didn’t need quite so much attention. And the family finances were on a more than sound footing. The age gap between the baby and the girls had not been ideal. Nor had her own proximity to 40. But these had not been insuperable barriers. They had gone ahead happily and confidently.
Her previous pregnancies and deliveries, though naturally of seismic importance to Andrew and her, had been uneventful to the maternity professionals. Nor had there been a premonition of anything untoward the third time. Then had come that fateful routine test and the pointer towards Down’s. There had been no plausible explanation for an aberration like this when the previous births had been uncomplicated and the parents had not changed. The medics were bemused but had explained that the result was not conclusive. It required confirmation through ultrasound scanning and amniocentesis.

She had gone along with the ultrasound scan. Although it was not quite a 100% guarantee of the condition, it supported the earlier finding. It was small comfort that it did not indicate any other abnormalities in the foetus. Though they had no fundamental hang-ups on the abortion issue, Andrew and she were agreed that, as they had created this new life they were going to continue to nurture it come what may. Because it carried a one in a hundred chance of a miscarriage, she declined the amniotic fluid test which would have sealed the prognosis. In any case, she was fully and sadly convinced that no further tests were necessary; and so it proved.

How glad she had been that she had proceeded with the pregnancy. Her two previous experiences of the joys, and occasional heartaches, of motherhood had given her tremendous fulfilment. This time astonishingly the sensation was heightened. Duncan was an incredibly giving child. He seemed to return affection with interest and had an irresistible desire to establish a loving relationship with anyone he encountered.

The girls had been delightful infants too but Duncan had been exceptional. There were no tantrums, no petted lips or other attention-seeking tears, no destructive tendencies and not even sleep-destroying nocturnal demands. What was specially remarkable was that his good nature seemed to rub off on all those around him. She had been worried that the girls might be jealous of the attention he received or alienated in some other way by him. Instead they doted on him, as did everybody who met him.

If he had ever been disappointed that Duncan had not been ‘normal’ Andrew had never shown it. Quite the opposite. Neither of them had voiced such thoughts, but she was sure he also saw it as bitterly ironic that a kid who had 47 chromosomes instead of 46, far from being a super being was less well equipped than others for life’s hazards. They were both grateful, however, that Duncan had been special in his own way. And now......

She had to concentrate.
Her demand for a cell extraction from Duncan had been made when she had barely been conscious of, or answerable for, her actions. Probably contrary to Andrew’s expectation, her return to full mental stability had not moved her to abandon the cloning idea. He had not rejected it. He was too reasonable a man for that. More to the point, he had been an outstanding father and had cherished his son. He was clearly torn at the thought of a replacement child. So the consultations with family and trusted friends had begun..

The essential facts were that she would be undergoing another pregnancy of what was still a very novel kind and that the child would have Down’s syndrome. A sardonic smile had escaped her on hearing that, at her age, there was a higher chance, about one in forty, that another child would have Down’s anyway.

There were points against whose validity she recognised (but she had flatly refused to entertain one tentative suggestion that merging her and Duncan’s cells might constitute a kind of incest). A prime concern was about the danger to her and the child from such a late pregnancy. She was not afraid for herself but she had to give weight to the consequences for Andrew and the girls.
The franker of her amateur consultants had asked why she couldn’t be content with the lovely family she already had. Her mind had gone back to a Scottish couple who had been trying a few years ago to guarantee the birth of a girl to replace a young deceased daughter.
They had been criticised for not just settling for the family of three, or maybe it was four, sons they had. She had been a bit ambivalent about the issue at the time. Now she sympathised entirely. Any child’s death left an aching void. When the child had an unusually distinctive role in the family, the ache intensified. The desperate need to fill their place had to be experienced to be understood. And when the possibility existed of producing someone who would be similar in all aspects.....

Even so, why opt for a child which you knew would be born abnormal? How could that possibly be fair to the child? That was her dilemma. Deal with it then.

She had so much wanted to see Duncan grow up; to see what kind of person he would develop into and what he might achieve against the odds. She would make damn sure that no lack of vigilance, however fleeting, would jeopardise a new child’s future..
Ah, but Andrew and she might not even be around for him. Down’s children were now quite likely to live into their fifties. Even if they survived long enough, they might be too frail to protect him. He should be financially secure. He would also have supportive siblings but was it fair or realistic to expect them to take responsibility if he could not fend for himself?
At the other extreme, Heaven forbid, the child might not survive despite her best endeavours. The very thought of reliving a loss like Duncan’s made her shiver with apprehension, and remorse.

Was it right to indulge her ability to bring a child into the world knowing that he almost certainly would be unable to create children of his own? She wasn’t sure that she could legitimately counter that question with the fact that more and more adults were refraining voluntarily from procreation.

And there was the increasingly harsh and uncaring social environment. After the shocking revelations of recent years, she hoped that he wouldn’t be committed to a residential home. And they were supposed to be carers. What would it be like for him in ‘normal’ society where people hardly knew who their neighbours were and seemed to be hostile to anyone who was at all ‘different’?

But what had sustained her was that Duncan’s nature had influenced people for the good. Those smiles that he had evoked had been genuine; they hadn’t been pitying rictuses. The child had made world-weary folk mellow a little, maybe made them think that they were not so badly off as they imagined, and, who knows, even resolve subconsciously to be a bit more tolerant. There weren’t many who could claim to make a more positive contribution to society than that. If the new child had the same personality, the world should surely not be deprived of an influence for good.

If........
Was she right to have excluded the family from this end stage of deliberation? While expressing their worries about her welfare, Andrew and the girls had accepted that the final decision be left to her, as had Dr Androtti at the meeting in Rome. Andrew had reluctantly respected her desire to be alone at this point; he was downstairs in the reception area. The girls, who were agog and apprehensive at the same time, were at home with Andrew’s mother. How long had she been waiting here? What? Only five minutes?!

Focus.
She missed her son so badly. Oh Duncan!.... I’m sorry. And I want you back with me! Decide.

OK it might be risibly naive but just maybe her opting for a new Duncan would encourage a new perspective on the cloning debate. It could demonstrate that the new technique need not centre on producing a master race or mirror images of our vain selves. If only people realised that the world could be vastly improved if individuals were allowed to be just that; be respected not for what they had but for their input to society; to be themselves and not what others wanted them to be. Yes, individuals.....be themselves.....not what others wanted them to be.
The brightness of the sky and sunshine outside the large unshuttered window seemed to impose themselves on her consciousness all of a sudden.
There was a softly polite knock and the door was opened by Dr Androtti. His face was serious but tender. "Well, Mrs Matheson, have you decided?"
"Yes, doctor, I just have."

© Walter Roberts, March 2002
email:RWa3767155@aol.com

More on the Cloning issue:

Do Clones have a soul?

Hope for the future - fiction

The FUTURE PAGE

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