Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (20 page)

Steph had given Alicia four or five one-page flyers which Steph called their “package,” and which Rent-a-Womb members handed out at street corners. Some pages were Mimeographed, others printed. Alicia took a look at them in the Frick canteen, where she had decided to eat her dinner instead of going back to her parents’ house. An orange-colored flyer said:

WHY “RENT-A-WOMB?”

After a nearly twenty-year record of healthy babies brought forth by surrogate mothers, and mutually agreed upon contracts between couples and surrogates, some groups within the United States see fit to try to halt surrogate services.

How? By a verbal campaign implying that our work is mercenary (true, most of us needed or need the money), immoral (how so?), damaging to family life (we are helping to create families), and damaging to the newborn who is taken away from its surrogate mother just after birth. Does anyone remember the seconds and hours just after being born?

The unofficial fee nationwide for surrogate mothers has been up to now around $10,000 plus medical expenses and sometimes partial financial support in the last weeks of pregnancy, if the jobs of girls were of a nature not to be performed in a state of advanced pregnancy.

Now certain churches, women’s groups and indeed some men’s are trying to stop surrogate mothers’ services not by going to court and making a specific charge, but by, for instance, pressuring hospitals (to which they may have made donations that they now threaten to withhold or cease) to stop artificial (in-vitro) fertilization. This is an attempt to turn surrogates into outlaws, willing to accept ever lower fees, while for married couples who want a baby, the whole procedure would become
more
expensive, if middlemen have to be paid. If anti-surrogate people have their way, hospital procedures will have to be done on the sly. . . .

Alicia took the next flyer and skimmed.

WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

Bringing healthy babies into the world . . . The attempt to stop us, to lower our fees, will result in:

1) making ours a backstreet activity or/and

2) a luxury, as is an abortion in nations or States where abortions are outlawed.

Oddly, the anti-abortion people are the ones screaming the most loudly against us. Has it occurred to them that Rent-a-Womb members are producing babies, not killing them?

Has it occurred to them to ask the opinion of several hundred happy parents? Meet some of us tomorrow from 10 a.m. onward on the Frick Medical Center’s east side lawn!

Everyone welcome!

Alicia glanced at the canteen door. Geoff had promised to make a dash down if he could before 9 p.m. He was in the delivery room, so his arrival was a hundred percent uncertain. She looked at a yellow flyer called
THE BRIGHT SIDE
, a list of eight or ten couples whose first baby had been brought to them by a surrogate mother. The list had a homely and very real look to Alicia.

Charles and Edwina Nagel, 212 Chestnut St., Pittsfield, Mass. Son

Chas. Jr. now 2½. “We were childless. Now we’re not.”

Felipe and Dora Ortega, 10 Cedar Heights Rd., Leacock, Mich. Daughter Josephine, 3. “We are thankful and hope to have another from a surrogate as soon as we can afford to.”

“Hi!”

“Geoff! Hello! Look at all this stuff from Steph! Want me to get you a coffee?”

Geoff looked tired and he needed a shave, but he smiled and nodded, seized the flyers and began poring.

Alicia came back with black coffee. “My mother refused to let Steph stay in the house.”

“What?—You’re kidding!”

Alicia assured him she wasn’t, and that Steph hadn’t been dampened or even surprised by it.

“One of my patients in pre-natal this afternoon—” Geoff spoke softly, and glanced at a nurse and an intern at a table near them, but they seemed absorbed in their own conversation, “—told me the women of the town are ‘quite shocked by these Rent-a-Womb girls,’” Geoff said on a prim note. “And they intend to turn up tomorrow too, I gather.”

“Pity I’m on duty at ten,” Alicia said. “I’ll have to look out a window—if I can.”

“Funny, I’ve got three fellows coming tomorrow morning to produce. What a time for it! Mighty Muckers outside chanting ‘Abnormal’ and ‘Contrary to nature!’ Ha-ha!” Geoff writhed with mirth, wiped a tear from his eye, and downed the rest of his coffee. “Bye, sweetie! Back to the blessed events!”

The next morning, Alicia had trouble finding a parking place for her car, because other cars had usurped the nurses’ parking row, which was not so sacred as that of the doctors. There were three parked buses, and at least two more arriving. No use looking for Steph in all the confusion of people. The east lawn was covered with women and men, some with banners, shouting and yelling, policemen even, trying to direct people. Alicia hurried into the Frick and checked in at a few minutes before 10.

“Get them
out
! . . . Get them
out
!” That was the first chant Alicia heard through the closed windows of a room where she was inserting a tube into the vein of a patient’s right arm. He was an elderly man, and this was a blood transfusion.

“Did that hurt?” she asked.

“Not a bit, thank you. What’s all the commotion outside?”

Then came the taking of four patients’ blood pressure. When she was washing her hands around 10:30, she opened a window to the bright October sunshine and looked out on to the east lawn.

Feminine voices rose to her ears, then a male voice boomed over a loud-speaker, “
Keep our country pure!
”

That was the Mighty Right with the amplifier.

“Listen to what we’re fighting
for.—
Take a look at (words unintelligible) and let them speak!” That was one of the Rent-a-Womb girls, and the voice had come from near the big gold-on-purple streamer held by two young women at either end. The streamer said
RENT-A-WOMB,
and billowed forth and back in the wind. Buses and a lot of parked cars were honking their horns. Each side was trying to drown the other out, Alicia realized. The Rent-a-Wombers had a sort of podium or stage, Alicia was glad to see, because the opponents had a small grandstand, like a section of stadium seating, and a larger platform just below it. From this platform the man with the mike was bellowing.

“. . . American tradition . . . God’s gift of children . . . being turned into an ugly commerce which you see here . . .”

Alicia tore herself away and closed the window. Back to duty.

There must be more than six hundred people on the east lawn, she thought. Had her mother turned out too, maybe with her friend Rosemary?

When Alicia next had a chance to look out of a window, things had hotted up. Some middle-aged women seemed to be tussling with a group of younger Rent-a-Womb girls on the left side of the lawn. A nurse, smiling excitedly, joined Alicia. Her name was Mary Jane, as Alicia recalled.

“Up those church people. I mean
up
!” Mary Jane made a vulgar gesture which suddenly seemed highly comical to both. “
They’ve
got all the time in the world to turn out, sure! Moneyed bastards, too!”

Mary Jane was Irish, Alicia thought. Even so, she was pro-Rent-a-Womb and probably in favor of abortion on demand. They both laughed madly in sudden sisterhood, and slapped each other’s shoulders.

“Did you see the TV?” Mary Jane drew Alicia toward the nurses’ “rest room” which had staff only on its door. The TV here was on, and several nurses standing and sitting watched raptly, some laughing, others gleefully applauding. The screen showed two women face to face yelling at each other, and seemingly about to come to blows.

“Where’s this?” Alicia asked.

“
Dallas!
” a couple of the nurses answered in unison. One added, “We just saw Los Angeles! Wow! It’s all over the country!”

“Wish I were down on the lawn,” Alicia said to Mary Jane. “My best friend’s head of Rent-a-Womb—practically. Stephanie Fuller.”

“Oh, yeah?” Mary Jane looked at Alicia with sudden admiration, almost. “Hey, I heard Mighty Muck’s going to—You know the fetus burial in LA? Well, Mighty Muck’s—”

Mary Jane never finished, because they all heard the hall buzzer and had to move. Alicia had thought Mighty Muck was solely Geoff’s term.

“. . . would like to introduce . . .” Alicia heard as she strode down the hall. Surely that was Steph’s voice—she hoped so—introducing some of the happy parents.

Alicia had a half-hour break and could have grabbed a sandwich, but she was more interested in the east lawn, where it seemed more people had gathered since she had last looked. She could see the “happy parents,” three couples standing in a row on the podium amid the Rent-a-Womb supporters, all laughing or smiling, perhaps at the difficulties of hearing anything, because at least two mikes seemed to be roaring from either side. The Mighty Right people, who had strung up their red-white-and-blue streamer, were playing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” on some kind of portable player while from the Rent-a-Womb side Alicia thought she could recognize “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

“. . . to read you about Abraham and Sarah!” yelled a determined female voice. “When Abraham
thought
Sarah was barren, he lay with Hagar . . .”

“Lay an egg!”

“. . . ask you for
silence
! The President is going to speak . . . about sixteen
thousand
aborted fetuses . . . not
forgotten
!”

Cheers from squawky elderly throats on the Mighty Right side, and “Yay-hoos!” from Rent-a-Womb. Applause and laughter.

“. . . fetuses collected from hospitals that would have thrown these babies out like
garbage,
” droned the male voice, coming from a source Alicia could not see. “. . . Now the voice of our President . . . committed to loving the unwanted . . .”

“
We
want them!” screamed Rent-a-Womb, and clapped hands and yelled. “Birth control!—That’s the result of no
birth control
!”

This got some laughter from both sides.

“. . . at the burial of . . .” Much sputtering of the turned up loudspeaker, as the President’s familiar voice said: “Just as the terrible toll of
Gettysburg
can be traced to a tragic decision . . . so can these deaths we mourn. . . .”

Alicia ran down. She had to get closer, had to be in it! She nearly bumped into Mary Jane and another nurse coming up the stairs, and said, “Come on down! Can’t you get off for a couple of minutes?” Alicia raced out into the sunlight toward the Rent-a-Womb side of the lawn, looking for Steph.

“. . . human beings . . . ruled outside the protection of the law by a court ruling which clashed with our deepest moral convictions . . .” This was the President, sounding deadly earnest. “. . . From these innocent dead, let us take
increased devotion
to the cause of restoring the rights of the unborn . . .” Mad applause on the amplifier.

Some applause from Mighty Righters but not much, because they avidly waited for more from the President.

“What’s abortion got to do with Gettysburg?” Alicia heard a woman ask a man standing beside her.

“Um—uh—Well, it is a little complicated, but I’ll try to explain when we get home,” replied the man.

“Alicia! I’m over here!” This was Steph, waving, standing on something, otherwise Alicia couldn’t have seen her in the crowd.

Alicia cut her way toward Steph, and her nurse’s uniform and white cap helped. “Hi, honey!”

“Hi!—Sylvia! Meet my friend Alicia Newton. And Sylvia’s husband Jed.”

Alicia said hello. These were a pair of the happy parents, Steph explained.

“Do you know, we’ve had so many people asking us questions,” Steph went on to Alicia. “Women who never get pregnant, though there’s nothing the matter with them or their husbands. You know? They want to know how they can get in touch with a surrogate mother.”

“. . .
persistence,
” roared the amplifier over the noise of the murmuring crowd, “is what allowed us to have a resting place today . . . for these little boys and girls . . .”

“Fetuses
still
?” yelled a man from somewhere, laughing.

“Not fair!” cried a woman among the Mighty Right. “Bad taste! Turn that
off
!”

“
No, it’s part of the LA fetus burial!” yelled a girl.

Day and
night,
we’re Mighty
Right!

Day and
night,
we’re Mighty
Right!