by Randy Alcorn
“I’ve heard Doc was involved in it.”
“He was all for it, no reservations. When the president took the ban off it several years ago, Lifeline was right there, your friend in the thick of it—not actually doing the research, but pushing it. So suddenly we’re not just doing abortions, we’re tinkering with their parts, cannibalizing them to patch up adults. The anti-abortion people don’t like it, I’ll tell you that. They on your list of suspects? I thought so.
“Any way, the same thing’s been done with anencephalic infants, but there’s not enough of them. There’s lots of aborted babies. But it takes maybe three to eight fetuses to treat Parkinson’s disease or diabetes. I read that to treat every person in this country with diabetes would require something like twelve million fetuses. We’re way short. Some places pay winos to give blood. Next thing you know we’ll be paying women to get pregnant and have an abortion, and we’ll justify it by saying look how much it helps Parkinson’s and diabetes patients. And even if it’s illegal, demand still stimulates supply and forces up the price. A black market is inevitable. Somebody wants to make bucks? Get pregnant, get an abortion, walk away with cash.
“But American abortions won’t be enough. Where will we go? People are already looking at the Third World. Since fetal tissue research was legalized in ’93, we’ve been importing fetuses from Russia. Offer somebody American dollars, more than they might make in five years, to have an abortion. And why stop with treating diseases? Why not use fetal gums with teeth buds to give someone new teeth? Or fetal skin to replace scarred facial skin? Or fetal scalp with hair follicles to treat balding?”
“Sounds like Brave New World.”
“You don’t know the half of it. A Scottish scientist perfected a method to take eggs from the ovaries of aborted female fetuses, fertilize them, and implant them in the wombs of infertile women, who will then give birth. You realize what that means?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You’re going to have children growing up whose real mother never existed. Well, that’s not quite right. Children whose real mother was never born. How’d you like to explain that to a kid? ‘Your mom was a dead baby.’ Or ‘In order for you to exist, your mother had to be killed before she was born.’ It’s bizarre, Woods. I’m no psychiatrist, but there’s got to be confusion and guilt here. We’ve got people saying this is unnatural and immoral, that you shouldn’t commandeer someone else’s reproductive capacity without their permission. But whose permission are we talking about? The fetus has no legal rights. So why are we worried about violating them? I’m prochoice. Almost all of us on the committee are. Why should we be more offended about the idea of a fetus bearing offspring than the idea of killing that fetus in the first place? I honestly don’t know the answer.
“Brave New World, you said? Tomorrow the issue will be conceiving fetuses for no other reason than to furnish body parts for transplants. When it becomes possible to incubate an embryo to maturity, some entrepreneur will start a fetus farm, breeding hundreds and thousands of them for nothing but spare parts. That’s why ethics committees are so vital. We’ve got to think this stuff through or pretty soon we won’t be that much different than the Nazi doctors.”
“But how can you decide what’s right and what’s wrong? What standards will people agree on?” Jake’s interest went beyond the scope of the investigation.
“That’s precisely the problem. Try chairing an ethics committee when the people on it have no shared foundation for ethics. Everybody’s got their own sense of what’s right and wrong. If one of the doctors on the committee saw a made-for-TV movie on euthanasia last night, it might be the primary influence on his input to the committee today. So you’ve got some Hollywood screenwriter and producer setting the ethical direction of Lifeline Medical Center. Life and death decisions deserve a more profound deliberation than what you get on Oprah or in People magazine.
“Forgive my skepticism, Mr. Woods, but working on an ethics committee with people like your friend is a little like trying to make blueprints for a building with people who disagree on how many inches are in a foot and how many feet are in a yard…and whether the foundation should be made of concrete or Jell-O.”
Jake understood, much more than he would have a few months ago. “I had a friend who used to say we’ve lost our ‘moral compass.’ People used to agree certain basics were right and wrong, nonnegotiable. But no longer.”
“Exactly. Call it natural law, the Judeo-Christian ethic, conscience, tradition, common sense, or whatever you want. And several countries are further down the line. In Holland someone proposed a television game show called ‘A Matter of Life or Death.’ The idea was to have a studio audience decide which of two patients should receive life-saving medical treatment. Lots of people were outraged. But you know how it hit me? With the government taking over health care, doctors are constantly being pressured to make tough decisions to cut costs. My question is, how much more qualified are bureaucrats and physicians to decide who lives and who dies than a TV studio audience?”
Marsdon hesitated. “I’ve said a lot more than I was going to. This is confidential between you and the police, right? No surprise article or anything?”
“Completely confidential. I’m not taking notes. I’m not doing an article, at least not now. If I ever do I’d ask you for an interview. Anything you tell me now is strictly off limits.”
“Okay. Good.” Marsdon paused, obviously relieved. But Jake sensed this was a man with a lot pent up inside. He needed to talk.
“Do you know how much latitude we’re given as physicians in deciding life and death situations? Living Wills are getting looser and looser. They’re subject to family and physician interpretation. There’s all kinds of different factors to weigh in declaring which organ donors are technically dead and which aren’t. Of course, the truth is they have to still be alive in the case of every transplant. The doctor can’t wait till their organs stop, then go in to get them because cell and tissue damage happens so fast, all you’ve got is a dead organ.”
Jake looked confused.
“Do I have to spell out what that means? We have to pretend people are dead so we can take their organs. They’re not really dead—it’s just that they’re near death, they’re dying or in our opinion they have minimal hope of recovery. But that’s not the same as dead. We call them HBCDs—heart-beating cadaver donors. That’s why brain death is such a convenient standard. We can still live by the dead donor rule. We’ve just changed the definition of dead. Still another thing Dr. Lowell and I argued about.”
“I’ve never even thought about most of these things, Doctor.”
“Few people have. JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, published a study on brain death and organ retrieval. I made copies for the whole ethics committee—Dr. Lowell would have gotten one. I’ve cited it in several papers and lectures of my own. The study showed only one out of three physicians and nurses were able to correctly identify the medical and legal criteria for determining death. Six out of ten had no consistent or coherent definition of death. And, get this, one out of five held a concept of death that defines patients in persistent vegetative states as dead. Which makes every case of their recovery a resurrection, I suppose. As our definition of death changes and fluctuates, the potential for abuse and bad judgment calls is magnified. I just don’t think your friend understood the problem. He wasn’t alone, which is the really scary part.”
“Scary in what way?”
“Look, we’ve got all kinds of definitions of PVS around. Persistent Vegetative State. I’ll give you one example. There’s a brain condition called de-efferented, or locked-in syndrome. Not only is vocal control lost, there’s a total lack of ability to communicate or control responses. But the cause isn’t cognitive failure, it’s paralysis. The fact is, EEGs don’t distinguish between vegetative and locked-in patients. Sure, if a careful neurological study is done by an expert, he can tell the difference. But somebody has to or
der the test. And who has time and money for this stuff anymore with the health care situation? The inclination is to give up and say, ‘Nah, she’s a vegetable. Let’s just call her brain dead and get on with it.’ Especially since we can get a healthy organ out of her to save someone else.
“It’s a lot easier to give up on person A when you tell yourself you’re helping person B. It’s not a pretty picture, Mr. Woods. I’ve been thinking about resigning from the ethics committee myself. Maybe getting out of medicine entirely. Become a plumber or something. Anyway, I’ve got patients waiting.”
“This has been helpful, Doctor. Anything else you can tell me about Greg Lowell?”
Marsdon sighed. “Only that he was highly respected. We had our differences, major ones, but I don’t mean to assail your friend’s memory. He was a colleague. He had the brains and hands of a great surgeon. At times, to be blunt, I wasn’t sure about his heart. But maybe that’s unfair. We’re all under stress in this field. The rules are changing on us, and a lot of us are getting tired of it. One moment we have to get permission to blow our noses, the next we’re given the power of gods. Greg was frustrated. So am I. At another time and place, maybe on another committee, I might have seen him differently. I’m sorry he’s gone.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Jake had been back in town a week. He’d written two of his three columns on media bias, using illustrations he’d gotten from Leonard and a number he put together on his own. He was careful to leave Leonard’s name out of it, since reporters are allowed to take chances with their careers but not each others’.
Media bias was an okay subject as long as it didn’t get specific, but Jake had gotten very specific. Some of the illustrations hit close to home. The routine over-inflating of attendance figures at gay and abortion rights marches were one among dozens of illustrations that were provable, but Jake wasn’t sure what kind of reaction they’d get him inside the Trib. Anyway, Winston did no more than raise his eyebrows and verify that the second article would be Jake’s last on the subject. It could have been a lot worse.
Dr. Marsdon’s input had been interesting and possibly valuable. Jake had shared it first with Ollie, then after giving him a two-day head start, with Sutter. This was his way of consoling himself that while he needed to help both investigators, he’d go the extra mile for Ollie when he could.
When Jake came into the office he saw the message on his terminal to drop by and see Jess Foley around two. He approached Foley’s office right on the hour, but saw through the big windows of the conference room next to his office that he was still buried in the editorial powwow for the first evening edition. Jess saw Jake and beckoned him in. That was Foley’s style. He was an open-door type of guy who often invited reporters in to see how editorial worked, thinking it made them better when they saw the big picture. Jake agreed.
“Hi, Jake. Sorry, we’re running late here. Hope you don’t mind sitting in?”
Jake didn’t mind at all. Several heads around the room nodded at him, though Jake thought he detected an unusual coolness from two of the editors. Probably just his imagination.
“Okay, so far in section A we’ve got National nine pages, Metro fifteen, Foreign eight.” As he did every day, Jess was slicing up the Trib like a piece of pie to a group of hungry children.
Jake enjoyed visiting the “desk,” the collective term for the editorial team. Most of the top editors were in the room—city desk, foreign desk, metro desk, sports, arts and entertainment, forum, the head of the graphic arts section, and a few others, twelve in all. So many of the crucial decisions were made here, decisions that elated or crushed reporters the way decisions made behind the closed doors of a parents’ bedroom elated or crushed children.
Posted prominently on a huge bulletin board were the front pages of each section of the latest edition of the Trib. Jake knew the meeting had begun with a group analysis in which the editors expressed their opinions of page layout and article selection. This served to highlight certain editorial choices, encouraging good work and critiquing the not so good. Section editors learned from each others’ expertise this way.
Strewn across the counter next to Jake’s chair were a few dailies and three biweekly newspapers from the suburbs. The papers quietly testified to the fact there wasn’t much originality in journalism. There are no copyrights on ideas. The cardinal rule in journalism is to do it first, but if you don’t do it first, at least do it better. Though there was no daily competitor to the Trib, Jess felt they could always learn from what the smaller papers were doing.
Jess looked at a yellow legal pad full of scratchings. “Wanda, still an embargo on CANCER?”
“Yeah, it’s the usual with the New England Journal. If the public gets it before the doctors, they hit the roof. Tomorrow evening’s edition is our first shot at the story.”
“Yeah, right. Just checking. We could use it today. How much copy?”
“Three columns, easy, maybe four.”
“Not that much in news—wish we had it today. Katie, how about that stand-alone for page one? You know, the early December tree with the last few leaves falling, by the water fountain.”
“Keegan would be thrilled.”
“Let’s surprise him.”
Every photographer’s dream. A page one stand-alone, unrelated to any story, chosen purely for the merits of the picture itself.
Barbie, Jess’s personal assistant, suddenly barged in the door with the unmistakable air of breaking news.
“We’ve got a plane crash in Seattle. A DC8. Just happened. All the networks are on it. Too soon for the wire services. We’re making some calls. Looks pretty bad.”
Jess groaned. “Great. Right when it looked like an easy set up. Get some g.a.’s on it fast,” Jess said to Barbie. “Pull somebody if you have to. Maybe Denise or Christy? We need some quick action, phone interviews, direct contact stuff, anything that’s different from everybody else, okay?”
“Right. What do you think of trying to make a connection with that last DC8 crash? Wasn’t long ago. Any similarities, an aircraft design problem, that sort of angle?”
“Great idea, Barbie. Check the morgue. But have Liz do the work, okay? All extra hands on CRASH.”
“Got it.” Barbie was gone, but the last glow on her face betrayed an adrenaline high from the combination of breaking news and imminent deadline.
“Okay, CRASH is a definite page one. It’ll bump FLU or RESIGNATION, but we’ll have to see which. Probably RESIGNATION.” Jess spoke the editorial language of slugs, the one-word name for stories.
“The stand-alone is definitely gone—what Keegan doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Joan, what will this do to our total pages?”
“I’ll call advertising. You know the standing orders. We lose all airline ads the first twenty-four hours after a crash, or when the crash is still on page one. Don’t know how many ads we had. If it’s an average day, we’ll lose a page or two of news. Probably same tomorrow.”
Jake considered the irony. Huge news, but a shrinking news hole.
Jess shook his head. “We used to print the extra news pages even without the ads, but the budget’s so tight now the bean counters upstairs say we can’t.”
Jess looked down the table to the only face Jake didn’t recognize. “Okay, this probably means Metro loses two pages. Sorry, Fae. Your first week on Metro and we’re already killing you. I’d tell you we’ll make it up to you, but I’d be lying.”
Fae gave a phony smile and made exaggerated hand motions crossing out a few stories. “I had some nice little briefs in a package. They would have made you proud. This probably kills UNSOLVED, the Dykstra murder case. Tomorrow is its anniversary. Don’t suppose it could go in two years and one day after the original?”
Jess looked sympathetic, but only for a moment, shaking his head. He turned to Perry, the National desk editor. “National gets a page one with CRASH, but you probably reinherit RESIGNATION for back pages, so make room.”
&nbs
p; He looked at Wanda wryly. “Like I was saying, sure glad they put an embargo on CANCER. We haven’t got room for it!”
The domino effect. Jake loved the relative safety of the opinion pages. Though he sometimes got shelved in syndication, in the last five years he’d only been bumped twice at the Trib. It was three columns a week, eight hundred words a column, as dependable as Winston’s bad moods.
“All right,” Jess sounded like a general giving his last word to the troops. “I want special attention to headlines. They’ve been getting a little flabby. Taut. Concise. Grab the reader. Okay? And all the adjustments don’t change deadline. Nothing changes deadline. No excuses. Got it?”
The meeting abruptly done, everybody cleared out like it was a bomb scene, and Jess and Jake were alone in the room. Headlines and deadlines. The newspaper business in a nutshell.
“Good job, Jess. You sure know how to run this ship.”
“Thanks.” Jess paused, confirming Jake’s fears the subject might be uncomfortable. “Listen, I just wanted to ask, are things…okay with you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, since your friends died and all.”
“It’s been tough, but I’m okay, yeah. Why?”
“Well, I don’t know. I’ve heard some people talking. No big deal, but they’re noticing a difference in your columns.”
“What kind of difference?”
“Well, maybe not as hard-hitting. You know how good you’ve always been at taking on the right wing. It’s kind of your hallmark. It’s okay to talk about media bias, but you’ve done it twice, and you need to be careful or you’ll give the impression it’s a real problem at the Trib. And there’s been other things recently, just little things here and there that seem…not really like you.”