IF

When rape results in pregnancy, or when giving birth might cost the
mother's life, few women would fail to consider as an alternative:

Abortion.

But let's say you're a doctor--a physician not morally adverse to

terminating a patient's pregnancy--and the circumstances are neither
frivolous nor dire.

Let's say that on a given day you are consulted by two young women,
both pregnant, both doubtful as to whether they should be.

Now, remember: such a choice is ultimately the mother's, but because

you are a physician, and because your judgment is respected, and
because your patient is seeking guidance, everything you say,
regardless of how clinically objective--yes, even the tone of your
voice--may sway her decision.

Yours is a position of enormous responsibility. Like it or not, the

very expression on your face could save or extinguish a life.

Your first expectant mother is Caterina.

Caterina is unmarried, obviously in her teens, obviously poor.

You ask her age, and she tells you, and at once you realize she has
overstated her years by one or two or three.

Caterina is in the first trimester of her pregnancy.

You ask if she has been pregnant before.

Caterina shakes her head.

Studying her, you wonder.

You inquire of her general health; no problems, she says.

And the health of the father?

Caterina shrugs; her eyes fall.

She has lost contact with the father of her unborn child. All she
knows is he was twenty-three, a lawyer or a notary or something like
that. He lives nearby, she thinks; she is not sure. The affair was
over quickly, little more than a one-night stand. No child was
expected--nor now is wanted.

What Doctor, is your advice?

Later the same day, you are consulted by a second expectant mother.

Her name is Klara.

Klara is twenty-eight, married three years, the wife of a government

worker; she has the look of a woman accustomed to anguish.

Concerned for the ultimate health of her unborn, Klara explains that
for each year of her marriage she has had a child--and each has died;
the first within thirty-one months, the second within sixteen months,
the third within several days.

Disease? You ask.

Klara nods. She suspects that any future child would be equally
susceptible. For you see, her husband is also her second cousin.
Both Catholic, they received papal dispensation to marry--though now
Klara questions their wisdom in asking permission.

And there's something else...

One of Klara's sisters is a hunchback; another sister, the mother of a
hunchback.

Klara is in the first trimester of her fourth pregnancy. The odds are
against the health of her child. Time is running out.

And it is only later that you learn--Klara's husband is not, as she

has said, her second cousin. He is her uncle.

So what, Doctor, is your advice?

In addition to all immediate considerations--physical, moral,

religious--the dilemma of whether to terminate a pregnancy is a
philosophical question:

Might this life, if left to live, affect the consciousness or even the
destiny of mankind?

Yet if the profundity of this question is diminished by the balance

which governs all life, there is evidence in the two true stories you
have just heard: the unwed mother with unwanted child; the married
mother with the graves of three infants behind her.

For if you, as the hypothetical physician, have opted in both cases

for abortion--then you have respectively denied the world the
multifaceted genius of Leonardo da Vinci--and spared humanity the
terror of Adolf Hitler.

They are THE REST OF THE STORY.