After dinner, Karen’s father, Robert, said, “Have you even been outside in the past week, or have you been cooped up in the house like an animal?”
Karen said, “I go out in the backyard and hang out.”
Robert said, “That’s not good. You need to be out doing things.”
Karen said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’d rather just lay low until whatever happens is going to happen.”
Lynn said, “Lay low? You’re past that point, I think.”
Karen said, “You know what I mean. Just stick around here and not give them an opportunity to get any more photos of me. I did a fucking CNN interview. That should be the only public appearance I have to do.”
Lynn said, “I don’t think that’s how it works, honey. When you put something in the world that gets people this fired up, they’re going to want you to continue to be a part of it. What you do about that is obviously up to you, and we’re happy to have you stay here as long as you want, but your dad just wants you to be happy, and I do, too. And you can’t really be all that happy sitting around watching TV all day, can you?”
Karen said, “Much happier than getting attacked at a grocery store and then seeing pictures of it all over the Internet. And I don’t just watch TV all day. I’m working on my dissertation.”
Robert said, “Why? Are you going to try to get into some other school after this or something?”
Karen had considered this, but she hadn’t yet committed to it in her own mind. She was continuing her work on the dissertation, in part, in order to stay focused on the purpose behind everything that was happening around her. Whether she used it to apply to a different philosophy program, or even tried to publish it herself, was irrelevant to her in that moment. It was just about continuing her work.
Robert said, “You’ve gotten into something here, that’s for sure.”
Karen said, “That is indeed for sure, Dad.”
They finished eating dinner and Karen went to her bedroom. More and more, she found that lying on her bed in a specific position on her side was the only way to ease the pain in her back. She’d lie sometimes for hours at a time reading about herself on the Internet. Although the articles against her were far more violent in tone, she was surprised to find that there were just as many as the number supporting her. The supporters, though, usually defended her more on the basis of freedom of expression than because they supported her challenge to the Christian right. She did find a few prominent articles, however, that praised Karen’s project as the event that the pro-choice movement was waiting for but had never had the guts or creativity to do for itself. These were the articles that gave Karen hope that what she was doing was making a difference, was changing people’s minds, was forcing them to talk about this in a philosophical context rather than just the usual right-wing brainless screaming from a pulpit. One article equated what Karen was doing to the Emancipation Proclamation. It claimed that women were the most subjugated group of human beings on the planet and that this was a massive step toward ending that, toward forcing people to see the hypocrisy of patriarchal religious structures that claim to want the best for women even as they work to rob them of their reproductive rights.
She also read countless posts and articles that pleaded with her to give the child a chance to live, even if her financial goal wasn’t met. Karen had to admit that the logic of this specific argument was sound. Most of these articles argued that Karen would be able to prove her point about the hypocritical nature of the religious right and take the high road at the same time if she didn’t get the money but still had the child and gave it up for adoption or even decided to keep it. As she finished reading one such article, she noticed that she was unconsciously rubbing her stomach. She could feel the fetus moving inside her as she rubbed. The article’s final line read, “If you do nothing else, just spend ten minutes thinking about what kind of person that child could become with you as a parent.” She lifted her shirt and looked down at the strange thing her body had become. Two moles on the top of her stomach had begun to grow thick black hair. She had visible stretch marks that she found hideous. But she knew that when this was over they’d serve as lifelong reminders of what she’d done, and she knew that she’d come to love them. Most disgusting to her at this point was how her belly button had pushed itself out. Her new doctor told her that it would return to normal after the pregnancy, but for now it made her gag every time she saw it. In her mind, her protruding navel was worse than her leaking nipples.
The final line of that article struck Karen as a reasonable challenge, and she forced herself to take it. She felt that she shouldn’t have to force herself to ignore her emotions, to close herself off from any thoughts or feelings she might be having. She put her palm flat on her stomach, where she felt the last movement, and thought about the tiny person growing inside her.
On the way home from her last doctor’s appointment, Karen’s mother had let slip the gender of the fetus, so Karen knew that it was a girl growing inside her. She imagined the girl to have blue eyes like Paul. She imagined them to be curious and smart and beautiful. She imagined this little girl growing up. She imagined herself going to a grade school PTA meeting and learning from the teachers that her daughter was the smartest student in the school, but that she also had a problem with authority. She imagined getting a call from a junior high principal because her daughter had punched a boy in the nose after the boy told her that he didn’t think his future wife should have a job. She imagined her daughter telling her that even though everyone else was going to the prom, she wasn’t, because she considered it an antiquated tradition that promoted discrimination more than anything else. She imagined her daughter getting into Harvard and being the first female student to do something so important that it forever altered the manner in which the school was run. She couldn’t imagine what that would be, but she could imagine her daughter doing it. She imagined her daughter becoming a leader in whatever the feminist movement of her time would be. She imagined her writing books that incensed the public but nonetheless pushed things forward. She imagined her daughter growing old but keeping a photo of her mother with her all the time. She imagined her daughter loving her for a wide variety of things, but mostly for deciding to have her. She imagined her daughter reading through the mountains of words that would have been written about both her and Karen, and she imagined her daughter understanding why she had done it, and she imagined her daughter having respect and admiration for her mother and her project. And in all this she realized that this child was a part of Paul, too. It was a part of the person she had come to love most in the world. And this child might be the only way she could have some part of Paul in her life. It was something she’d never allowed herself to consider until that moment, and it made her extremely sad to think of this child in those terms, as the last piece of her relationship with Paul.
Karen felt a tear roll down her cheek and immediately told herself it was hormones. Then she imagined a different version of her daughter. She imagined her with the same blue eyes from her father, but then she imagined those eyes without the fire she saw in them in the other version of her daughter. She imagined this more likely child as a girl with little special curiosity about life or anything else. She imagined her daughter marrying an average man and having his average children, and never working, and never contributing to anything or thinking critically about the world around her. She imagined her daughter as a normal woman, trapped by her inability to see the dangers of traditional gender roles and relationships. She imagined her daughter as being happy, but that wasn’t enough for Karen.
Karen knew that parents had some influence over the people their children became, but certainly that influence wasn’t absolute, and statistically her daughter would be far more likely to be uninteresting than she would be likely to do anything of note or even to be likely to have an interesting conversation with her mother about any of this. For Karen, that would be more heartbreaking than anything else. And there was the dilemma for her. Even if she wanted to have the child and keep it without giving it up for adoption, she knew that the great likelihood was that her daughter would be completely and utterly normal.
She didn’t consider herself to be normal by any means. She thought about how her parents had raised her, and how influential they had been in shaping the person she’d become. They had given her the room she needed to explore things for herself, and they never pressed religion on her or any publicly held views of what a woman should or could be. She knew she’d be the same way with any child she could ever have. But she had no real idea how much her upbringing had contributed to her adult personality, and how much it was the product of innate factors. She couldn’t say how much of her would have been the same, no matter what her parents did. Things like intelligence and curiosity, Karen thought, were random. Despite any kind of parental impositions in a child’s life, certain things were dictated at birth. And if her child had low intelligence, or no interest in intellectual pursuits, there was virtually nothing she could do to reverse that. This was her worst fear where a possible child was concerned, but it was a fear she’d never considered before that moment. It was a fear that betrayed in Karen a secret desire for a better life for her unborn child.
And beyond that, Karen could feel a bond forming with this child. She felt as though the child was on this journey with her, that some partnership in the overarching plot of this entire ordeal had been formed. That would be a difficult partnership to end. She’d already ended one relationship that meant more to her than anything, and she knew that losing another would be even more difficult.
She tried to put the question out of her mind and think instead about what the next few weeks would be like. She was quickly approaching the end of her second trimester, and although there had been a very significant uptake in donations as the end date approached, the account still had only twenty-seven million dollars. At this late date it was extremely unlikely that she would hit her goal, and abortion was a likely enough prospect that she had started looking into where she would have it done. She knew she would have to keep the location a secret, in order to avoid not only paparazzi but also the potential for harm to herself or anyone who worked there. When she called around, she found that every clinic was open to having Karen as a patient, and most of them even told her that they supported her and thought what she was doing was admirable.
She knew she would also have to make some kind of public acknowledgment of the results of her experiment. Every major news organization in the country had offered to cover a press conference live, if she chose to give one, but she wasn’t yet certain that a live press conference was the way to go. She considered simply posting an update on her site and allowing that to be the only message she gave the public on the deadline. But as she thought more and more about the abortion itself, for the first time she realized that the apprehension she felt had little to do with the end of the experiment, or even the fear surrounding the procedure. She felt fear at the possibility that the life she was ending might just be one of the most amazing women she would ever meet.