Part 4: Eugenisists

Doctor Ellien Bailey was dumbfounded. Her mouth worked silently while she tried to make sense of fragments of a broken reality. Her patient, Samantha, had been visiting regularly for almost 20 years. She was obviously the product of a troubled home. The younger woman had been snared in trouble through her juvenile years, and her adult life was peppered with further entanglements that found her on the wrong side of the law, but she was just the sort of patient Ellien most wanted to help, and over the years, she liked to think that she had indeed, helped Samantha.

But she hadn’t yet come far enough. Not by far. After a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, they found that Samantha could be productive and avoid trouble so long as she stayed on her medication. Samantha, however, had problems sticking to the regimen. She was prone to bouts of hysterics and sometime violence. Twice she’d been committed, and both times she’d been released once on her medications again.

She was unstable, she wasn’t ready, and Ellien couldn’t believe the rational, softly-spoken girl in front of her didn’t realize that.

Ellien did the only thing that could right her world. She said no.

“What?”

Samantha’s face was innocent confusion, like she really hadn’t thought it possible. Ellien mustered her courage, and said again: “No.

“I can’t. You’re really not prepared to have a child, Samantha, and I can’t in good conscience, give you a prescription for elixir right now. Maybe we can work something out so if you stay on your meds for a certain probationary period ...”

A dark look came over Samantha’s face. “Probationary?! Listen, I know my rights, and you can’t decide if I can have a baby.”

“I know,” Ellien replied, her confidence strengthening with each breath, “I can’t decide for you. But I can decide not to be party to it.

“Listen, Samantha, I think that if you could get into some good habits you could make a fine mother, but right now you know that sometimes you do things that you can’t control and end up regretting. What if you had an incident, and you hurt your child? Could you live with it? I’m not saying this for you, but for your child; I won’t give you elixir until you are healthy and in a good place.”

Samantha glowered as Ellien methodically noted the visit on her tablet, said a pleasant goodbye, and exited the office. She walked away from the examination room with a good feeling, like she’d made a stand that she’d never regret.

Fourteen days later a small horde of lawyers notified her of the impending lawsuit. She was accused of discrimination, alienation of affection, and interfering with parental rights. It was preparation for the suit that robbed her of conviction, after all her own lawyer tended to those details, it was the ravenous media that besieged her life.

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“Are you a eugenicist, Dr Bailey?”

She blinked calmly. Her observers might mistake her composer for cool calculation, but in reality she merely wanted to keep her thoughts in some semblance of order. “No.”

The plaintiff’s attorney gingerly straightened the seams of his double-breasted silk suit. “Are you qualified to decide who is allowed to procreate?”

Again a frosty, “No.”

“I see,” he huffed. “Yet you refused a prescription of elixir to Ms Samantha Jellico on April third of this year, did you not?”

Ellien remembered her own lawyer’s advice: keep your answers short, but when you’re asked a convoluted question, make sure you’re clear. “I decided that it wasn’t in her best interest to be given a prescription at that time.”

“So you made a decision as to someone else’s reproduction, correct?”

“Not at all,” she replied. “I choose not to play a role in someone else’s reproduction.”

Ellien thought that her reasoned, clear answer would defuse the entire ordeal. Despite her expectations, her opponent’s mouth took on a barely perceptible sinister curl. “As a health care professional, can you cite any physical reason that would make pregnancy or childbearing dangerous to Ms Jellico?”

She’d been warned, coaxed, and almost plead with to refrain from taking the stand. At one point her lawyers uttered the word “forbid”, but Ellien would not hear of it. She’d stepped in, and was not being pushed into a corner by tricks of language. “I know no reason that she couldn’t have a child.”

“Your concern was for complication after childbirth?”

“Yes, Samantha’s been my patient for many years, and I know her history--”

The attorney cut her off, “Ms Jellico’s history is not at issue here.”

A blunt reminder that the judge had given instruction that Samantha’s history was not to be brought up to the jury. Ellien shook her head and tried to reign in her composure, “Her health is at issue, as is her capability to rear a child.”

“You had only just completed a check-up on Ms Jellico, and there is no note of a problem. Do you have concrete evidence to demonstrate that Ms Jellico is incapable of child rearing?”

“Only her pattern of behavior.”

She expected a protest, an uproar, or a censure for daring to speak what she’d been ordered to remain silent about. All she got was a sour look on the attorney’s face, “It is, then a foregone conclusion, then, that she cannot be a good mother?”

“I felt compelled to watch out for the needs of the potential child.”

He folded his arms, “You decided she was not fit to have a child. Therefore aren’t you, despite your distaste for the term, a eugenicist?”

She conceded the game of words. “I suppose I am, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”