Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 8420 Plough Quarterly • Autumn 2016 W hen someone like Richard Dawkins looks in on families like mine, he sees only the chal- lenges and assumes all is dark. I don’t blame him for this blindness. Although I love my sister fiercely, she did not always seem a good and perfect gift to me. Growing up, I was sometimes frustrated by the demands her care made on us, and on a few occasions I found myself longing for a “normal” life. I regarded these infrequent bouts of self-pity as harmless and as having no bearing on my fundamental love for her. One day, however, I realized my attitude was not as innocent as I believed. As a twenty-two-year-old, having left home four years earlier, I was living in Germany with my life before me. Like almost all young women of my generation, I embraced the notion that personal independence and a successful career were the route to happiness. Although I had grown up in a Christian home and still loved God, autonomy and success became part of my creed. I decided to study midwifery, and as preparation volunteered at an obstetrics and gynecology hospital in the university town of Leipzig. On my first day on duty, I responded to the call bell and found myself in a private room with a woman in her mid-thirties. At the time, I was aware that abortions were legal at up to twenty-three weeks if a doctor diagnosed serious congenital malformations and signed a release for the procedure. I was also theoretically open to the idea that abortion might be justified in certain extreme circum- stances – though obviously not for infants with Down syndrome, who (I thought) would never count as “severely disabled.” How naïve I was. When I entered the room, I did not know a late-term abortion was underway. The patient asked for help in going to the toilet. Though unfamiliar with the protocol to follow, I instinctively ran for a bedpan. Several minutes later, I caught a tiny bluish form – her son, unmistakably a human being, with arms, legs, ears, eyebrows, fingernails. He had died in utero following the injection of a toxic solu- tion, and had then been expelled after nurses induced labor with a drip. The woman, seeing me speechless as I held the bedpan, explained: “The doctor told me it would have Down syndrome. I knew I couldn’t handle that alone.” She must have sensed my distress. Trying to reassure me, she added: “Don’t worry, I’m not a sissy. I’m tough and I can deal with this.” I called for a nurse. She clamped and cut the cord, her scis- sors separating mother from baby in a macabre mimicry of what would otherwise have been a moment of joy. Then she instructed me to place the bedpan in the sluice room where waste was collected. Hesitantly, I asked what would become of it. “Oh, they’ll take it to the laboratory and use the tissue for research,” she replied as she casually covered his remains with a paper towel. In this hospital, the Premature Intensive Care Unit was located one floor below gynecol- ogy. There, no efforts were spared in the often frantic attempt to save twenty-four-week-old babies’ lives. How, I wondered, did a life that was legally defined as a disposable fetus at twenty-three weeks become a human being at twenty-four? With hours still left on my shift, I tried to pull myself together and act Is it feminist to tell a woman that she is tough enough to kill her own child, yet not tough enough to raise it?