Ode’s Operation
A short speculative story on the consequences of embryonic personhood.
image by wondermash
I should’ve aborted him when it was still legal, Evi thought with pain when she looked at her fourteen-year-old son on the operating table, tenderly stroking his forehead. It would’ve saved him a lifetime of pain.
‘Is this really necessary?’ she asked sharply, pointing at the restraints at his arms and ankles. Ode looked at her with desperate eyes.
‘Protocol, dear!’ a friendly nurse with gold-rimmed glasses over his mouth mask sang, telling Ode to ‘Count back from ten to one!’ Evi squeezed her son’s hand shooting seething looks at the round-faced doctor in purple scrubs that had just entered the operating theatre.
Her pale, young (too young, she thought) son let out a muffled moan and closed his eyes. His hand went limp and slid out of hers.
‘Why is she still here?’ Purple Doctor asked Cheerful Nurse looking at the mother.
‘She is right about to leave!’, Cheerful Nurse sang in a high-pitched voice. And to Evi he winked conspiratorially: ‘Come on now grandma, let’s go. When you see your son again, the your grandchild and placenta should be firmly attached to the peritoneum of his abdominal cavity.’ Evi could’ve murdered him, right then and there, for being so jolly in this act of violence. Because that’s what this was. Violence. A rape. Legal rape.
After the Netherlands was one of the last European countries to have granted personhood to embryo’s a specific branch of ortho-feminist thinkers had advocated for an equal distribution of pregnancy efforts and risks between women and men. Pregnancies had to be carried to term, but not necessarily by the biological mother: embryo’s could be transferred to biological fathers if the mother wished so, to be decided by a speedy legal procedure called supersnelrecht. In practice judges mostly ruled against this, as male pregnancy success rate was low, despite immense technological advances in uterus transplantations and hormone therapies.
Evi thought of Mieka, sixteen, who had been Ode’s girlfriend for the past eight months. They had been so cute together. And Evi had been terrified of exactly this the whole time. They urged them to use protection, even considered hormonal sterilization therapy for her boy, but she was dead-set against the government’s anti-abortion and anti-sex tactics and hadn’t wanted her boy take massive doses of hormones. Now her principles cost them dearly. It was rare for a judge to make the decision to transfer embryos from mother to father, but they’d had a real bad luck of the draw with conservative judge Rikhart Peterson, who was a stanch ortho-feminist and believed men should carry the equal responsibilities and risks of pregnancy as women had done for millennia. Even if that ‘man’ was only fourteen years old.
She had read great relief in the poor girl’s parent’s eyes at the ruling, and great guilt too. This system failed everyone. Most of all Ode. Her son had to carry a baby to term against his will, at great health risks. Only half of pregnancies were carried to term and the mortality rate amongst fathers was high due to internal hemorrhaging.
Ode’s procedure was done in 45 minutes. When Cheerful Nurse wheeled him out into the waiting room, he was pregnant with an eight-week old embryo. But he looked as if he had been sentenced to death.