Abortion choice

An online acquaintance of Ma Lei's told her one of the most horrible stories I've ever heard. She sprung this on me at dinner in a wonton soup restaurant on the ground floor of our apartment building, and it was all I could do to maintain my composure. I didn't entirely succeed.

Ma Lei was somewhat surprised by my emotiveness — but sometimes, the Chinese can be just stunningly blind to emotions.

The story came from another woman who has had to go to the fertility clinic for her pregnancy, so she and her husband hadn't just easily gotten hooked up with a little one: they'd worked hard for it, as Ma Lei and I can testify.

The woman is 6+ months pregnant, and she went in for her ultrasound test. The result was a nightmare.

Her son had a massive cleft palate — way more than any Chinese hospital is prepared to deal with.

I speak as a cleft-palate sufferer for whom my deformity has never amounted to much of an issue. 

But this woman's child was clearly seen to be missing not just some bone structure, but the entire left half of his nose and all the upper-palate structure that should have underlain it.

In America, perhaps this wouldn't have been such a horror story. American surgeons do incredible things.

My own dear, late Janusz Bardach — Soviet Gulag survivor and later University of Iowa surgeon — pioneered one of the many surgical techniques that allowed my upper lip to look relatively normal. And that was just one of the first among a long line of surgical developments in American treatment of midline cranial-development defects.

If you ask me, when I'm looking in my own mirror, I emerged from my own cleft palate and harelip as a stunningly handsome lady-charmer. :-) Apparently, my wife doesn't entirely disagree, since she's a very beautiful woman who somehow or other decided I was good enough. In my opinion, if I'm handsome enough to snag a woman that beautiful, I'm handsome enough.

I did suffer through a handful of relatively mild operations, years of braces, and a single experience when a bully rode his bike past me and said "Hey! Flat-nose!"

However, my first girlfriend's parents warned her that if she married me, our children would be "monsters." 

But other than that girlfriend, no one has ever held my mouth against me — and indeed, I credit much of my articulateness to the speech therapy I went through as a young cleft patient.

But China isn't America. It's not even the America of 1969, when my treatments began, and it's certainly not the America of today.

Even in America today, this baby's reconstruction would be on the extreme end of the current technology. It would be expensive and experimental, and it would require months of work. And then the results would be bad.

In China, it would probably be impossible. to fix a cleft this extreme. There are no hospitals doing this far-end work. (I almost said "cutting edge.") Even to get something done in China, anything at all, would be $20K or more — which they just don't have.

Now, suppose that they somehow managed to get the best work done for this child that's available in China. He will have a clearly deformed face, half a nose, and a gaping hole where the left-hand side of his nose should be.

How will he be treated in school?

Chinese teachers aren't schooled in sensitivity. They won't hesitate to tease him, abuse him, use him as a negative exemplar for other students. "You got that one wrong? You're almost as stupid as the kid with no nose." HAHA! Everyone laughs.

Suppose that the parents somehow or other manage to bring him up with a reasonable education, via private tutors who don't tease him mercilessly. Suppose he gets a good university degree in China. Now will he get a good job?

No. In China, a pretty face is part of one's qualifications for a good job, and an ugly face is grounds for denial from a good job. If you're SUPER-ugly, deformed of visage, then everyone you might have to work with will be made extremely uncomfortable. Hence, no one will want to hire you.

And in country in which there's already an imbalance between male and female, do you suppose that such a boy would ever get married and bring his parents a grandchild? Not on your life.

Ma Lei told me straight-up — with tears in my eyes, not so much in hers — that kid could never have a happy life in China. "It's not America," she said. "China is —" and then I think she said a word that means "hostile," or perhaps "inhospitable," but I don't exactly know. It definitely wasn't an endorsement of China.

Meanwhile, the woman made the very rational decision to have a late-term abortion. She made an appointment to go in the next morning and have her baby given a long needle that would put him painlessly to sleep. I cannot in any way, on any level, argue against her decision. I believe she made the exact right one, given the horrible circumstances of her life here in China.

But that whole night, the baby in her belly was acting the way any baby in his mother's belly will do. He swam around, he punched her, he kicked. He had no idea that his mother had decided to end his life.

Can you, for just one moment, imagine what it must have felt like for that woman to have had her fetus playing his fetile games inside her belly, feeling the connection with him that she must necessarily have felt — yet knowing that 10 hours later, she was going to nod her head to the doctor to inject the giant needle that would terminate his life?

Ma Lei's online acquaintances universally condemned the poor woman, as if she weren't already suffering enough. 

Ma Lei stamped her online foot — which I have the feeling bears a lot of weight, because Ma Lei is the kind of woman who makes people take notice of her opinions — and told them to shut the hell up. The others probably fell in line, because in my experience it's only a very few hearty souls who can withstand the wrath of Ma Lei. And in this case, it's not as though that woman had made a light and transient decision.

I appreciate, so deeply, the fact that Ma Lei stood up for this woman. I can't say one way or the other about this woman's decision. In a better China, I would say she should have the baby and let him duke it out with his detractors. But there isn't a better China, there's only this China, in which it's acceptable for teachers to