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Dear Dad,
I need your advice. I’m facing the most difficult decision of my medical career – at least so far. Most of the work we do here is morally straightforward. Remove shrapnel, sew up wounds, triage without regard for whose side the wounded are on, save as many lives as we can. And call on Sidney Freedman or Father Mulcahy for the kinds of injuries we’re not qualified to treat. Even so, I’ve made decisions that could be considered questionable. I falsified the date on an official death certificate to hold back one tiny additional bit of pain from a bereaved family. I also removed a healthy appendix in order to slow down an officer who kept sending us too much business. I feel justified in the first decision; the second, maybe not so much. But now…
I’ve told you before about Major Houlihan. Top-notch nurse, poor taste in men. Normally, I’d say more about her body, but that’s kind of the issue. She’s pregnant. The father is Donald Pebnoscot, her husband stationed in Japan. He doesn’t know, and she doesn’t want him to know – as you may guess, they’ve been having some problems. She also doesn’t want to be pregnant. Or rather, she doesn’t want to leave the army, and the army has no place for mothers of young children. It seems unfair; Beej would kill to be home with his young daughter but is forced to serve the military, while Margaret wants a military career more than anything and is facing the prospect of losing it.
Which brings us to me. To put it in neat, clinical terms, Margaret wants my help in terminating her pregnancy. I know how to do it, of course; same basic procedure used to remove fibroids. There hasn’t been much call for it out here, but we get a bit of everything helping the locals, so I’m not totally out of practice. And heaven knows she’d be safer with one of us than using some untested local remedy. I’m not sure she’d go that far, military career or no. It’s hard to have a career if you’re dead.
I’m sure she’s struggled with it. She loves kids; I’ve seen her whenever we have the children from the orphanage visit. She’s so warm and affectionate, it’s like she just melts. It’s a whole other side from the all-business, G.I. Margaret we’re used to. I can’t imagine how much she should love a child of her own, but this damn army won’t allow it. Men can father children and still serve, if for some godawful reason they want to, but heaven forbid we allow mothers the same dubious opportunity. Major Houlihan is a damned good nurse. She’s been professional in all kinds of rough situations; pregnancy would be a piece of cake. She’d need some time to recover from childbirth, of course, but Colonel Potter would also need time to recover if he fell off his horse and broke his leg. The military isn’t telling him he’s not allowed to ride. And as for looking after the baby, we’ve got a full medical staff and a couple dozen volunteer sitters. It wouldn’t be the first time the camp has cared for a child. This place has so much death; any of us would be happy to watch over a little bit of life.
But military regulations have slammed that door closed, and I don’t think it would go very well to call up I-Corps and ask for an exception. There’s not even a form to fill out in triplicate. So what am I supposed to do? If some other doctor were to handle it, I wouldn’t say a word. But she wants me, and I guess I should be flattered, but instead I’m just full of sadness and dread. I took an oath to preserve life, not to end it. And if word ever got out, I might be forced to give up medicine, maybe even be arrested. The whole camp already knows Margaret is pregnant. it’s impossible to keep a secret in this place, even without the spectacle of the chief surgeon performing an operation on a rabbit. It wouldn’t take long for people to notice that her pregnancy didn’t seem to be developing, and it would be a short step from there to figure out what happened. She could say it was a miscarriage, I guess, and no one would be able to contradict her, but I can’t ask her to lie. Even if she decided to do so for her own career, there’s no way Potter and B.J. wouldn’t guess. I’d be bound by doctor-patient confidentiality, but they’d figure it out, and I don’t know if we could work effectively having a secret between us, even a secret that rightfully belongs to someone else. But I guess I’m going to have to find out. Margaret is a friend, and she needs me, and that counts for an awful lot in this place. She’s going to need someone after, too, and that’ll have to be me, at least unless and until she decides to confide in someone else. This is tearing my heart up; I can only imagine how it’s going to break hers.
You’re never going to get this letter; it’s going straight into the fire and I’ll be watching it until there’s nothing but ashes. But I still remain
Your loving son,
Hawkeye