In the beginning, there was man. Man was dressed in a white lab coat with a stethoscope hanging over his shoulder. Woman was there too: Eve. Well, Ellen, according to her medical report. She was clothed modestly in a hospital gown. He, Adam (in reality, Dr. Peppercorn) was dressed in his usual white doctor's coat and had his back against the wall, his back just below the wooden jesus he had mounted there with double-sided tape.
He had been eying her paperwork, flipping through it.
"18 weeks," said Dr. Peppercorn. "18 weeks. That's a big, big decision to make." The doctor peeled himself from the wall to pace around the small room. "Around here, we see all children as God's children."
The doctor put his hands on his knees in a baseball straddle and pointed his eyes about six inches behind her belly button.
"Even him," he said, hiding his intentions behind a smile.
Eve — erm, Ellen — glared at him. "Why is everything so freaking hard in backcountry sewer of a city," she had said. "I don't care if I have to cross the goddamn border to do this..."
Dr. Peppercorn looked nervously at her. "No, no need for that," he said. He had to keep her preoccupied for longer. Just a few more weeks, and she'd be past the legal limit. No chance of termination, not even out of state.
"Listen, we have some new materials. I haven't shown these to anyone yet, but this explains the best way to keep your baby safe—"
"Oh god, more materials!"
Soon, the doctor had dumped several trifolds on her lap, a Mother Mary's Guide to Raising a Child of God, and about a hundred phone numbers for "support" (whatever that meant) that she could find in the local area.
"Take a look at those for a few minutes, it's a legal requirement."
"And can we talk about the procedure afterwards?" she said.
"Sure," said Dr. Peppercorn. He swiveled around to type something on his computer terminal.
"Hey," she interrupted.
The doctor turned his head and looked at her out of the side of his eye. "Yes?"
"What's this about Will god forgive my abortion?" She was pointing to the pamphlet.
He pretended to be suprised. "Hm. Oh that. I guess it's just something to think about."
"Is this even an abortion clinic?"
"Legally speaking," he said, with his eyes back on the computer monitor.
"So how come I don't see any medical equipment."
"We haven't needed to perform any procedures so far. Just been fortunate in that regard."
"How many freaking years has this place been open?"
The doctor didn't reply. He quickly tapped a few more keys on his keyboard, then let out a satisfying huff.
"Hey, I'm talking to you," she said.
The office printer began to hum, warm up, and then spat out a few pieces of paper. Dr. Peppercorn swiveled back around his char, walked up to printer, and handed one of the sheets of paper to Ellen.
"Here's a copy of your paperwork," he said, "talk soon. We'll see you in a few weeks for the ultrasound."
She looked at it. Her pregnancy timeline had been changed. Somehow, her medical history had placed her now at 24 weeks pregnant which was, incidentally, beyond the legal limit of any nearby state.
"You… you can't stop me from doing this!" she said, aghast. "I'll do it anyway! I'll do it myself!"
"You won't do that," said the doctor.
"Oh I will," she said, "I can and I will. Maybe you think I'm going to hell for this, but don't you realize that so are you? She's going to have suffered all that much more because you're a liar and a waste of everyone's time. I don't care if there's a hell. There And when I'm in hell, at least I'll know that my baby girl's in heaven, and was spared a life of misery because lowlifes like you think you run the world. If there's a hell, then there's a parking spot there with my name..."
But something that Ellen had said had caused a chain reaction of thoughts to occur in the doctor's mind, and he was no longer listening to what she was saying. She was absolutely right, he thought, in that he was going to hell. And so, probably, was she. But for a good cause, no? All the children he had saved — by hook, or by crook — surely that must be worth something?
Ellen was still yelling at the doctor as she left the office. She passed by the secretary and said something else, but the doctor was thinking a very deep thought, and was too deep in thought to hear it.
...at least I'll know that my baby girl's in heaven, she had said.
Dr. Peppercorn watched her through the rectangle of his transparent office door. She was gesticulating, and her car keys were jingling against her hips. She was receding into the parking lot and her image was shrinking, being consumed by his partial reflection in the office door glass.
The chain reaction of thoughts was reaching the critical threshold of becoming an idea.
He looked up at the cross on his wall. There was a carved wooden man on that cross, a man who gave the entirety of his human life so that other humans might have a chance at salvation. He wondered what went through that man's mind before he allowed himself to be sacrificed. Perhaps it was something like this.
He was realizing that he had had it all backwards up until now.
The power of the big idea began to shift things around inside of him. It started in his belly, then warmed his heart, and soon consumed his entire body as if he was ablaze throughout. He felt like he was the burning bush itself.
God forgive me for what I'm about to do, he thought.
Ellen receded and receded into the parking lot and got smaller and smaller, until she was the size of tiny little embryo buried in his tummy, a shiny beige embryo with two big lights for eyes...
Wait, that's actually a Volkwagen Beetle, thought the doctor. "Stop! No!" he yelled.
The doctor tore out of the building, past his secretary. Her name was Cassandra.
Cassandra saw the doctor running after the car, yelling and waving his hands. She saw him take a shortcut through the parking lot and eventually end up in front of the car. All she could make out through her thick glasses was that he had his hands on the hood and was making grand gestures of agreement with his arms.
She also thought she saw the woman in the car smile an odd sort of smile before she slowly drove away.
When the doctor finally returned, she asked him what all that was about.
"Take the rest of the day off," said Dr. Peppercorn, "and cancel all my future appointments." He was sweating, his shirt was unbuttoned and, Cassandra noted, he already looked a lot more…
...biblical.
Dr. Peppercorn sat in his office chair and stared at the ceiling molding. He had his laptop out — the same one that he used for those tedious medical reports (that he never actually wrote) — and he began to type, as if his hands were guided by the Lord himself. He stayed there for hours, ignoring all essential obligations, to draft his message.
The Lord's work, he thought to himself, for the first damn time in my life. I can actually save them all...
He printed off sheets until he ran out of paper, then shoved them in his briefcase and stuck them all around. He taped them everywhere with double-sided tape, from the school walls to the billiard halls. At the bottom of each flyer was a date: December 19 — two weeks from that day.
When Cassandra arrived the next morning, the doctor wasn't wearing his white lab coat. Instead, he had on a plaid button-up. He had his legs up on his desk, and was reading a book. She noticed also that he had added another cross to his exam room, opposite the first one.
"Hm," she said.
As the days marched toward December 19th, the doctor's attitude grew even stranger. He had added more versions of the Bible to his office, in more languages, and had even installed a third and fourth cross near the upper corners of his office, so that they would never be out of his sight. He began to dress even more casually, bohemian even, with his shirt half undone, his sleeves rolled up, and rocking an old pair of leather sandals.
"Quite the decorator lately," Cassandra said to him one day.
In response, he walked up to her, put his hands on her waist, and kissed her on the cheek.
"We," he said to her, "are going to do the greatest thing that anyone has ever done."
On the morning of December 19th, the sun shone fierce and yellow on a cool, frosty morning. It was just in time for Christmas, the resurrection of Christ, and the return of his soul to the Lord.
Dr. Peppercorn had just pulled into the parking lot to see the miracle that god had created. There were dozens of women waiting outside, all holding tearoffs with his instructions on them, and all ready to get their free abortions. And Ellen — really, Eve — wearing her Hollister, was first in line. He walked up to her and gave her a great, big hug.
She arched her spine away from him, as if it was electrostatically repelled.
He called her into the office and had her take off her Hollister shirt one more time. On the exam table, he described to her how he was going to perform the abortion, exactly as he had promised her when he had stopped her in her Beetle, and exactly as he had promised in the flyers he put out.
Not two weeks before Dr. Peppercorn was so sure that we were all going to hell: Hollister shirts, lab coats and all. But Ellen's words had also pointed him to a loophole, or at least an opening. A light at the end of a uterine tunnel. Not a way to save lives per se — no, that was too easy. What he realized is that there had been a way to save something much more important.
Souls, of course. The abortion "clinic" (as it was in name only) had gone from a misdirection of the unholy, to the world's fastest conveyor belt to heaven. Did the doctor have to pay a small price for this himself? Probably, he thought. But on the balance, it was worth it. There was only one of him, but there were so, so many babies.
"Ready?" he asked her.
"Wait," she said, the triangular mask covering her nose,
"I think — and I'm not sure where this is coming from — but I feel like I'm having second thoughts..."
"Trust me, it's the right decision," he said. He titrated up the nitrous oxide.
"Oh, if you're sure..." she said, "... okay..."
When her eyes closed, he moved closer to her midsection, and began to speak softly with his cheek against her belly.
"Off to heaven you go," he whispered, "off to heaven you all go..."
"Wait. What the fuck did you just say?" said Ellen. She was glaring at him. Oh, you're not asleep yet, he thought.
"Hm?" said Dr. Peppercorn, "did you hear something?" He turned the nitrous oxide dial all the way up, and proceeded.
Now, you, the person reading this, might be wondering exactly how God felt about all this while it was happening. The natural answer to this is that it depends on God's mood, and God can be quite moody. But let's at least consider that to commit to his program, as Dr. Peppercorn did, required a rare form of selflessness. After all, Dr. Peppercorn was in no way convinced that he himself would be benefited in any way. So his act was, in a way, the purest form of altruism. Do you think God rewarded him for this?
I sent a letter up to Heaven by weather balloon and received this response in the mail a few days later.
To whom it may concern,
God has a rather strict policy about to whom he permits entry to Heaven. In particular, it says in no uncertain language in the New Testament that Heaven is open exclusively to those who believe. Sadly, there are classes of beings that will not make it into heaven due to this requirement. These are (including, but not limited to): animals, savages, and those too young to comprehend, namely children. Though the Lord has ample accommodations available elsewhere. For more information, please refer to Romans 1:20.
Naturally, God has designed Earth such that those who are intended to go to Heaven do indeed make it there. So none of this should be seen as deviating from His plan.
On the other hand, Dr. Peppercorn's truly selfless actions have earned him a special spot among the ranks of the angels.
Just kidding, he will have to spend eternity among the corpses of the children he is currently murdering.
Yours, Gabriel
None of that represents my opinion on abortion. It was just fun to explore the Christian view of "abortion is bad" next to "all babies go to heaven."
We were in Arkansas, talking about life. You know: the trees, the wild horseradishes, and the nuances of the morals surrounding abortion. That's where the idea for this story was born, so to speak. What brought it to its fruition it was the 2021 Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health.
In this case, Mississippi challenged the "viability line" laid down by Casey v. Planned Parenthood. "Viability" means that a fetus is considered a separate, independent human life only when it can survive on its own (aka is viable) outside the womb. So once it's viable, the legal theory goes, it's its own person. Right now it takes about 25 weeks before you're viable. Which means legally speaking, you're 6 months older than you think.
(Fun fetal fact, by the way. The viability line shortens every year. Science makes it shorter. An interesting intersection of science and religion: as science gets better, abortion gets harder!)
Anyway, Mississippi wants abortions to stop at 15 weeks — way before the viability line, and that's what the hullaballoo in the news is all about. It's not clear why they picked 15 weeks, and not 16, but we can look at Texas for a clue (see the "Heartbeat Act".) The Texans think abortions should stop at 6 weeks. 6 weeks is as short as a single period. A single missed period. One mathematical bit of information. It's the legal equivalent of calling at 3am from a blocked number to "notify" you of your new subscription to Teen Mom. Hope you're awake to take the call.
So whether it's 6 weeks or 16, here's the deal. They don't want abortions to happen, period. That's what the court case is about: to bring Roe v. Wade to an unsympathetic court. No more, no less. But most of the people who support the repeal are Christians. And so I ask them: if babies also go to heaven, why make a fuss about abortion? Isn't heaven the place we're working our butts off to go?
And if they don't, well, then what?