April Operation - Linda Hall      © Evangel Publishers

Chapter One

On the last day of his life Dr. Douglas Shanahan planted flowers. He was doing what he modestly referred to as “puttering;” but it was an artist’s hands, a skilled surgeon’s hands which transplanted the pink petunias and the white alyssum, the blue delphiniums and the hybrid single-leaf geraniums into the soft brown earth.

It was mild for April and he was alone with a glinting buttery sun which warmed him. He liked these times, they offered him space to meditate, time to reflect. He was kneeling next to a circular patch of garden midway between his home and the wide inlet that led into the Bay of Fundy. Through the budding elms and maples, he caught glimpses every so often of the shimmering blue water. Above and behind him was his house, a large, grand three story wooden wide-porched structure which was built in the mid-1800s by a sea captain for his family. Throughout the years it had served alternately as a bed and breakfast, an art museum and at one time, a convent. It had been empty for several years before the Shanahans purchased it ten years ago.

Surrounding him on the green lawn were dozens of flats filled with little square plastic boxes of annuals and perennials. He had dropped an exorbitant amount of money earlier that morning at a garden center out on the highway.

And taking the day off to get his garden in had been a good idea. He was glad he had listened to Emma when she had accosted him at the clinic yesterday.

“Dr. Shanahan, you need a day off! Dr. Lunford can handle it. If you come in here tomorrow I will personally throw you out!” she said wagging her finger at him.

He grinned, even now, at the image of Emma, all of five feet, picking him up and throwing him out; but he had no doubt that she could do it if she set her mind to it. She managed his clinic, a feisty young woman known for her fiery temperament and her brazen outspokenness.

“Okay, okay,” he had said laughing and holding up his hands in mock surrender.

One of life’s greatest relaxations for him was gardening; nurturing living things, coaxing them to life with his careful hands. His entire estate was surrounded by gardens, all of them tended by Douglas or his wife Sheila. They also planted a large vegetable patch along the back, and kept the clinic staff and volunteers as well as their married daughters well supplied with fresh tomatoes, zucchinis, carrots and beets.

Normally his wife Sheila, wearing her straw hat, trowel in hand would be working here alongside him, but she was away for a few days visiting her sister on Prince Edward Island. And Moira Pilgrim, the woman who cleaned for them occasionally wouldn’t be here until afternoon. But he never minded being alone.

He and Sheila, married for 33 years had two married daughters; Lois who lived in St. Andrews with her husband, and two children, Allison age seven and Meghan age four. Something like a shadow crossed his face when he thought of Lois. Briefly, only briefly, did he allow himself to think of his elder daughter. His other daughter Penny, stable confident Penny lived in Bangor, Maine with her photographer husband of eight years. The two of them had a chubby curly-headed 17 month old daughter named Aris, who was fast becoming Douglas’ favorite.

He shaded his eyes and looked up into the cloudless sky, a sky so liquid blue that it looked as if droplets of blue would fall upon the ground.

If anyone dared to comment on his lack of sons or grandsons, Douglas would wave them away, as if shooing a persistent bug. The fates had ordained women for him, and the fates were not to be argued with. Women it was. He smiled a little. Not only did he live in a family of women, he also worked exclusively with women; all of his patients were women. All of his clinic staff and most of his volunteers were women.

The dirt around the pink phlox was warm on his hands and he sighed. Summer would be good, he hoped. It had been a difficult winter. New Brunswick was the last Canadian province to allow free standing abortion clinics, a victory won only that fall. The United States had had abortion-care clinics for the last umpteen years, and Douglas had always thought it was an absolute travesty that Canada lagged so far behind. Canadian women in delicate emotional states were forced to travel south across the border to get the procedure done, or wait for a Canadian hospital abortion where a “committee,” with confidentiality not on the menu, decided on whether an abortion was called for. Canadian women deserved better.

New Brunswick, where Douglas grew up, was the last standoff. Even though his “women” called him a “pussy cat,” the image he portrayed to the media was very different—Fighter! Strong willed!

During the past long winter he had had many words with New Brunswick’s premier, Johnson Maddison, who had billed himself as “Canada’s last pro-family leader.” But Douglas abhorred his self-proclaimed title, it was as if stating that by contrast individuals such as himself were “anti-family.”

“Mr. Premier,” he had said on one occasion, “If being anti-family means caring for those people around you, of caring for the women and the young girls in your family who find themselves pregnant with nowhere to go and no one to care for them, of being concerned that every child has a safe and wanted place in which to be born, that women are provided with the best care possible, then, Mr. Premier, you can call me anti-family.”

In January the issue had gone to New Brunswick’s Supreme Court where the decision to allow free-standing abortion clinics was finally upheld. New Brunswick’s first abortion clinic, therefore, was set up in the small town of St. Matthews, Douglas Shanahan’s childhood home.

He chose a flat of dwarf hybrid yellow petunias to form the border for the front of the bed. In the center of the patch was a spread of phlox which was coming to life after a long winter sleep. He trimmed a few dead offshoots away, nicking his finger on a sharp branch in the process. He never wore gardening gloves. He preferred to feel the earth, warm and alive on his naked hands. A drop of blood fell from his forefinger onto a yellow petunia petal. He watched it pool, a bead of deep red dew on a bed of yellow. He watched as the edges of the droplet broke and his blood spread outward from the center, tendrils of red engulfing the entire bloom.

It’s not that he particularly liked performing abortions—those caricatures they drew of him in the newspapers were viciously wrong—for him it was about caring, about giving women a second chance. The lesser of two evils. As he patted fresh earth up against some creeping phlox, he thought back to the time and place when he decided to become an abortion doctor.

When he was 16, he lived next door to a girl named Patty. She was a year older than he was, but they were in the same grade. They had an odd kind of friendship. It was almost as if Patty, who ran with a completely different group of classmates than the smart, serious friends that Douglas chose, could confide in him because he was somehow “safe.”

It was a miserably cold and sloppy March day when Patty, shivering, confided to Douglas that she was “in trouble.” He remembered her desperate words as they stood together stomping their feet under the street light. “My parents will kill me!” she had said. “They really will kill me!”

He knew her parents to be ultra-religious and extremely strict. A few weeks after that initial encounter she whispered to him not to tell anybody, especially not her parents, but her boyfriend had arranged an abortion for her. Some friend of a friend who was an intern did abortions in a clinic after hours for a fee. Her boyfriend was going to pay for it. Douglas watched down from his bedroom window when her boyfriend came to pick her up late one afternoon. He also watched when Patty came home four hours later, head down, walking slowly like an old woman, leaning on her boyfriend’s arm for support. By the light of the street lamp he could see the grimace of pain on her face as she clutched her abdomen with her free hand.

The next time Douglas saw her was two days later when the ambulance came and she was rushed to the hospital, her distraught, confused parents looking on. She died later in the hospital from a massive hemorrhage and a infection which raged through her entire body.

After her funeral, Douglas decided that there would be no more Pattys. He graduated with honors in medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, specializing in obstetrics and gynecology. Eventually, he went into private practice as a gynecologist/obstetrician.

When the Wade vs. Roe decision was brought down in the United States, he saw it as a victory, even for Canada. He amassed an army of volunteers across the country who fought hard to make abortion accessible to Canadian woman. He set up abortion clinics across the country, often defying local and provincial governments in the process. He was hailed as a pioneer, a hero in the pro-choice movement. He also knew what the anti-abortionists called him—Baby killer! Murderer! Progenitor of the New Holocaust!

He shook his head as he rounded a pat of brown earth around the roots of small yellow and purple mottled pansies. They know so little about me, he thought. Then he stood up and admired his handiwork.

The bullet which felled him came from somewhere on the hills behind his estate. Later the police would fine-comb that area and find nothing. Only an instant of surprised pain registered in his mind before he bent his knees and fell forward, heavily. Later the coroner said he was probably dead before he even hit the ground. And people would tell Sheila that that was a mercy; but on that morning his own blood stained and ruined the carefully laid petunias, the newly trimmed phlox; completely obliterating the yellow flower with the finger-prick of blood, ravaging all of his living things with the blood of himself on that fine, warm April morning.