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Bottle Babies
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16755 |
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BOOK WORLD
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9 / 1989 |
2,591 Words |
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Beryl Lieff Benderly
Beryl Lieff Benderly is the author of Dancing Without Music:
Deafness in America, Thinking About Abortion, and The Myth of
Two Minds: What Gender Means and Doesn't Mean, which won
honorable mention in the 1988 National Psychology awards for
Excellence in the Media. |
THE BROKEN CORD
Michael Dorris
New York, Harper and Row, 1989
288 pp., $18.95
In the sixteen years since Roe v. Wade, America's debate about the ethics of pregnancy has hardened into two opposing, fortified positions. A woman's body is her own, intone the prochoicers; adoption is the answer, drone the prolifers. But now Michael Dorris lobs into the discussion a book that blasts all that entrenched argumentation to smithereens. Such destruction was not his primary intention, but in this single volume he has written several books, not all of them intended--but each of them illuminating, important, and unutterably sad.
At the simplest level, he recounts his life with his adopted son, Adam. At the profoundest, he lays bare a social and moral dilemma more complex than any our society has yet been able to resolve, or even to face intelligently. It is the very sort of issue we handle worst: It has innocent victims; grave, irreversible consequences; and no apparent, or even imaginable, solution that fits our institutions, traditions, or self-image. It pits hope against freedom, right against right. It brings to mind the one refrain that neither side in the debate wants to hear, the one that denies our national credo of the simple solution and the clean slate. The sins of the fathers, Dorris sorrowfully reminds us, are visited, irreparably and without justice or remorse, upon the sons.
Or, as in this case, the sins of the mothers. Adam is a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), a set of birth
... (1993 of 15335 Characters)
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