At first, Yolanda Martinez had no idea that she was dying. The flow of blood had remained steady for the past fifteen minutes, but as she'd bled profusely from there before with no ill effects, the thought of death never crossed her mind. She assumed it to be no more than an expected side effect of her abortion, and did crossword puzzles on the toilet while waiting it out, reaching back occasionally to flush it all away. It took fifteen more minutes of bleeding, however, to make her realize that something had gone terribly awry. This was more than an inconsequential side effect; this was a vital tear in something, a rip through which her very life seeped away.

    Yolanda was a big woman, larger than her own mother had been, even before the pregnancy. Dress sizes always had run on the large side in her family, and though she fit every definition of the word, she never thought of herself as fat. Full-figured, ample and big-boned, maybe, but not fat. She paid little attention to her size and never succumbed to the siren song of miracle diets and wonder drugs. Her weight was not that big a deal to her and was, perhaps, why she never had any indication until the day she asked for the abortion that she was nearly seven months pregnant.

    Seated on the toilet, she thought back to her appointment with the doctor that morning. Lately, she'd been feeling movement in her belly but had always attributed it to gas, or indigestible food matter. There was never any alarm until yesterday, when the fluttering movements persisted for hours on end, and were accompanied by irregular contracting pains in her lower abdomen. Having never been pregnant, she still did not make the connection that the unusual symptoms she experienced were indeed attributable to a new life developing within. She was entirely ignorant of everything relating to pregnancy - so ignorant, in fact, that she had never wondered why her period stopped completely months ago. Her menstrual flow had always been sporadic and inconsistent, so when it tapered off altogether, she simply assumed she’d arrived at that point in her life when such a thing was expected to happen.

    When the doctor gently informed her that she was close to experiencing the profound joy of a first child, Yolanda had stared back dumbly in shock, unable to believe a word he said. He explained that even though he was only a general practitioner, he did know enough about obstetrics to predict the arrival of the newborn was imminent, quite possibly only days away. He assured her that though the baby would certainly be premature, there was a very good chance he or she would be healthy and would not require a lengthy hospital stay once born. After a quick telephone call, the doctor gave her the name of an obstetrician who agreed to see her later that same afternoon. She nodded mutely, still too shocked to fully comprehend the reality of her situation.

    Yolanda Martinez did not want her baby. She told the doctor as much and hinted at an abortion, hoping the doctor might feel compassion and give her a quiet referral. When he responded by explaining that it was much too late to abort the nearly developed fetus, she stormed out of his office without even bothering to offer payment for his services on her way through the lobby.

    At home, less than an hour later, she thought long and hard about sex, and its ugly, hideous consequences. It hadn’t even been her idea to engage in the dirty, despicable act - a young, tired railroad worker had offered her a sum of money too large to pass by. So she’d let him have his way with her in an empty box car, unwilling to bring him into her home.

    Yolanda had no use for a man - not in her home or in any other setting. But she did need extra money from time to time, and that forced her into some pretty tight corners.

    She was boxed in now, wedged tightly into a hole with only one opening, one predictable outcome. Despite what her doctor had said, she did think again of abortion and the alternatives it provided. It might not be safe and it certainly wouldn’t be pretty, but it was the only way she would be able to rid herself of the unwanted growth within her womb. There was no other choice available to her - she did not want to have the baby in the first place, much less be forced to spread her massive legs apart on a delivery table for the medical staff to see her fright, her humiliation.

    In the past, she'd heard of women giving themselves abortions successfully. What she did not know was that those women had done it in the first few weeks of pregnancy rather than the last. Her thinking, consequently, was seriously flawed; she never considered the fact that while a significant percentage of such home remedies did, in fact, terminate the pregnancy, many terminated the life of the mother as well.

    As she writhed on the floor with the coat hanger late that afternoon, she felt dirty, ugly. She was all too aware of her pathetic plight, and was glad no one was around to witness the disgusting scene. In spite of its macabre nature, she was convinced at first that she was doing the right thing by performing the act on her own, rather than suffering an even greater degree of humiliation by having the necessary exorcism done in a dark corner of an illegal basement facility. Soon, however, the continuous strain exhausted her. When the flow of blood increased, she went to the toilet to take a rest before finishing the frustrating job at hand.

    plop...plop...plopplop...plop

    Something had gone wrong, horribly and irreversibly wrong.

    Her water broke with a sudden, startling gush. She had no idea what it meant and wondered if she might have inadvertently ruptured something vital within. Weak, sick, and

    plopplop...plop

    still bleeding, Yolanda finally admitted to herself that her abortion attempt might not have been such a good idea. She experienced a rhythmic pain which increased in intensity each time around, compounding her dizziness. As the world began to swim and fade before her eyes, she decided that a call for help might be in order. At this point, she was beyond caring about any humiliation she might endure.

    Utilizing every bit of what little strength remained, she did manage to crawl to the phone and place a call before collapsing and dying. Death overtook her so swiftly she never had time to put the phone back into its cradle.

    When the rescue team arrived, they found much more than the dispatcher had prepared them for. The scene was a chaotic, revolting mess, worse than anything any one of them had seen before. A large sheet spread over the living room floor was virtually soaked with blood; a splattered trail of blood led from that location to the bathroom at the end of a long hallway; bloody handprints lined the walls along the hall; and dozens of bloody toilet paper-balls littered the tiled floor, some melting into oceans of blood. A straightened coat hanger found outside the bathroom door merited little attention at first.

    The naked woman they found at the end of the bloody trail was huge - three-hundred-plus pounds, by their mutual estimate. The lower half of her immense torso was smeared with blood as were her hands, wrists and forearms, leading a detective in the group to immediately suspect an aggravated assault. One of the men, finally realizing the significance of the coat hanger, wrestled her thighs apart and inspected the woman's vaginal canal with a gloved hand, meeting immediate resistance upon insertion.

    This woman had been in active labor!

    Three of them managed to roll the body over onto its back, while the other retrieved a large medical kit from the front room. There was no time to pull the infant through the birth canal; they cut the mother open instead, flaying her flesh carefully, layer by layer, working together with grim determination, praying silently to save a life today. Soon, the man who first discovered the pregnancy had the honor of lifting a tiny, precious baby girl from the suffocating confines of her mother’s dead body.

    After tense moments of frantic resuscitation, the premature infant responded with a thready scream, inhaled her first breath and thus entered a hostile world that never wanted her in the first place, and (unbeknownst to them all at that time) would never accept her in the future.

    In the hospital, the infant received the best care available at that time. She was loved by the entire staff and they named her "Joan" - the name a derivative of Jonah, the biblical character who managed to survive in the belly of a whale. The irony was apparent to those who knew the circumstances surrounding her miraculous birth.

    Baby Joan's hospital stay was extensive, and there were many days her appointed pediatricians lost any hope of her survival. However, the tiny infant clung tenaciously to life and stabilized within a matter of weeks, finally showing signs of weight gain and the proper Apgar reflexes she should have demonstrated at birth. Later tests would show some brain dysfunction, due primarily to a momentary interruption of life-sustaining oxygenated blood while she'd been trapped within her mother's suffocating birth canal.

    Though no one in the maternity wing wanted to see her go, baby Joan was finally discharged from the hospital and taken into custody by the state, since all attempts at identifying and locating the newborn's natural father had failed.

    She was given a last name, in accordance with state procedures. The girl known as Joan Anderson spent her first three years in a state run, under-funded foster care facility in El Paso, Texas, where, unbeknownst to her, her natural father occasionally worked in the railyards along the international border. Soon after little Joan turned three, the El Paso facility ran short of funding and she was transferred to a children's home in Bremerton, Washington, nearly two thousand miles from her place of birth. To rationalize the move, state child welfare personnel reasoned that it would be good for her to grow up far removed from her birthplace. This would, they maintained, offer her a fresh start in life and lower her chances of someday piecing together the puzzle of her birth. All involved agreed it would be better for her not to know. Most of her records were destroyed, and those which weren't were significantly altered.

    Little Joan spent her entire childhood in the Bremerton facility. Though there were many young folks wanting to adopt and diligent efforts were made to place her in a loving home, no one showed even a trace of interest in her or made a single inquiry. She never developed any real friendships; her peers came and went as if there were a large revolving door at the front of the facility, and that was a door Joan would never see until her twenty?first birthday.

    When that day finally rolled around, Joan Anderson was given a hundred dollars and a stack of meal coupons, then released to the street like a common thug on parole. She found work first at the local paper and then at a local health clinic. The pay was meager, but enough to rent a small apartment near the Bremerton naval shipyard. She tended bar at a local tavern two nights a week to bring in grocery money. Those nights at the bar made it possible to eat, and provided some needed social contact as well. The next three years of her life consisted of the same grinding routine.

    She finally broke free and found better work with a family planning clinic in Silverdale, Washington, twenty minutes north of Bremerton. They paid nearly twice as much, and her work was far more enjoyable. Coincidentally, a large part of her job entailed counseling young pregnant women on the pros and cons of abortion. Her own troubled past gave her a deep sympathy for the plight of the young mothers?to?be and was an empathy quite apparent - though equally mysterious - to all who worked with her. In most cases, Joan heartily recommended abortion, pointing out that it would be unfair to bring a child into the world if its life would be miserable as a result of poverty, abuse, or constant hunger. She shared parts of her known history with hundreds of young women through the years as an example, sympathetically explaining that her own mother should have decided on abortion rather than choosing to burden the taxpayers with yet another welfare child.

    Of course, she had no idea that her mother actually had attempted to abort her unwanted pregnancy; all records pertaining to her origins had been destroyed years earlier. Joan Anderson had no idea who her natural parents were, or why she had no memories of them.

    One day, on an ordinary morning like any other, she resolved to unravel the secrets of her own past. There was no clear place to begin, so she started mailing letters, making telephone calls, searching birth records, and hounding the child welfare facility in Bremerton. Four years of searching, hounding and calling turned up nothing. In a final act of desperation, Joan contacted a television program that specialized in reuniting family members and solving mysteries of genealogy. A segment was produced and aired on a national network, in hopes that someone somewhere might call in with a piece to the puzzle of her life. No one did. The producers aired the segment again three months later. Again, no results. Three months later, they reluctantly agreed to air it a final time, but only because a major advertiser had taken an interest in the outcome.

    This time, someone called. He refused to give his name, but did say that he'd been a paramedic in El Paso long ago, and he told a tragic tale of an abortion so horribly botched it resulted in the death of the mother and some minor brain dysfunction in the surviving newborn. He told the switchboard operator it had weighed on his conscience for well over two decades, and he would be delighted to know that the little baby girl he helped save finally matured to enter adulthood as a stable, productive member of society. He did mention that he didn't really think his story had anything to do with the segment on television, but the timing was right, and they should probably look into it.

    They didn't.

    Instead, a new segment was filmed, this one a fanciful re?creation of events heard firsthand from that anonymous caller. The producers all agreed that the sensational story would play on viewer emotions, and would also serve to boost the show's overall ratings. As might be expected, the segment did not reflect the accurate truth, since the anonymous caller provided only sketchy details and refused to give a number should they need to contact him for more information. However, the story was factual enough that, when aired, it generated dozens of calls before the first commercial break. In the end (and in very short order) it spawned enough answers to solve the Joan Anderson mystery and a "Solved!" segment was hurriedly filmed to link the two together, and to further maximize record ratings.

    The news was devastating to Joan Anderson, and she refused to believe any of it. However, as the facts were painstakingly documented, she had no choice but to face up to it all.

    The truth totally and irreversibly shattered her, filling her with a blossoming rage she found strangely comforting. It was the first genuine emotion she'd experienced for any length of time and, consequently, it seemed natural and healthy. It protected her from the pain and shielded her from the toxic truth. However, it also adversely affected the emotional and learning dysfunctions she had been born with, amplifying and distinguishing them, further warping what was already not perfectly straight. It overwhelmed and occupied the weak areas of her mind, tainting every mental function with a dark, obsessive purpose. More than anything, Joan Anderson needed a purpose - a legitimate reason to live, something to focus on, something to accomplish.

    She would start by having a baby of her own. This would give her the chance to be the mother, to atone for the actions of her own mother by loving and nurturing a child of her own. Joan knew she could not physically have a child; that had been revealed to her following a comprehensive free physical. compliments of the health clinic in Bremerton. Her ovaries had never fully developed and produced no monthly egg.

    Adoption was out of the question, for that process took longer than natural childbirth. She needed a baby, she needed it now, and any baby would do. It would keep her mind off of her own miserable life, and would embody the promise of a bright new future. Maybe some of that good fortune would rub off. Joan was a firm believer in the "do unto others" adage - she just needed someone to do unto.

    She flipped a coin. Heads. She would have a boy. She would do unto him.

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