The Children Act Read Online Free PDF Page A

the passengers and were found innocent of any crime because they were acting to avoid persecution in their own country.
    Regarding the all-important matter of intent, the purpose of the surgery was not to kill Matthew but to save Mark. Matthew, in all his helplessness, was killing Mark and the doctors must be allowed to come to Mark’s defense to remove a threat of fatal harm. Matthew would perish after the separation not because he was purposefully murdered, but because on his own he was incapable of flourishing.
    The Court of Appeal agreed, the parents’ appeal wasdismissed and two days later, at seven in the morning, the twins entered the operating theater.
    The colleagues Fiona valued most sought her out to shake her hand, or wrote the kind of letters worth saving in a special folder. Her judgment was elegant and correct, was the insiders’ view. Reconstructive surgery on Mark was successful; public interest faded and moved on. But she was unhappy, couldn’t leave the case alone, was awake at nights for long hours, turning over the details, rephrasing certain passages of her judgment, taking another tack. Or she lingered over familiar themes, including her own childlessness. At the same time, there began to arrive in small pastel-colored envelopes the venomous thoughts of the devout. They were of the view that both children should have been left to die and were not pleased by her decision. Some deployed abusive language, some said they longed to do her physical harm. A few of those claimed to know where she lived.
    Those intense weeks left their mark on her, and it had only just faded. What exactly had troubled her? Her husband’s question was her own, and he was waiting for an answer now. Before the hearing she had received a submission from the Roman Catholic archbishop of Westminster. In her judgment she noted in a respectful paragraph that the archbishop preferred Mark to die along with Matthew in order not to interfere with God’s purpose. That churchmen should want to obliterate the potential of a meaningful life in order to hold a theologicalline did not surprise or concern her. The law itself had similar problems when it allowed doctors to suffocate, dehydrate or starve certain hopeless patients to death, but would not permit the instant relief of a fatal injection.
    At nights her thoughts returned to that photograph of the twins and the dozen others she had studied, and to the detailed technical information she had heard from medical specialists on all that was wrong with the babies, on the cutting and breaking, splicing and folding of infant flesh they must perform to give Mark a normal life, reconstructing internal organs, rotating his legs, his genitals and bowels through ninety degrees. In the bedroom darkness, while Jack at her side quietly snored, she seemed to peer over a cliff edge. She saw in the remembered pictures of Matthew and Mark a blind and purposeless nullity. A microscopic egg had failed to divide in time due to a failure somewhere along a chain of chemical events, a tiny disturbance in a cascade of protein reactions. A molecular event ballooned like an exploding universe, out onto the wider scale of human misery. No cruelty, nothing avenged, no ghost moving in mysterious ways. Merely a gene transcribed in error, an enzyme recipe skewed, a chemical bond severed. A process of natural wastage as indifferent as it was pointless. Which only brought into relief healthy, perfectly formed life, equally contingent, equally without purpose. Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents whowere loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous.
    For a while, the case had left her numb, caring less, feeling less, going about her business, telling no one. But she became squeamish about bodies, barely able to look at her own or Jack’s without feeling