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"Because it was dead, right?" he asked Dr. Larch. "That's why it was cool, right?"
"Yes," said Dr. Larch. "In a way, Homer, it was never alive."
"Never alive," said Homer Wells.
"Sometimes," Dr. Larch said, "a woman simply can't make herself stop a pregnancy, she feels the baby is already a baby--from the first speck--and she has to have it--although she doesn't want it and she can't take care of it--and so she comes to us and has her baby here. She leaves it here, with us. She trusts us to find it a home."
"She makes an orphan," said Homer Wells. "Someone has to adopt it."
"Someone usually adopts it," Dr. Larch said.
"Usually," said Homer Wells. "Maybe."
"Eventually," Dr. Larch said.
"And sometimes," said Homer Wells, "the woman doesn't go through with it, right? She doesn't go through with having the baby."
"Sometimes," said Dr. Larch, "the woman knows very early in her pregnancy that this child is unwanted."
"An orphan, from the start," said Homer Wells.
"You might say," said Wilbur Larch.
"So she kills it," said Homer Wells.
"You might say," said Wilbur Larch. "You might also say that she stops it before it becomes a child--she just stops it. In the first three or four months, the fetus--or the embryo (I don't say, then, 'the child')--it does not quite have a life of its own. It lives off the mother. It hasn't developed."
"It's developed only a little," said Homer Wells.
"It hasn't moved, independently," said Dr. Larch.
"It doesn't have a proper nose," said Homer Wells, remembering it. On the thing he had held in his hand, neither the nostrils nor the nose itself had developed to its downward slope; the nostrils pointed straight out from the face, like the nostrils of a pig.
"Sometimes," said Dr. Larch, "when a woman is very strong and knows that no one will care for this baby if she has it, and she doesn't want to bring a child into the world and try to find it a home--she comes to me and I stop it."
"Tell me again, what's stopping it called?" asked Homer Wells.
"An abortion," Dr. Larch said.
"Right," said Homer Wells. "An abortion."
"And what you held in your hand, Homer, was an aborted fetus," Dr. Larch said. "An embryo, about three to four months."
"An aborted fetus, an embryo, about three to four months," said Homer Wells, who had an irritating habit of repeating the pigtails of sentences very seriously, as if he were planning to read them aloud, like David Copperfield.
"And that's why," Dr. Larch said patiently, "some of the women who come here don't look pregnant . . . the embryo, the fetus, there's just not enough of it for it to show."
"But they all are pregnant," said Homer Wells. "All the women who come here--they're either going to have an orphan, or they're going to stop it, right?"
"That's right," Dr. Larch said. "I'm just the doctor. I help them have what they want. An orphan or an abortion."
"An orphan or an abortion," said Homer Wells.
Nurse Edna teased Dr. Larch about Homer Wells. "You have a new shadow, Wilbur," she said.
"Doctor Larch," Nurse Angela said, "you have developed an echo. You've got a parrot following you around."
"God or whatever, forgive me," wrote Dr. Larch. "I have created a disciple, I have a thirteen-year-old disciple."
