The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers Page A

co-ordinating that, and helping set up the Recycle Fashion shows, I didn’t even stop to think. It’s one of the things I regret most in my whole life.

Chapter 7
    There was only one ray of hope that whole autumn. Baby Johnson was delivered by Caesarean section. The first post-MDS baby! His picture was on the front of all the papers, shops put up flags, and people went round with huge grins on their faces. Even the suicide rate dropped. His grandmother’s street was full of flowers, and the news showed her holding him, crying, thanking everyone. Baby Johnson’s mother was 15 and they held her funeral in Westminster Abbey. She was called Ursula. Her mother told the story. Back when Ursula’s pregnancy was confirmed women were still having abortions, in the hopes of saving their own lives. It was the first time in Ursula’s life she ever had sex. She believed that because her baby had been conceived, he had the right to be born. Her parents tried to dissuade her but Ursula must have known how important her baby would be for the world, because she had this amazing faith in him.
    Her doctor knew that researchers were working on putting women into a coma and helping the babies survive, and he told Ursula about them. She was one of the first to volunteer for the Sleeping Beauty experiment. Her mother described how they had stayed awake all night before they signed the consent forms, crying and praying for guidance. But Ursula had never wavered, and the last thing she had done before they gave her the injection, was to smile at her parents and thank them for her beautiful life.
    â€˜And I believe in fairies,’ said Mum.
    Dad said, ‘Still–good for her!’
    What I loved was that Ursula decided she wanted to save her baby, and she made it happen. She chose what to do. By then they had some Sleeping Beauties at my Dad’s clinic and I asked him if they were like Ursula. He said he didn’t know, it’s the doctors who deal with them, he only does technical stuff. Then he grinned and admitted that two of their babies might be going to be delivered soon.
    And in the days after Baby Johnson there were new babies delivered all around the world. At my Dad’s clinic, baby Jill was born one week later, though the other one who was due at the same time, who they called Jack, died. Dad was saying there wouldn’t be many more pregnancies after this wave, because these babies were all like Baby Johnson, conceived before girls knew the consequences of MDS. ‘Since then, everyone’s taken care not to get pregnant. We’ve hardly got any other pregnant women coming through. Our ward’s nearly empty.’
    The sadness attached to these wonderful new babies was that they had MDS just like the rest of us. It was in their cells from their parents. In the papers there was a flood of statistics calculating the future population. To keep it stable, every woman has to have 2.1 children, which means 10 women should have 21 babies between them. But now a woman dies to produce just one baby. And obviously, since pregnancy is death, most women would choose not to have a baby at all. Experts said the population would shrink to nothing.
    Dad was wrong, though, about there being no more pregnancies after this batch. Because once it was proved that babies really could be delivered from the Sleeping Beauties, and that they were healthy except for dormant MDS which everyone had anyway, a stream of girls started to volunteer. You could see why they did, even then. They were following Ursula Johnson’s example. They did it for their husbands, or their families, or their religions. They did it for the future. What better single thing could a person do with her life?
    But naturally people fussed and objected like they always do when someone tries to do something positive. ‘The girls who volunteer are too young to know their own minds, blah blah blah.’ Or, ‘the programme is too