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From time to time my friend Mark Goldstein, a veterinarian, calls me to brainstorm about difficult animal-care decisions confronting him as director of the Los Angeles Zoo. This time he was faced with the dilemma of Nan, a teenage chimpanzee already saddled with a young son. The facility where they were housed was crowded, and it would be years before the new housing planned for them would be ready. Under the circumstances, the last thing that Nan needed was another infant, and she had been on contraceptives.
The contraceptives had evidently failed, because Nan now appeared to be nearing the end of her first trimester of pregnancy. Mark wondered about the wisdom of an abortion, which would have to be carried out soon if at all. What did I think?
My first reaction was: I'd hate to have your responsibility for deciding, but I think you'd better do it. Yes, a decision to abort is always agonizing. Nevertheless, of the last two pregnancies in that crowded facility, both of them also failures of contraception, one had ended in a stillbirth, the other in an infant that died within a week. With that track record, I reasoned, abortion would surely be the lesser of two evils.
Then Mark explained why he wasn't so sure. No one had ever performed an abortion on a chimpanzee, so there'd be no way to be sure the operation would be safe. If Nan were to hemorrhage and die, we would lose a female of prime reproductive age from the small captive breeding population of a species endangered in the wild. Even assuming the procedure itself would cause Nan no harm, removing her from the cage where she lived with 12 other chimps would necessarily involve the risk of tranquilizing her; furthermore, her absence could trigger a war over social status among the remaining occupants. As for my suggestion that the pregnancy be allowed to run its course and room be found for the infant at another North American zoo, Mark's answer was simple: all American zoo facilities have as many chimps as they can handle. "Now what do you think?" he asked.
I agonized for a while longer, and eventually I came down against an abortion. That was Mark's...