"No, I ran through a few options of who to bring this up with and somebody else would've fainted."

"It's upsetting but I'm working on being a more constructively upset person."

"It's very useful. Uh, the most obvious organization equipped already to handle cash infusion and turn it into birth control distribution does also provide abortions. You could earmark it, but money's fungible..."

"Would they perform more - abortions - if they had more funding?"

"In the short run, yes, in the sense that they could open more locations that would then offer the range of services they offer - I think they are not currently funding-constrained enough to turn away people who come to them for that, so it'd be a coverage thing, not a per capita where they already operate thing. In the long run most of what they do is the birth control end."

"People shouldn't be pregnant if they don't want to, that's - really important -"

"Yup. If the Valar just wanted to make everybody on the planet more like Elves in this respect I'm all for it, to be honest, people would freak out but still. I'm assuming they can't do that without moving in and waiting a hundred years though."

"Could tap them and do it one at a time, but I think we've decided having a Vala on Earth might be bad."

"Yeah. There's been some talk of a way for mages to do it, but mages can't do persistently magical things so it'd be permanent until you went to a mage again, doesn't scale well."

"The Elf way is just - your body is under your control - it would in fact also allow someone to intentionally kill their child if they wanted -"

"If you ever have cause to discuss this subject with humans who aren't me be advised that's kind of a loaded way to talk about it; the prevailing opinion is that at least early fetuses are not yet moral patients."

"...I guess as far as anyone can tell you don't have souls, that does change it."

"...you will also want to be careful about saying humans don't have souls."

"But if you do have souls then when you get them is an important question -"

"I mean, I doubt we have souls in the sense that Elves do, it's mostly that even to people without religious opinions on the question bringing up whether humans have souls and whether human fetuses are people in the same breath will make it sound awfully like you're questioning the personhood of even adult humans."

"...right, okay. Elves who die as children mature dead - not as fast, but they do - if you, ah, caused to end a pregnancy you'd have a baby anyway, only a very very damaged one that Mandos probably wouldn't reembody -"

"...okay this is actually interesting, your littlest sisters are identical twins - in humans that happens when a single conception splits in half, early but not instantly. Are they sharing a soul or does souling happen sometime after that or are Elf twins different?"

"I'm not actually sure, twins among Elves are really rare - I wonder how to check, maybe the Valar'd know -"

"There's also a thing that may not happen in Elves at all where fraternal embryos can glom together and produce one person. If it happens later and with identical twins you get conjoined twins, but if it's early enough and the twins are fraternal there's individual people with two sets of genes, maybe mismatched eye colors..."

"Conjoined twins?"

"They're born stuck together somewhere. Sometimes they can be detached, sometimes not."

"That doesn't happen with Elves either. I don't think the one-person version does either -"

"Yeah, they seem like the sort of - medical curiosity that just plain doesn't happen to Elves. I was surprised you had such a thing as identical twins at all, actually. Humans are stuck running on pure biology."

"My parents might've tried for it on purpose out of curiosity, wouldn't be unlike them."

"Are your sisters the only ones?"