FIRST DEGREE — ILLNESS
Because pain is a universal experience, I presume that the Shah of Iran must have suffered his affliction much as I suffer mine, and that he must have been paranoid, as I am, about the random stinging that awoke him in the night, that poked at his insides when he settled down to read the paper and burned in his waist without warning. This is how cancer starts, he must have recognized: an abstract torment that most people choose to ignore, a strange and random expression of the often-confused body.
I like to imagine this age-old scene: a powerful man and his timid advisors, an underling whispering into the Shah of Iran’s ear, “This is what power does to you, your majesty. It gives you pain. It makes your body ache. A result of stress. No need for alarm.”
Similar to the way my girlfriend will laugh and say, “Babe, you don’t have cancer,” when I whisper her my fears.
Similar to the way everyone says that—even my mother, who was younger than I am now when she was first diagnosed with cancer, only 26 when she returned to New York from abroad and realized that it had been years since her last targeted check-up.
That was in 1979.
By then, the Shah had already stopped appearing in public. And the people of Tehran, in response, had begun crowding the streets in protest, demanding the Shah emerge from his seclusion and answer for himself. To them, the Shah’s obscurity was only the latest in a series of administrative failures and public indiscretions. Days went by. Weeks. The protests grew. The secret police ran clandestine and murderous operations, trying to suppress what we now understand was a burgeoning revolution. They targeted dissidents and civilians alike. Political figures vanished, or were poisoned. There were skirmishes. Entire theaters set on fire. The Shah was eventually forced to flee.
He took asylum in America, where he would undergo formal treatment for his cancer, which he had been hiding from the world for some time. Then, while my mother was receiving her own diagnosis of cervical cancer, the new head of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, was demanding that the Shah be returned to Tehran to face up to his crimes. When America did not yield to this request, a swarm of people stormed the United States Embassy and took fifty-two American diplomats hostage, stuffing them into the cement wombs of Tehran and holding them for 444 days.
The reality was that the Shah was too ill to travel, on his deathbed at New York Presbyterian in Manhattan, just a few blocks away from Lenox Hill Hospital, where I would be born, a decade later, under traumatic circumstances.
SECOND DEGREE — NIELS LAUERSEN
The man who lifted me out of my mother’s womb died in between drafts of this essay. His name was Niels Lauersen and his obituary reads more like a gossip column.
Lauersen was once dubbed the “Dyno Gyno” by the New York tabloids for treating celebrity patients like Celine Dion, Liv Ullman, and Foxy Brown for infertility. A doctor of Danish origin, Lauersen was also known for dating wealthy socialites, one of whom was Denise Rich, the ex-wife of notorious financier Marc Rich, who was indicted in 1983 on 65 criminal counts including, among more typical white-collar crimes, completing oil trades with Iran during the hostage crisis.
But Lauersen wasn’t just notorious for his proximity to wealth and power—he was a miracle worker. “His waiting room was impossible; it took hours to see him,” a former patient said. “Lil’ Kim would come in through the back door in the most to-die-for ensembles, you can’t imagine, but he enjoyed my pregnancy, everyone’s pregnancy, like a country doctor. I’ve never seen anyone deliver the results of a good Pap smear with such joy.”
Lauersen’s fame was bolstered even further by the appearances he made on The Phil Donahue Show, which is when my mother first laid eyes on him, in 1991, at the beginning of the end of the second millennium. By this time, numerous doctors had already sighed, folded their fingers together and explained to my mother that the removal of her cancer at 26 had indeed had bleak consequences for her ability to conceive. But here was Dr. Lauersen on the TV, boldly declaring that he “could give anyone a baby, get any woman pregnant.” Here was Lauersen, with his gray suit and dominant shoulders and curly blonde hair, glaring out of the electric square of the television into my mother’s eyes.
“It was like he was talking directly to me,” she said. “Looking into my eyes like he could see me.”
Which is an experience I encounter myself a few days after that conversation with my mother, while watching my own TV.
This time it’s Lance Armstrong glaring out of the electric rectangle. Glaring into my eyes and pleading with “any guy watching this”—during some documentary—to suck it up, pick up the phone, speak your pain, confess your truths, ask for help, speak the phrases: pain in testicles and I’d like to make an appointment.
THIRD DEGREE — CHARGES
My therapist asks: “Did you call to make an appointment yet?”
Then: “Are you still experiencing pain?”
And later: “Why do you think you’re putting this off?”
I obfuscate. I tell her about Lauersen. About being torn from my mother’s womb a month too early. I tell her the whole story. The web of connections. I explain how cancer has changed national trajectories and catalyzed revolutions. I tell her about 1979. The hostage crisis. How America leveled an embargo against Iran that was violated by this one particular businessman, who got caught buying and selling Iranian oil while the hostages were still blindfolded. How that businessman’s wife then left him and found solace in the arms of a burgeoning celebrity doctor named Niels Lauersen, who had been the first person to touch my newborn flesh, and who had subsequently—because of his mishandling of my birth—traumatized me for life. I express a theory of mine that Lauersen’s malpractice has constituted him as responsible for all of my life’s anxieties—for the feelings of panicked abandon that flare up in me whenever a loud bang sounds from the construction down the street or when a call to a loved one goes to voicemail. The heated terror when my girlfriend is late coming home from an errand or when it’s hot in October and the world seems to be melting. The dissociative, almost masochistic abandon I feel when I come across an article about the hostage crisis and spend the following weeks obsessing about it, roleplaying it in my mind, even venturing down to the basement of my house and pulling the bandana I wear when I exercise down over my eyes just to feel the sensation of confinement—or, more accurately, to remember it: those lonely days in the incubator, my first experience of living.
“That must have been hard for you. Being in an incubator,” my therapist says.
I push past that statement and explain that Lauersen was eventually indicted for insurance fraud; he was fabricating cervical or uterine issues in order to administrate fertility treatments to his patients that the insurance companies wouldn’t cover—or performing unnecessary procedures to enhance fertility and overcharging for them, depending on who you asked. Either way, he could not abide failure. He was a strange figure—a sort of Robin Hood of fertility, except for the fact that he fucked up my entire psyche when he accidentally broke my mother’s water a month before her due date, thereby causing a chain of events that eventually landed me in the NICU because of a breathing issue, which was followed by a bilirubin issue.
I tell my therapist what Lauersen did to my mother. How he’d noticed some cantaloupe-sized fibroids on her uterine wall during the course of my C-Section. How he’d cavalierly sliced them out then and there, while I was being born—a maneuver that my father could overhear the nurses objecting to even while it was being performed.
I tell my therapist how Lauersen only divulged this to my mother a few weeks after my birth, when he was forced to admit to it after she ended up in the emergency room with a raging temperature, which turned out to be puerperal fever and which eventually led, after some prep, to another surgery—this time to remove from my mother’s uterus the infected gauze pads that Lauersen had accidentally left behind during the C-section.
I tell my therapist that in my research for this essay I discovered that Lauersen, over the course of seven years in New York, billed Blue Cross-Blue Shield for 356 fibroid cyst removals. The next highest number for a doctor was 41.
And that he was charged with malpractice, eventually. He’d maimed. He’d marred. One baby’s skull by was damaged by metal forceps. Another had been extracted so inconsiderately that it suffered permanent paralysis of the arm.
I also tell my therapist that Lauersen was a sort of foreshadowing figure, a prototype of something to come later: the powerful and charismatic-but-ultimately-naughty man who is destined to suffer a public reprisal. I tell her what Lauersen said to one of his lawyers—the 28-year-old Weiss Associate Danya Perry—when he threw an arm around Weiss’ shoulder after a hearing, leaned in and asked: “When am I going to get you pregnant?”
FOURTH DEGREE — CAPTIVITY
During the course of their imprisonment, the American hostages were forced to endure numerous fake deaths—Russian roulette with empty cartridges, line-ups against a wall before firing squads shooting blanks.
A panic attack is a fake death, my therapist says.
Most of the hostages weren’t soldiers. They were politicians, desk-jockeys, translators. They had no training in how to survive imprisonment. They were communications officers, attachés, electronics specialists at the mercy of someone else’s moods and competence—newborns to the kind of captivity my mother would suffer fourteen years later, at Lenox Hill hospital, where Doctor Lauersen cranked the Pitocin up so high that the nurse in the room had shouted, loud enough for my father to hear in the hallway, “You’re killing her!”
FIFTH DEGREE — ESCAPE
Just before their release, the hostages were taken to a grand mansion in the capital. The mansion had once belonged to a former general in the Shah’s army, Teymur Bakhtiar, who’d fled the country under suspicion of conspiring with the Shah’s future usurpers, Khomeini and the Islamists, who would later replicate the same abuses they accused the Shah of committing. Bakhtiar was also the founder of the SAVAK, the same secret police whose extralegal behavior had, in part, brought about the downfall of the Shah and catalyzed the revolution. But Bakhtiar was murdered before all of this, in 1970, by the very SAVAK he’d once commanded, during a hunting party in Iraq.
At Bakhtiar’s mansion, the hostages enjoyed clean beds, hot water, prepared meals. The African American and female hostages were freed. Those who remained could tell their rescue was approaching. Why else were they being treated suddenly so well?
Finally, after 444 days of detention, they were released. On the flight home, when the pilot announced that they’d left Iranian airspace, the hostages whooped and hollered and fell into each other’s arms. It was 1981.
Two decades later, in 2001, Marc Rich was controversially pardoned by Bill Clinton, on Clinton’s last day in office, for the crime of oil trading during the hostage crisis.
Ten years before that, in 1991, there were complications with my birth. I was held against my parents’ wishes by Lenox Hill hospital and put into a plastic box. I spent the first ten days of my life alone with wires and needles piercing my skin. I wasn’t allowed to suck a pacifier. I wasn’t fed. I withered to 4 pounds ten ounces. My father begged for my release but there was no doctor present over the course of a three-day weekend to sign me out. My mother was back in our apartment, in too much pain to move. She wondered if she’d even had a baby. Was it all a dream? Her fever had begun.
I was only released to my father after a family friend who worked at the District Attorney’s office came to the hospital, flashed his badge, and spoke a few key words.
Ten minutes later, my father carried me out of the sliding doors and hailed a taxi. I was so desperately undersized that the car seat they’d bought for me was too big. I jostled around in its husk while we zigzagged through Central Park. My dad had to hold me pressed against the car seat. He could feel my heart beating through my chest. I wasn’t asleep. I was looking out the windows. I was curious and alive. It was strange, he said, watching a thing so ragged and weak see the world for the first time.
SIXTH DEGREE — LIVING ON IN TRUTH
My parents first heard of Dr. Lauersen’s arrest from a friend and fellow former patient of his. She’d been called by a lawyer who was part of a suit. Anyone victimized by Lauersen’s rogue practices was invited to join. The friend was thinking about it. My parents did, too, for a while, before eventually declining—I’d made it through the trauma of the birth without any (observable) damages, and they wanted to move on.
Still, my parents were curious. What else had Lauersen done to deserve such a lawsuit?
It doesn’t take too much digging nowadays to answer that question.
In 1994, three years after my birth, a former girlfriend of Lauersen alleged that he had coerced her into two pregnancies, “to act as his sperm depository in order to see whether he (Lauersen) could (still) father a child.”
In 1999, Kimberly Alvarez, another patient, sued Niels Lauersen for a sexual assault she said took place in the Park Avenue apartment that he kept for patients from out of town. “I was so stupid,” Lauersen said, after settling out of court with Kimberly Alvarez. “I’ve got to be more careful. There were so many crazies, you know? It’s just one of those things, because I’m nice to women, nice to people.”
In 2006, shortly after his release from prison, Lauersen was sued by Naula Robinson, who he married while in prison. Lauersen—now dubbed the “Slime-o Gyno” by the New York Post—had romanced Robinson behind bars, borrowed money from her to keep his fertility clinic afloat, used her to handle his books while he was away, promised to have a baby with her, then severed ties with her shortly after he was released from prison.
Then, after their split, another scandal broke.
At a birth clinic in New York, an African American baby was born to a Latinx couple who had entrusted the clinic to handle their in-vitro fertilization. During the time of the procedure, New York Medical Services for Reproductive Medicine paid twenty thousand dollars a month to Niels Lauersen, who acted as a consultant. He oversaw their operations. Whether or not he was directly responsible feels superfluous. Wherever Lauersen went, malpractice followed.
Soon, another scandal broke, this one involving a physical incident at Lauersen’s apartment between the doorman and a probation officer looking to track Lauersen down. Had Lauersen instructed the doorman to intervene? Had he bribed him? Or was the probation officer just worked up? What kind of effect did Lauersen have on the minds of the people around him?
The answer to that question is complicated. It’s tempting to conflate him with the bad men of our era. But Lauersen’s case is more complicated than Weinstein or Spacey; he was a man of medicine. People love their doctors.
Because pain is a universal experience, I presume that the Shah of Iran must have suffered his affliction much as I suffer mine, and that he must have been paranoid, as I am, about the random stinging that awoke him in the night, that poked at his insides when he settled down to read the paper and burned in his waist without warning. This is how cancer starts, he must have recognized: an abstract torment that most people choose to ignore, a strange and random expression of the often-confused body.
I like to imagine this age-old scene: a powerful man and his timid advisors, an underling whispering into the Shah of Iran’s ear, “This is what power does to you, your majesty. It gives you pain. It makes your body ache. A result of stress. No need for alarm.”
Similar to the way my girlfriend will laugh and say, “Babe, you don’t have cancer,” when I whisper her my fears.
Similar to the way everyone says that—even my mother, who was younger than I am now when she was first diagnosed with cancer, only 26 when she returned to New York from abroad and realized that it had been years since her last targeted check-up.
That was in 1979.
By then, the Shah had already stopped appearing in public. And the people of Tehran, in response, had begun crowding the streets in protest, demanding the Shah emerge from his seclusion and answer for himself. To them, the Shah’s obscurity was only the latest in a series of administrative failures and public indiscretions. Days went by. Weeks. The protests grew. The secret police ran clandestine and murderous operations, trying to suppress what we now understand was a burgeoning revolution. They targeted dissidents and civilians alike. Political figures vanished, or were poisoned. There were skirmishes. Entire theaters set on fire. The Shah was eventually forced to flee.
He took asylum in America, where he would undergo formal treatment for his cancer, which he had been hiding from the world for some time. Then, while my mother was receiving her own diagnosis of cervical cancer, the new head of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, was demanding that the Shah be returned to Tehran to face up to his crimes. When America did not yield to this request, a swarm of people stormed the United States Embassy and took fifty-two American diplomats hostage, stuffing them into the cement wombs of Tehran and holding them for 444 days.
The reality was that the Shah was too ill to travel, on his deathbed at New York Presbyterian in Manhattan, just a few blocks away from Lenox Hill Hospital, where I would be born, a decade later, under traumatic circumstances.
SECOND DEGREE — NIELS LAUERSEN
The man who lifted me out of my mother’s womb died in between drafts of this essay. His name was Niels Lauersen and his obituary reads more like a gossip column.
Lauersen was once dubbed the “Dyno Gyno” by the New York tabloids for treating celebrity patients like Celine Dion, Liv Ullman, and Foxy Brown for infertility. A doctor of Danish origin, Lauersen was also known for dating wealthy socialites, one of whom was Denise Rich, the ex-wife of notorious financier Marc Rich, who was indicted in 1983 on 65 criminal counts including, among more typical white-collar crimes, completing oil trades with Iran during the hostage crisis.
But Lauersen wasn’t just notorious for his proximity to wealth and power—he was a miracle worker. “His waiting room was impossible; it took hours to see him,” a former patient said. “Lil’ Kim would come in through the back door in the most to-die-for ensembles, you can’t imagine, but he enjoyed my pregnancy, everyone’s pregnancy, like a country doctor. I’ve never seen anyone deliver the results of a good Pap smear with such joy.”
Lauersen’s fame was bolstered even further by the appearances he made on The Phil Donahue Show, which is when my mother first laid eyes on him, in 1991, at the beginning of the end of the second millennium. By this time, numerous doctors had already sighed, folded their fingers together and explained to my mother that the removal of her cancer at 26 had indeed had bleak consequences for her ability to conceive. But here was Dr. Lauersen on the TV, boldly declaring that he “could give anyone a baby, get any woman pregnant.” Here was Lauersen, with his gray suit and dominant shoulders and curly blonde hair, glaring out of the electric square of the television into my mother’s eyes.
“It was like he was talking directly to me,” she said. “Looking into my eyes like he could see me.”
Which is an experience I encounter myself a few days after that conversation with my mother, while watching my own TV.
This time it’s Lance Armstrong glaring out of the electric rectangle. Glaring into my eyes and pleading with “any guy watching this”—during some documentary—to suck it up, pick up the phone, speak your pain, confess your truths, ask for help, speak the phrases: pain in testicles and I’d like to make an appointment.
THIRD DEGREE — CHARGES
My therapist asks: “Did you call to make an appointment yet?”
Then: “Are you still experiencing pain?”
And later: “Why do you think you’re putting this off?”
I obfuscate. I tell her about Lauersen. About being torn from my mother’s womb a month too early. I tell her the whole story. The web of connections. I explain how cancer has changed national trajectories and catalyzed revolutions. I tell her about 1979. The hostage crisis. How America leveled an embargo against Iran that was violated by this one particular businessman, who got caught buying and selling Iranian oil while the hostages were still blindfolded. How that businessman’s wife then left him and found solace in the arms of a burgeoning celebrity doctor named Niels Lauersen, who had been the first person to touch my newborn flesh, and who had subsequently—because of his mishandling of my birth—traumatized me for life. I express a theory of mine that Lauersen’s malpractice has constituted him as responsible for all of my life’s anxieties—for the feelings of panicked abandon that flare up in me whenever a loud bang sounds from the construction down the street or when a call to a loved one goes to voicemail. The heated terror when my girlfriend is late coming home from an errand or when it’s hot in October and the world seems to be melting. The dissociative, almost masochistic abandon I feel when I come across an article about the hostage crisis and spend the following weeks obsessing about it, roleplaying it in my mind, even venturing down to the basement of my house and pulling the bandana I wear when I exercise down over my eyes just to feel the sensation of confinement—or, more accurately, to remember it: those lonely days in the incubator, my first experience of living.
“That must have been hard for you. Being in an incubator,” my therapist says.
I push past that statement and explain that Lauersen was eventually indicted for insurance fraud; he was fabricating cervical or uterine issues in order to administrate fertility treatments to his patients that the insurance companies wouldn’t cover—or performing unnecessary procedures to enhance fertility and overcharging for them, depending on who you asked. Either way, he could not abide failure. He was a strange figure—a sort of Robin Hood of fertility, except for the fact that he fucked up my entire psyche when he accidentally broke my mother’s water a month before her due date, thereby causing a chain of events that eventually landed me in the NICU because of a breathing issue, which was followed by a bilirubin issue.
I tell my therapist what Lauersen did to my mother. How he’d noticed some cantaloupe-sized fibroids on her uterine wall during the course of my C-Section. How he’d cavalierly sliced them out then and there, while I was being born—a maneuver that my father could overhear the nurses objecting to even while it was being performed.
I tell my therapist how Lauersen only divulged this to my mother a few weeks after my birth, when he was forced to admit to it after she ended up in the emergency room with a raging temperature, which turned out to be puerperal fever and which eventually led, after some prep, to another surgery—this time to remove from my mother’s uterus the infected gauze pads that Lauersen had accidentally left behind during the C-section.
I tell my therapist that in my research for this essay I discovered that Lauersen, over the course of seven years in New York, billed Blue Cross-Blue Shield for 356 fibroid cyst removals. The next highest number for a doctor was 41.
And that he was charged with malpractice, eventually. He’d maimed. He’d marred. One baby’s skull by was damaged by metal forceps. Another had been extracted so inconsiderately that it suffered permanent paralysis of the arm.
I also tell my therapist that Lauersen was a sort of foreshadowing figure, a prototype of something to come later: the powerful and charismatic-but-ultimately-naughty man who is destined to suffer a public reprisal. I tell her what Lauersen said to one of his lawyers—the 28-year-old Weiss Associate Danya Perry—when he threw an arm around Weiss’ shoulder after a hearing, leaned in and asked: “When am I going to get you pregnant?”
FOURTH DEGREE — CAPTIVITY
During the course of their imprisonment, the American hostages were forced to endure numerous fake deaths—Russian roulette with empty cartridges, line-ups against a wall before firing squads shooting blanks.
A panic attack is a fake death, my therapist says.
Most of the hostages weren’t soldiers. They were politicians, desk-jockeys, translators. They had no training in how to survive imprisonment. They were communications officers, attachés, electronics specialists at the mercy of someone else’s moods and competence—newborns to the kind of captivity my mother would suffer fourteen years later, at Lenox Hill hospital, where Doctor Lauersen cranked the Pitocin up so high that the nurse in the room had shouted, loud enough for my father to hear in the hallway, “You’re killing her!”
FIFTH DEGREE — ESCAPE
Just before their release, the hostages were taken to a grand mansion in the capital. The mansion had once belonged to a former general in the Shah’s army, Teymur Bakhtiar, who’d fled the country under suspicion of conspiring with the Shah’s future usurpers, Khomeini and the Islamists, who would later replicate the same abuses they accused the Shah of committing. Bakhtiar was also the founder of the SAVAK, the same secret police whose extralegal behavior had, in part, brought about the downfall of the Shah and catalyzed the revolution. But Bakhtiar was murdered before all of this, in 1970, by the very SAVAK he’d once commanded, during a hunting party in Iraq.
At Bakhtiar’s mansion, the hostages enjoyed clean beds, hot water, prepared meals. The African American and female hostages were freed. Those who remained could tell their rescue was approaching. Why else were they being treated suddenly so well?
Finally, after 444 days of detention, they were released. On the flight home, when the pilot announced that they’d left Iranian airspace, the hostages whooped and hollered and fell into each other’s arms. It was 1981.
Two decades later, in 2001, Marc Rich was controversially pardoned by Bill Clinton, on Clinton’s last day in office, for the crime of oil trading during the hostage crisis.
Ten years before that, in 1991, there were complications with my birth. I was held against my parents’ wishes by Lenox Hill hospital and put into a plastic box. I spent the first ten days of my life alone with wires and needles piercing my skin. I wasn’t allowed to suck a pacifier. I wasn’t fed. I withered to 4 pounds ten ounces. My father begged for my release but there was no doctor present over the course of a three-day weekend to sign me out. My mother was back in our apartment, in too much pain to move. She wondered if she’d even had a baby. Was it all a dream? Her fever had begun.
I was only released to my father after a family friend who worked at the District Attorney’s office came to the hospital, flashed his badge, and spoke a few key words.
Ten minutes later, my father carried me out of the sliding doors and hailed a taxi. I was so desperately undersized that the car seat they’d bought for me was too big. I jostled around in its husk while we zigzagged through Central Park. My dad had to hold me pressed against the car seat. He could feel my heart beating through my chest. I wasn’t asleep. I was looking out the windows. I was curious and alive. It was strange, he said, watching a thing so ragged and weak see the world for the first time.
SIXTH DEGREE — LIVING ON IN TRUTH
My parents first heard of Dr. Lauersen’s arrest from a friend and fellow former patient of his. She’d been called by a lawyer who was part of a suit. Anyone victimized by Lauersen’s rogue practices was invited to join. The friend was thinking about it. My parents did, too, for a while, before eventually declining—I’d made it through the trauma of the birth without any (observable) damages, and they wanted to move on.
Still, my parents were curious. What else had Lauersen done to deserve such a lawsuit?
It doesn’t take too much digging nowadays to answer that question.
In 1994, three years after my birth, a former girlfriend of Lauersen alleged that he had coerced her into two pregnancies, “to act as his sperm depository in order to see whether he (Lauersen) could (still) father a child.”
In 1999, Kimberly Alvarez, another patient, sued Niels Lauersen for a sexual assault she said took place in the Park Avenue apartment that he kept for patients from out of town. “I was so stupid,” Lauersen said, after settling out of court with Kimberly Alvarez. “I’ve got to be more careful. There were so many crazies, you know? It’s just one of those things, because I’m nice to women, nice to people.”
In 2006, shortly after his release from prison, Lauersen was sued by Naula Robinson, who he married while in prison. Lauersen—now dubbed the “Slime-o Gyno” by the New York Post—had romanced Robinson behind bars, borrowed money from her to keep his fertility clinic afloat, used her to handle his books while he was away, promised to have a baby with her, then severed ties with her shortly after he was released from prison.
Then, after their split, another scandal broke.
At a birth clinic in New York, an African American baby was born to a Latinx couple who had entrusted the clinic to handle their in-vitro fertilization. During the time of the procedure, New York Medical Services for Reproductive Medicine paid twenty thousand dollars a month to Niels Lauersen, who acted as a consultant. He oversaw their operations. Whether or not he was directly responsible feels superfluous. Wherever Lauersen went, malpractice followed.
Soon, another scandal broke, this one involving a physical incident at Lauersen’s apartment between the doorman and a probation officer looking to track Lauersen down. Had Lauersen instructed the doorman to intervene? Had he bribed him? Or was the probation officer just worked up? What kind of effect did Lauersen have on the minds of the people around him?
The answer to that question is complicated. It’s tempting to conflate him with the bad men of our era. But Lauersen’s case is more complicated than Weinstein or Spacey; he was a man of medicine. People love their doctors.
During his first trial, former patients had crowded the courthouse steps, holding pictures of their ‘miracle babies’ up to the press, ascribing the viability of their children to Lauersen’s expertise and charity alone. They saw Niels Lauersen as almost-divine—a person who transcended the normal bounds of human influence, who could give the gift of life.
On Niels Lauersen’s website, which was taken down sometime after his death, there was a page called ‘Patient Stories’ where a letter from a woman named Margaret was displayed. After telling the story of her own miracle baby, Margaret signed off like this:
“I was your patient from when I was 18 years old. I am now 41 and having major problems…You always said listen to your body and my body is trying to tell me something…I am afraid that it might be ovarian cancer. I need you. I know you would help me…I would travel anywhere for you to be my doctor again…”
Another page on Lauersen’s now-defunct website was titled ‘Miracle Babies.’ The Miracle Babies page was the epitome of Lauersen’s view of himself: a cloudy background with smiling photos, many of which depicted Lauersen brandishing a fresh life in his hands, holding a baby up to the camera like a trophy, as if the baby were born from Lauersen’s will and not a woman’s body. To Lauersen, each baby was a personal congratulations from God. An affirmation that he was who he thought himself to be—powerful, special, perhaps even holy.
On Niels Lauersen’s website, which was taken down sometime after his death, there was a page called ‘Patient Stories’ where a letter from a woman named Margaret was displayed. After telling the story of her own miracle baby, Margaret signed off like this:
“I was your patient from when I was 18 years old. I am now 41 and having major problems…You always said listen to your body and my body is trying to tell me something…I am afraid that it might be ovarian cancer. I need you. I know you would help me…I would travel anywhere for you to be my doctor again…”
Another page on Lauersen’s now-defunct website was titled ‘Miracle Babies.’ The Miracle Babies page was the epitome of Lauersen’s view of himself: a cloudy background with smiling photos, many of which depicted Lauersen brandishing a fresh life in his hands, holding a baby up to the camera like a trophy, as if the baby were born from Lauersen’s will and not a woman’s body. To Lauersen, each baby was a personal congratulations from God. An affirmation that he was who he thought himself to be—powerful, special, perhaps even holy.
*
Before Lauersen died, I was planning on reaching out to him as a part of my research for this essay. To see what he had to say. To see if he remembered me. Of course, part of me was relieved to hear that he had died; I didn’t want to have to speak to him, really. But still, I wonder what he would have said.
In my fantasies, I am stoic and righteous. I speak on behalf of the wronged. I tell Lauersen what he’s left me with. An inability to be alone. The constant presence of death, which is abdondonment, which is solitude in a plastic box. And what he’s left others with. Pain. Trauma.
This shit lasts forever, I would say. Didn’t you know that?
But in reality, I know how the conversation would have actually gone. I am a weak person. I am timid. Laursen would have smelled that far away. He would have sensed my weak points, my anxiety, my hypochondria. My pretensions would have been deconstructed over video chat. You’re blaming me for your personality, he would have said—and he would have been correct.
If Lauersen hadn’t died, and if I had been able to track him down, and if he and I had spoken, I’m sure that I would’ve succumbed to his charisma, like everyone else. I wouldn’t have been angry or righteous. I’d’ve been trembling, annoyed at my own immobilility and thus afraid to say anything at all. I would’ve been hateful and exhausted and quiet. And Lauersen would have seen it all. And he would’ve tried to soothe me. The pain in my right testicle would’ve emerged as a topic of conversation and Lauersen would’ve seized on that weak point and consoled me, speaking to me in the soft and informal tones only the best doctors can employ. Knowing me, I probably would have cried. And eventually, I would be in his hands. What he did to my mother would no longer be the point: I would be the one under examination, the one promising things. Namely, to see someone about the throbbing pain in my testicle, which could be cancer or nothing at all, Lauersen would have probably said, depending on many life factors.
And for some reason, just the thought of him saying those things makes me want to make an appointment. Not because I want to honor this hypothetical advice. And not because of shame or pressure. I want to make an appointment now, after years of being a prisoner to my pain, because I want to be the type of person who is not afraid to ask for help, who doesn’t need patronage from a man like that, who can stand motionless in the wake of him and walk away myself.
So, this morning, I do, in fact, call the University Health Offices. And I do, in fact, make an appointment. I say the words “pain in my right testicle,” “referral to Urologist” and “ultrasound.”
And I hold. I listen to the muzak. I pull out my pen and paper.
In my fantasies, I am stoic and righteous. I speak on behalf of the wronged. I tell Lauersen what he’s left me with. An inability to be alone. The constant presence of death, which is abdondonment, which is solitude in a plastic box. And what he’s left others with. Pain. Trauma.
This shit lasts forever, I would say. Didn’t you know that?
But in reality, I know how the conversation would have actually gone. I am a weak person. I am timid. Laursen would have smelled that far away. He would have sensed my weak points, my anxiety, my hypochondria. My pretensions would have been deconstructed over video chat. You’re blaming me for your personality, he would have said—and he would have been correct.
If Lauersen hadn’t died, and if I had been able to track him down, and if he and I had spoken, I’m sure that I would’ve succumbed to his charisma, like everyone else. I wouldn’t have been angry or righteous. I’d’ve been trembling, annoyed at my own immobilility and thus afraid to say anything at all. I would’ve been hateful and exhausted and quiet. And Lauersen would have seen it all. And he would’ve tried to soothe me. The pain in my right testicle would’ve emerged as a topic of conversation and Lauersen would’ve seized on that weak point and consoled me, speaking to me in the soft and informal tones only the best doctors can employ. Knowing me, I probably would have cried. And eventually, I would be in his hands. What he did to my mother would no longer be the point: I would be the one under examination, the one promising things. Namely, to see someone about the throbbing pain in my testicle, which could be cancer or nothing at all, Lauersen would have probably said, depending on many life factors.
And for some reason, just the thought of him saying those things makes me want to make an appointment. Not because I want to honor this hypothetical advice. And not because of shame or pressure. I want to make an appointment now, after years of being a prisoner to my pain, because I want to be the type of person who is not afraid to ask for help, who doesn’t need patronage from a man like that, who can stand motionless in the wake of him and walk away myself.
So, this morning, I do, in fact, call the University Health Offices. And I do, in fact, make an appointment. I say the words “pain in my right testicle,” “referral to Urologist” and “ultrasound.”
And I hold. I listen to the muzak. I pull out my pen and paper.