– OB RESIDENT, DR HANNA MACINTOSH

Was I too simply too tired to notice? It was easy for us to overlook the larger babies at first. The first cases we studied were a mix of anecdotal information gleaned from overworked urban centers & data gathered from an overall uneducated population with questionable accuracy for dates and medical history. I mean, when you ask a patient, When was your last menstrual cycle? & they reply with, Is that when I bleed?, it is difficult to determine a common baseline from which to base abnormalities.

When I ask myself, was I too tired? Was I too jaded by their overwhelming lack of concern for their own health paired with their overwhelming sense of entitlement that the poor had begun to show? Was I worn down by a system that promoted the poor to procreate with abandon & to proliferate in squalor? The answer is yes.

Fifteen babies were born into my...

The nights hadn’t been plagued as much of late by the dreams, always these pervasive dreams, that seemed to drown out all reason, all warmth. Dreams where a darkened stairway leads down through large automatic doors into a large room, one hundred feet wide and twice as long. Long metal tables with dull gleams stretch out, evenly spaced across the smooth cement floor and old, industrial lamps dangle with their sulfuric yellow lights barely penetrating the surrounding dark. Each light illuminates a body on each table. At first they all seem to be the same, but eventually it becomes clear that each body is a different young woman with different hair and different closed eyes and different silent shapes and tones. In a corner, some people who resembles nurses and doctors surround a body, applying shock pads, administering IVs, worrying, chewing their nails and looking at their white...