hind you. Writing about the dilemma of treating these babies, an ethicist suggested: “The basis of selection for treatment in cases of myelomeningocele ought to be the presence of a commitment by the parents to care for and nurture their afflicted child.” A young woman, still a teenager, enters the nursery with a flourish, tying her gown behind her as she crosses the room to Brian’s crib. She introduces herself to me when I stand to hover over his crib where he lies sleeping at last. She is his mother, Linda, thin and all nerves. She scoops him out and bounces him around the room, talking. It is an hour before he is due to eat and he shows no signs of hunger. Despitemy suggestion against it, Linda opens a new bottle and settles down to feed him. She has little success with the tired baby whose stomach is still nearly full, and rocks rapidly in the chair while she fusses with the nipple, talking to no one in particular without pause. At the height of the evening we have a new admission to our small room, necessitating the movement of cribs, the rearrangement of chairs and monitors, the making of room. Sarah comes in a high, hot Isolette; she is not yet three pounds, but she’s a day old, wrinkled, red and simian. Even the veteran nursery nurses crowd round her to coo and moo. She sleeps on, eyes clamped tight against the bright light, naked but for a diaper smailer than a table napkin. F JL or the Christmas of 1984 the Cabbage Patch Doll manufacturers, ever eager to catch new levels of tolerance, marketed (with success) a new model, the Cabbage Patch Preemie, hairless and pink and bulbous-faced. I wonder what is next. Big-skulled hydrocephalus dolls? Cleft palate babies? Perhaps a twisted- limbed spina bifida. They could call it Baby Doe. I am sitting in the chair with Li, wiggling the nipple in his mouth to remind him of our mutual goal. A young couple appears at the window. Their faces are blank, composed. The man, tall and handsome and mustached, wears a yellow baseball cap emblazoned with the name of a trucking company. He helps the short, plump woman into a hospital gown out- sfde the door. She drapes it over her clothes and smooths it down. He follows suit, then reaches for the baseball cap at the last moment, pulling it off in a crumbled fist like a farmer entering church. He stands shyly by the door, a young man in jeans and button-down shirt dressed incongruously in a hospital gown. She moves at once to Janelle’s crib, to her daughter. Because of the surgery on her back, r r i x he essential myth of Baby Doe is that parents who choose to forego aggressive treatment for their defective baby are malicious, heartless and unloving. Janelle must lie on her belly and be moved on a board that enforces her prone position. Of course, she cannot be breast-fed; the angle would be impossible. She is changed prone, fed prone. To lift her, her mother must lift the whole board. She cannot curl her up in her arms, cannot cradle her. The nurse helps her balance the board on her lap, Janelle spread before her like a feast. Her husband moves to her side and scrapes a chair up, embarrassed and polite. Brian’s mother talks on in the background, and I look at Janelle’s mother. She is beautiful, pale, full of face, tired. Her dark hair hangs round her face, which emanates a sweetness grown brighter by the ordeal of a long labor and the violence following. She keeps her face calm, tranquil, running one hand lightly over Janelle’s hair, softly, softly, without pausing, speaking to her in psychic whispers. Occasionally she confers with her husband, and they nod their heads together, seeking comfort one from the other. They are an island. The essential myth of Baby Doe is that parents who choose to forego aggressive treatment for their defective baby are heartless, and unloving. Surely such a myth is comforting, blending as it does all shades of gray into simple black and white. The baby, clearly, can’t be wrong. Therefore the parents are; they are cowards. They choose the easy way out. All choice is hard. To choose not to do is hard. Janelle’s parents—have they any idea, any idea at all, about what they are getting into? Have any of us, merrily whistling in the dark down these echoing corridors? Brian’s mother announces her exhaustion and rises to leave. I offer to take her son, whose feeding time and discomfort have now arrived. Linda stretches and yawns, and wonders if it would all right if she went home to sleep now and didn’t return till morning. Yes, I assure her. She gathers her bag and leaves. I feed Brian, also with little success, and change his diaper. Time for tests. I take his wet Pamper across the hall and squeeze it until a few drops of urine fall into a test tube. With a simple chemical I check it for sugar, to assure the stability of his metabolism. Li has a diaper changed too, a bottle, and is patted to sleep, relieved to be left alone. Brian cries and screams and trembles. Anyone will collapse in a few days with an irritable baby, and I wonder about Linda’s endurance. A half hour after he falls into slumber, she returns with relatives in tow and wakes him so they can see. He fusses and won’t smile despite her exhortations. The room is suddenly crowded and noisy. I am as annoyed as if she had grabbed hold of my own sleeping baby. Linda is determined to hold court and speaks loudly to the room. “ He’s never been so cranky before,” she tells us. “ I had a friend,” she says to all. “ They said her baby was going to be retarded. Can you imagine that?” And she shakes her head. My heart sinks. Janelle’s mother smiles politely, nods her head. She strokes and strokes. As the evening wears on, I see the ripples in her smooth expression. Her face works with great subtlety; she begins to learn her new life. She is sorting out dreams, discarding ideals, re-shaping the corners and crannies for Janelle’s distortion. It is not just the physical world that must be adjusted to fit Janelle; that is easy enough in comparison . Both mother and father must be made to fit her, too. The chaos settles. Linda, nervous and haggard, tightly wound, leads her kin out, and with effort I get Brian back to sleep. When all is quiet, I go to find a head nurse and tell her my concerns about Linda. She lacks confidence, knows nothing of baby care. She is just a girl. When Brian is strong enough to go home, she will expect him to perform in certain ways: it is a textbook family for child abuse. It is all I can do. When I return to the room, Janelle’s parents have left. I never learn their names. We gather our charts and note accounts of the evening almost done—how much drunk, how much spit back. When the writing is over, we circle our chairs protectively round the cribs and talk. I discover, in passing and trying to disguise my interest, more about Janelle’s parents. They are children, too, as I suspected— she is seventeen years old, he a year older. Janelle could have been worse, after all. I have spent more than a few hours in the dim library stacks of the medical school library, turning pages of color photographs, stark nightmare after stark n ig h tm a re . Here is a c h i ld w ith rachischisis, her entire spinal cord and brain exposed to air; the child is irreparably split from forehead to tailbone as though with a cleaver, a fleshy fissure of a baby. Here is a holotelencephalic boy, head puckered and fused in the center with only a blank, fatty bulge for a face. 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