In my first pregnancy it looked like this: At our anatomy scan, the doctor was able to see that the umbilical cord was attached, not in the center of the placenta, where it was supposed to be, but off to the side. In my second pregnancy, it came when they measured a fold at the back of my daughter’s neck, the nuchal translucency. Follow-up testing was recommended if this fold was thicker than 3mm, because too much thickness there might or might not mean chromosomal or structural abnormalities that might or might not be incompatible with life. My daughter’s was 3mm exactly.
“What does that mean?” I asked, both times.
“Don’t worry,” the first doctor said. “Nature knows what it’s doing. It’s probably nothing.”
“Don’t worry,” the second doctor said, and then gave me forms to sign for chorionic villus sampling.
Neither of them actually answered my question.
Even before these moments, I’d found pregnancy uneasy, unknowable terrain. First there were lines on a test, then a little mounding between my hipbones, which I could only feel when I was lying down, and a vague sense of sickness, like reading in the back of a car on a twisty road. With more months came heft and an uncanny internal stirring, like a twitch of a new inner muscle that became distinct flailings, bumpings, and rollings. Here, at my core, was a region I had no access to. A sealed black box on which everything—a whole life—suddenly depended. Were things all right, inside? Who knew? Not my doctors, it seemed—not with the certainty I craved. I’d somehow turned my own body into a sort of restaging of Schrödinger’s cat. My eventual baby, inside the closed container of my uterus—my own organ, but exempt from my conscious control or knowledge, an unseen central zone I’d never been very aware of before—was both all right and not all right at all times. Both possibilities existed, and neither could be ruled out. The baby was utterly inaccessible to me even when I contained it completely, even when I was touching whatever appendage it was jabbing me with through the wall of my own abdomen.
When my doctors didn’t answer my questions to my satisfaction, I set off in search of answers elsewhere. My Google searches from those months read like a staccato seismograph of panic:
