Fetal Quotes

Right. So no plans at all then?" Jenna frowned. "Other than rocking in the fetal position for a while?" "Yeah, I was thinking about taking one of those showers where you huddle in the corner fully clothed and cry," Archer offered.

She heard the very beginning of a smile in his voice--a fetal smile--and it very nearly killed her.

Janice suddenly flopped her body down on the dusty, musty train seat and pulled herself into a fetal position. Libby stroked her shoulder, trying to comfort her. Maggie and I looked at each other. We knew Janice had more to tell us.

Life is always going to be a series of ouch-making moments, and the question was, was I going to go all fetal position, or was I going to woman up? I went into fetal position on the bed to think about this. Fetal position turned out to be very comfortable.

I wanted to curl up into a fetal position and start sucking my thumb, let my tears and dripping saliva pool under me. Sorry. I tried living, tried being sentient. Can't do it. Can't live in the same universe with that.

Iko was beginning to comprehend why humans curled into the fetal position when they were afraid.

Archer, Jenna, and I weren’t exactly clutching each other and sobbing, but we were pretty shaken as we formed a little huddle. “Okay,” I finally said. “Can we all agree that this is maybe the most screwed-up situation we’ve ever found ourselves in?” “Agreed,” they said in unison. “Awesome.” I gave a little nod. “And do either of you have any idea what we should do about it?” “Well, we can’t use magic,” Archer said. “And if we try to leave, we get eaten by Monster Fog,” Jenna added. “Right. So no plans at all, then?” Jenna frowned. “Other than rocking in the fetal position for a while?” “Yeah, I was thinking about taking one of those showers where you huddle in the corner fully clothed and cry,” Archer offered. I couldn’t help but snort with laughter. “Great. So we’ll all go have our mental breakdowns, and then we’ll somehow get ourselves out of this mess.

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it.

I went on a blind date last night. We watched a silent film. We stayed up all night talking in sign language. I fell asleep in the fetal position in her cat's litter box. Ah, 'twas a great night. I'll never forget dancing with an albino under the stars.

Sophie: "Right. So no plans at all, then?" Jenna: "Other than rocking in the fetal position for a while?

What makes you think I'm coping?" "Well, for one thing, you're not lying on the floor in the fetal position. That's a good start.

Falling apart is curling up into a fetal position and staying in bed for a week. What you were doing is having the emotional response an individual has to the loss of someone they love. We cry to give voice to our pain.

If you’re not interested in me, just tell me. You don’t have to ruin me for all women.” “I’m more about action than words.” I’m glad he’s making jokes, but I still wince. I drop to a crouch in front of Trent and ask in a low voice, “Are you okay? Seriously?” “Yeah, I’ll live. And by live, I mean curl up in the fetal position on my couch with a bag of ice on my nuts for the rest of the night.” “I’ll hold the ice,” I offer in a soft whisper.

You cannot decide all the sensory stimuli in your environment, your hormone levels this morning, whether something traumatic happened to you in the past, the socioeconomic status of your parents, your fetal environment, your genes, whether your ancestors were farmers or herders. Let me state this most broadly, probably at this point too broadly for most readers: we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.

If anything, global response to the Rising only confirmed something that many Australians had quietly believed for quite some time: If forced to live in Australia for a year, most of the world’s population would simply curl up in a fetal ball and die of terror.

The National Institute of Mental Health spends only $4.3 million on fetal prevention research, all of it for studies in mice, from its yearly $1.4 billion budget,” Freedman noted recently. “Yet half of young school shooters have symptoms of developing schizophrenia.

We are all yeses. We are worthy enough, we passed inspection, we survived the great fetal oocyte extinctions. In that sense, at least -- call it a mechanospiritual sense -- we are meant to be. We are good eggs, every one of us.

Morels are ugly in the skillet. The caps look like the scrotums of leprechauns, the stems like the tusks of fetal elephants.

Where did you go?" "To the end of the driveway," my mother says. "I was nine months pregnant; that was the maximum distance I could waddle without feeling as if my uterus was falling out." I wince. "Do you have to be quite so graphic?" "What would you like me to call it, Zoe? A fetal living room?

The hours tick by as I lie in bed. Memories keep surfacing, tormenting me into unbelievable sadness. I can't bring myself to move. I can't fight the memories that keep filling my thoughts. I stay curled in the fetal position as each memory plays out. I can't stop them from coming. I can't make them go away. Nothing can distract me. I can't block the memories, so they continue to come.

He cranks the condo’s AC way down at night and still most mornings wakes up soaked, fetally curled, entombed in that kind of psychic darkness where you’re dreading whatever you think of.

A friend, an absolute friend, does one thing that despite all the dirt we carry under our fingernails, makes up for everything. They stay.

With every new girl, you've got to start over again. We're not all pleased the same way. She might hate you after a week.

I'm only looking for one person. And I can't bloody see him.

Such a child sometimes.

No, no, no, " she says in a sincere, yet malicious tone. "It's not me who should be mad. That would be your father for messing up our lives!" "Goodnight, Paige. Enjoy the dark." "Fuck you!" "Love you too.

Why does my body betray me? Why is there an imbalance in my brain?

As suburban children we floated at night in swimming pools the temperature of blood; pools the color of Earth as seen from outer space. We would float and be naked—pretending to be embryos, pretending to be fetuses—all of us silent save for the hum of the pool filter. Our minds would be blank and our eyes closed as we floated in warm waters, the distinction between our bodies and our brains reduced to nothing—bathed in chlorine and lit by pure blue lights installed underneath diving boards. Sometimes we would join hands and form a ring like astronauts in space; sometimes when we felt more isolated in our fetal stupor we would bump into each other in the deep end, like twins with whom we didn’t even know we shared a womb.

Nonattachment to Results Nonattachment to results + self compassion = a supple relentlessness that is hard to match. Push hard, play to win, but don’t assume the fetal position if things don’t go your way.

What happened to the world was gradual. I've forgotten what it actually was, but I have faint, fetal memories of what it was like. A smoldering dread that never really caught fire till there wasn't much left to burn. Each sequential step surprised us. Then one day we woke up, and everything was gone.

I love you so much." "You wanna try telling me that sober?

The cloud of the consommé’s warmth enveloped her face and revived her poise. In the liquid a slice of lemon lay at fetal peace.

I was there to get a Ph.D. in English literature. That's not true. I was there to read a lot of books and to discuss them with bright, insightful, book-loving people, an expectation that I pretty quickly learned was about as silly as it could be. Certainly there were other people who loved books, I'm sure there were, but whoever had notified them ahead of time that loving books was not the point, was, in fact, a hopelessly counterproductive and naive approach to the study of literature, neglected to notify me. It turned out that the point was to dissect a book like a fetal pig in biology class or to break its back with a single sentence or to bust it open like a milkweek pod and say, "See? All along it was only fluff," and then scatter it into oblivion with one tiny breath.

The truth is, men are not from Mars and women are not from Venus. We are all earthlings whose penises and vaginas came from exactly the same type of fetal tissue. This is why, in addition to penises and vaginas, we also have a wide spectrum of intersex genitals, which medical science is only now slowly coming to accept as 'normal.

When you sense that your dark night is one of pregnancy and oceanic return, you could react accordingly and be still. Watch and wonder. Take the human embryo as your model. Assume the fetal position, emotionally and intellectually. Be silent. Float in your darkness as if it were the waters of the womb, and give up trying to fight your way out or make sense of it.

McG: 11:39 PM: Tease. A: Bushy prehistoric looking veggies frighten me. Lilliana: 11:41 PM: WTH are we talking about here? McG: 11:42 PM: Fucking auto correct. VAGINAS! Bushy vaginas put the fear of God in me. Seriously, Lilly, if you’ve got one, groom that shit unless you want to see a grown alpha male curl into the fetal position and cry. It won’t be pretty. Just sayin

Dwaine, I've missed you." "Lucy, what have I done? I love you." No more skipping. We are eye to eye. "You can't love me," she states. "But I do." "She's the one you want." "What? She makes me miserable! I want to see the world and fuck girls. I'll be her babysitter forever." "She's the one you want.

No, I’m not sure,” she hisses. “But if I’m going out, I’m going out fighting.” Well, that makes one of us because if I’m going out, I’m going out screaming while crouched in the fetal position. Hey, it’s how I came into this world and it’s how I’m going out. Don’t judge.

My depression had grown on me as that vine had conquered the oak; it had been a sucking thing that had wrapped itself around me, ugly and more alive than I. It had had a life of its own that bit by bit asphyxiated all of my life out of me. At the worst stage of major depression, I had moods that I knew were not my moods: they belonged to the depression, as surely as the leaves on that tree’s high branches belonged to the vine. When I tried to think clearly about this, I felt that my mind was immured, that it couldn’t expand in any direction. I knew that the sun was rising and setting, but little of its light reached me. I felt myself sagging under what was much stronger than I; first I could not use my ankles, and then I could not control my knees, and then my waist began to break under the strain, and then my shoulders turned in, and in the end I was compacted and fetal, depleted by this thing that was crushing me without holding me.

We broke into laughter—the kind that’s your only recourse when you feel like curling up in a fetal position and whimpering like a little girl.

You had to appreciate the small things in life when the big things made you want to curl up in the corner in the fetal position and give up.

If they’d been on my wall while we were apart it would have hurt so much I would have gone fetal and subsisted entirely on Cap’n Crunch and self-pity.

He is lying on his left side, in the fetal position, as if he is trying to get out of this world by the way he came in.

You’ve had many ordeals in the past. During these ordeals, life seemed unbearable. You may have collapsed from the exhaustion of hopelessness and curled into a fetal position. Regardless of how difficult this new ordeal may be, as with the others, this too will be overcome. It will make you stronger.

...I see fetal sciences in you, mummified poems, and bones of my romantic secrets and old innocence. Shall I hang you on the wall of my emotional museum, beside the dark, chill, sleeping irises of my evil? Or shall I spread you over the pines ―suffering book of my love― so you can learn about the song the nightingale offers the dawn?...

Sometimes, wanting to impress is what keeps us moving when all we really want to do is curl up in a fetal position and whimper.

Despite all the medical warnings about ketones, it turns out the fetal brain actually gets approximately 30% of its energy from ketones.[142]

I don’t always seem to be born again. Sometimes I seem to be curled up in the fetal position, hiding.

He who carved the edges of the cosmos curved Himself into a fetal ball in the dark, tethered Himself to the uterine wall of a virgin, and lets His cells divide, light splitting all white. He gave up the heavens that were not even large enough to contain Him and lets Himself be held in a hand. The mystery so large becomes the Baby so small, and infinite God becomes infant.

When I got inside, I just sort of stood there. There’s nothing stranger than the smell of someone else’s house. The scent goes right to your stomach. Mary’s house smelled like lemon furniture polish and oatmeal cookies and logs in a fireplace. For some reason it made me want to curl up in the fetal position. I could have slept right there on their kitchen table.

On the fifth day I knew Kaidan would have made it home. I held my breath and called him. I listened to every charming word of his voice mail, then hung up. That evening I sat on my bed and called again. This time I left a message. “Hi, Kai, um, Kaidan. It's me. Anna. I'm just trying to see if you made it home safely. I'm sure you probably did. Just checking. You can call me anytime. If you want. Anyway. Okay, bye.” I hung up and buried my shamed face into a pillow. Now I was leaving messages after he'd made it clear he wanted zero to do with me? Next thing I knew I'd be frequenting his shows to give him psycho stares from the back, and then doing late-night drive-bys to see what girl he was bringing home. The thought of him with another girl made me writhe in discomfort and curl up in the fetal position. Day six was our first day of back-to-school shopping. We still had a month before school began, but the state issued a tax-free day, so stores were having big sales. I eyed all the teensy skirts and fashionable shirts dangling on mannequins. I tried to imagine Kaidan's reaction if I came dressed like that to one of his shows, some guy other than Jay on my arm. Ugly stalker thoughts. I was full of them. Two weeks passed, and I was still tripping over chairs to grab the phone every time it rang, like now. This time it was Jay.

I gradually shrank in size until I was a teenager, then a child, and then, at last, a baby, crawling, until inevitably I was sucked naked and screaming through that portal every man's mother possesses, into a black hole where all light vanished. As that last glimmer faded, it occurred to me that the light at the end of the tunnel seen by people who have died and come back to life was not Heaven. Wasn't it much more plausible that what they saw was not what lay ahead of them but what lay behind? This was the universal memory of the first tunnel we all pass through, the light at its end penetrating our fetal darkness...

genes and fetal environment are relevant. But most important, recall the logic of collapsing different types of trauma into a single category. What counts is the sheer number of times a child is bludgeoned by life and the number of protective factors.

More and more the world resembles an entomologist's dream. The earth is moving out of its orbit, the axis has shifted; from the north the snow blows down in huge knife-blue drifts. A new ice age is setting in, the transverse sutures are closing up and everywhere throughout the corn belt the fetal world is dying, turning to dead mastoid. Inch by inch the deltas are drying out and the river beds are smooth as glass. A new day is dawning, a metallurgical day, when the earth shall clink with showers of bright yellow ore. As the thermometer drops, the form of the world grows blurred; osmosis there still is, and here and there articulation, but at the periphery the veins are all varicose, at the periphery the light waves bend and the sun bleeds like a broken rectum.

Terrific! Have you done Step Three?" He waggled his brows as he opened up the top left drawer of my dresser. "No. Hey! Do you mind, Nosy Newton?" "Are these panties?" he asked, holding up two of my thongs. "Because they look like dental floss to me." Oh my God. My almost father-in-law was digging around in my lingerie. Embarrassment bloomed in my face. "Ruadan, get out of my underwear!" "Fine," he said, closing the left drawer and opening the right one. "Oh! Lookie here!" "If you touch that box," I said menacingly, "I will cut off your head with your own swords. And I'm not talking about the one on your shoulders." He laughed, shutting the drawer. "You won't need a vibrator anymore. You've got Patrick." His gaze slid toward the dresser. "Unless you have different toys in there. Nipple clamps?" "I… what… oh God." I fell onto the bed, curled into the fetal position, and covered my face.

To replace wiring diagrams, Marcus suggests a better analogy: The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood. But not a single chapter—be it on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality—consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words.

What do think about abortion?” “I could feel the tension growing in the plane. I dropped my head, acknowledging that we had very different value systems for our lives. Then I thought of a way to respond to his question. “You’re Jewish, right?” I asked. “Yes,” he said defensively. “I told you I was!” “Do you know how Hitler persuaded the German people to destroy more than six million of your Jewish ancestors?” The man looked at me expectantly, so I continued. ”He convinced them that Jews were not human and then exterminated your people like rats.” I could see that I had his attention, so I went on. “Do you understand how Americans enslaved, tortured, and killed millions of Africans? We dehumanized them so our constitution didn’t apply to them, and then we treated them worse than animals.” “How about the Native Americans?” I pressed. “Do you have any idea how we managed to hunt Indians like wild animals, drive them out of their own land, burn their villages, rape their women, and slaughter their children? Do you have any clue how everyday people turned into cruel murderers?” My Jewish friend was silent, and his eyes were filling with tears as I made my point. “We made people believe that the Native Americans were wild savages, not real human beings, and then we brutalized them without any conviction of wrongdoing! Now do you understand how we have persuaded mothers to kill their own babies? We took the word fetus, which is the Latin word for ‘offspring,’ and redefined it to dehumanize the unborn. We told mothers, ‘That is not really a baby you are carrying in your belly; it is a fetus, tissue that suddenly forms into a human being just seconds before it exits the womb.’ In doing so, we were able to assert that, in the issue of abortion, there is only one person’s human rights to consider, and then we convinced mothers that disposing of fetal tissue (terminating the life of their babies) was a woman’s right. Our constitution no longer protects the unborn because they are not real people. They are just lifeless blobs of tissue.” By now, tears were flowing down his cheeks. I looked right into his eyes and said, “Your people, the Native Americans, and the African Americans should be the greatest defenders of the unborn on the planet. After all, you know what it’s like for society to redefine you so that they can destroy your races. But ironically, your races have the highest abortion rates in this country! Somebody is still trying to exterminate your people, and you don’t even realize it. The names have changed, but the plot remains the same!” Finally he couldn’t handle it anymore. He blurted out, “I have never heard anything like this before. I am hanging out with the wrong people. I have been deceived!

Like many cruel and evil women, Morgan le Fay knew men’s weaknesses and discounted their strengths. And she knew also that most improbable actions may be successful so long as they are undertaken boldly and without hesitation, for men believe beyond proof to the contrary that blood is thicker than water and that a beautiful woman cannot be evil.

Craving a physical connection, I slide my finger along the back of Rachel’s hand. She’s asleep. Has been for a while. Curled in the fetal position in the middle of my bed, Rachel wears the mask of a ravaged person. Somehow, I missed the signs: dark circles under her eyes, the clothes that once fit perfectly now hang, her skin so pale it’s translucent.

YOU AND YOU ALONE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN HAPPINESS, NOT ANYONE ELSE

The implications of fetal environmental effects? Another route toward how lucky or unlucky you’re likely to be in the world that awaits you.

the fetal brain generates far more neurons than are found in the adult.

The earliest and most dramatic changes in maternal physiology are cardiovascular. These changes improve fetal oxygenation and nutrition.

Jack, get up,” Kieran barked, lowering his hands from the doorframe. His eyes were on me, unreadable like usual. Jack moaned, now fully curled up in the fetal position.

I’m in no position to criticize, because I’m in the fetal position, and I’m bound and gagged and stuffed in the trunk of a Mercedes.

Stuck in a fetal position I sought out my lovers.

They found that the fetal cells from their sons reached their brains, sprouted branches, and pumped out neurotransmitters. Their sons helped shape their thoughts.

He lay on the floor, crawled inside the lines, and curled up into the same fetal position, trying to stay within the white lines. And then, at last, he started to cry.

The stars in heaven cast a pretty light. but their combinations have nothing to do with the comings and goings of the most elusive femme fetale on this planet, Opportunity.

[In reference to cases of testicular feminization]: “The incredible lesson about our sexual biology is that all men at one point in their fetal development have the capacity to be women. Moreover the body is programmed to develop as a female unless it sees and recognizes specific biochemical signals such as testosterone and anti-mullerian factor that tell it to develop as a male.

I’m an HSP to the core. I avoid violent imagery (I abandoned reading Elaine Aron’s The Highly Sensitive Person on my first try because—in typical HSP fashion—I couldn’t handle the frequent references to sexual abuse). I’m very empathetic, and I feel as though my head will explode when two people try to talk to me at the same time. I have difficulty making dinner while the counter is cluttered with the morning’s dishes. I lose my mind when someone is singing while the radio is playing a different song. Watching the news makes me want to assume the fetal position and never get up.

I was an easy birth, and I have never regretted it. Not even for a visit would I return to the womb. I never sleep in the fetal position, but on my back or stomach, legs flung wide. I stay out of hot dark closets. I choose rooms with windows, full of moving air. I like scattered light, a moon, stars, but will settle for anything, even that greenish glow found nowhere in nature of a Santa Monica Freeway sign.

It is a black-and-white photograph showing a naked young man in fetal position. He has entitled it "No Tail!" The fantastic fingerwork of his wings is outspread on the bed like a black lace map of South America.

This wine makes me feel like I’m bathed in amnion, breathless, fed by the motherbloodflow in the umbilical vein, fetal, slippery and tumbling over and over in the warmth of the beating womb, warm amnion, warmnion.

throat and turned her into the undead thing that I feared. It was the worst day of my life. I found her on the floor in the kitchen, and my throat swelled. Her body lay in the fetal position, her right hand below her

It has just been discovered that women carry fetal cells from all the babies they have carried. Crossing the defensive boundaries of our immune system and mixing with our own cells, the fetal cells circulate in the mother’s bloodstream for decades after each birth. The body does not tolerate foreign cells, which trigger illness and rejection. But a mother’s body incorporates into her own the cells of her children as if they recognize each other, belong to each other. This fantastic melding of two selves, mother and child, is called human microchimerism. My three children are carried in my bloodstream still…. How did we not know this? How can this be a surprise?

We enter gradually into the third symbolic pregnancy, the last of this year of reincarnation, and the most perilous. In the first symbolic pregnancy, the emphasis was on the beginning of the pregnancy, fertilization and development of the embryo. In the second symbolic pregnancy, which is not complete, the focus was on the middle of the pregnancy and fetal development, as well as his fight, which begins around the fourth month. In this third symbolic pregnancy, the emphasis is on the exit. The exit of the fetus bathed in this adrenaline and this force from the gods, this vital energy, but also the exist of the ancestor from his tomb, for the parallel is obvious.

Their curled-up graduation programs were on the kitchen counter. I located my name, then ripped them up and threw them in the garbage pail. Back in my room, a black-and-white “My Little Margie” rerun had begun. I watched it without sound, eating strands of congealed noodles, biting into cold, sticky shrimps curled tightly into their fetal positions. When I looked out, the sky had lightened to pearl gray. A wet breeze was stirring the catalpa tree.

Peace and beauty? You think Indians are so worried about peace and beauty? ... If Wovoka came back to life, he'd be so pissed off. If the real Pocahontas came back, you think she'd be happy about being a cartoon? If Crazy Horse, or Geronimo, or Sitting Bull came back, they'd see what you white people have done to Indians, and they'd start a war. They'd see the homeless Indians staggering around downtown. They'd see fetal-alcohol-syndrome babies. They'd see the sorry-ass reservations. They'd learn about Indian suicides and infant mortality rates. They'd listen to some dumb-ass Disney song and feel like hurting somebody. They'd read books by assholes like Wilson, and they would start killing themselves some white people, and then kill some asshole Indians too. Dr. Mather, if the Ghost Dance worked, there would be no exceptions. All you white people would disappear. All of you. If those dead Indians came back to life ,they wouldn't crawl into a sweathouse with you. They wouldn't smoke the pipe with you. They wouldn't go to the movies and munch popcorn with you. They'd kill you. They'd gut you and eat your heart.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting ... Instead of seeing birth as an awakening from blank nonbeing and fetal incompletion into the child's fullness of being, and seeing maturity as a narrowing, impoverishing journey toward blank death, [Wordsworth's] ode proposes that a soul enters life forgetting its eternal being, can remember it throughout life only in intimations and moments of revelation, and will recall and rejoin it fully only in death.

As it happens, the first souvenir I bought was a dried llama fetus. Revolting as it may sound, my poor stillborn llama is actually rather cute. Frozen in the fetal position and dried stiff like beef jerky, it has the gentle, smiling face of a camel and plenty of soft, if slightly formaldehyde-scented, fur. I bought the llama fetus partly because it horrified me, but also for educational purposes, so that my eight-year-old daughter Sophia could show it to her class. (She refused.) Bolivians buy llama fetuses to ward off evil in its many guises. Bolivian miners—who, with a life expectancy of forty-five years, basically live their entire adult lives dying—look to llama fetuses for protection against dynamite explosions and the lung-destroying silicon particulates they inhale all day. Downing high-proof alcohol also helps. “The purer the alcohol, the purer the minerals I find,” one miner told me wryly.

Remarkably, the fetal brain generates far more neurons than are found in the adult. Why? During late fetal development, there is a dramatic competition in much of the brain, with winning neurons being the ones that migrate to the correct location and maximize synaptic connections to other neurons. And neurons that don’t make the grade? They undergo “programmed cell death”—genes are activated that cause them to shrivel and die, their materials then recycled.

they would sometimes ask the doctor why he plunged scissors into the back of those babies’ necks. “To ensure fetal demise,” he replied. “Are you kidding me?” Pescatore exclaimed. “To ensure fetal demise on a live, breathing, moving infant.

This was based on studies of a rare disorder, congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). An enzyme in the adrenal glands has a mutation, and instead of making glucocorticoids, they make testosterone and other androgens, starting during fetal life.

I kiss. Anywhere with skin. Her face, her throat, her hands, her wrists. She watches wordlessly, doesn't reciprocate, doesn't even accept them. Then I give up, I find her neck and hide in the crook of it. Wrap your arms around me, Paige. Please.

In fact, I don’t read as many YA novels as I used to because YA is just so good and, inevitably, I always end up in the fetal position on the floor, rocking back and forth, mumbling about how my book will never be as good as the book I just finished.

the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can’t manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data “highways,” abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer. How can we affect national policy—or even make intelligent decisions in our own lives—if we don’t grasp the underlying issues?

Although it seems that most people with endometriosis begin having symptoms at or around the time of their first period (whether they know it or not), calling endometriosis a “period problem” doesn’t account for the phenomenon of endometrial lesions found in the pelvic cavities of fetuses. Fetuses who have, clearly, not menstruated. Endometriosis has been discovered during fetal autopsies, a finding that seriously challenges the widely held belief that endometriosis is strictly a menstruation-dependent disease.

About half of patients with pure anxiety disorders develop major depression within five years. Insofar as depression and anxiety are genetically determined, they share a single set of genes (which are tied to the genes for alcoholism). Depression exacerbated by anxiety has a much higher suicide rate than depression alone, and it is much harder to recover from. “If you’re having several panic attacks every day,” says Ballenger, “it’s gonna bring Hannibal to his knees. People are beaten into a pulp, into a fetal position in bed.

if free will exists, show me a neuron(s) that just caused a behavior to occur in the complete absence of any influences coming from other neurons, from the neuron’s energy state, from hormones, from any environmental events stretching back through fetal life, from genes.

The First Amendment protects our right to practice our beliefs, and under the Religious Freedom Reform Act (RFRA), the State must present a compelling reason for why they want to enforce rules that inhibit adherence to our religious practices. Clearly, the State of Texas has no compelling reason because these rules were not enacted to promote health and safety, but rather to harass and burden women who terminate their pregnancies. For these reasons, members of The Satanic Temple are not required to comply with the Texas rule on fetal remains.

I say is someone in there?’ The voice is the young post-New formalist from Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an ascot that won’t stay tight, with that hesitant knocking of when you know perfectly well someone’s in there, the bathroom door composed of thirty-six that’s three times a lengthwise twelve recessed two-bevelled squares in a warped rectangle of steam-softened wood, not quite white, the bottom outside corner right here raw wood and mangled from hitting the cabinets’ bottom drawer’s wicked metal knob, through the door and offset ‘Red’ and glowering actors and calendar and very crowded scene and pubic spirals of pale blue smoke from the elephant-colored rubble of ash and little blackened chunks in the foil funnel’s cone, the smoke’s baby-blanket blue that’s sent her sliding down along the wall past knotted washcloth, towel rack, blood-flower wallpaper and intricately grimed electrical outlet, the light sharp bitter tint of a heated sky’s blue that’s left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees in yet another North American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.), knees to chest, slew-footed by the radiant chill of the claw-footed tub’s porcelain, Molly’s had somebody lacquer the tub in blue, lacquer, she’s holding the bottle, recalling vividly its slogan for the past generation was The Choice of a Nude Generation, when she was of back-pocket height and prettier by far than any of the peach-colored titans they’d gazed up at, his hand in her lap her hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize, more fun way too much fun inside her veil on the counter above her, the stuff in the funnel exhausted though it’s still smoking thinly, its graph reaching its highest spiked prick, peak, the arrow’s best descent, so good she can’t stand it and reaches out for the cold tub’s rim’s cold edge to pull herself up as the white- party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speaker’s blow, people barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing saying ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ Joelle’s limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgement of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the glass’s corner, hair of the flame she’s eaten now trailing like the legs of wasps through the air of the glass she uses to locate the de-faced veil and what’s inside it, loading up the cone again, the ashes from the last load make the world's best filter: this is a fact. Breathes in and out like a savvy diver… –and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub’s lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids’ blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching.

I was at least four-hundred miles from life of any kind on this particular night when it began to rain. It was one of those summer rains that come down in buckets but pass quickly. I had a full load and no desire to slide off into a ditch so I gradually slowed, the air brakes whining like a lonely animal in the deep darkness. I pulled off onto the gravel shoulder and that's when I saw her. I came close to rolling over her because of the rain as she lay curled up in a fetal position. Her entire body was shaking so hard it frightened me. The rain was pouring but she made no effort to move.

EVERY WEDNESDAY, I teach an introductory fiction workshop at Harvard University, and on the first day of class I pass out a bullet-pointed list of things the students should try hard to avoid. Don’t start a story with an alarm clock going off. Don’t end a story with the whole shebang having been a suicide note. Don’t use flashy dialogue tags like intoned or queried or, God forbid, ejaculated. Twelve unbearably gifted students are sitting around the table, and they appreciate having such perimeters established. With each variable the list isolates, their imaginations soar higher. They smile and nod. The mood in the room is congenial, almost festive with learning. I feel like a very effective teacher; I can practically hear my course-evaluation scores hitting the roof. Then, when the students reach the last point on the list, the mood shifts. Some of them squint at the words as if their vision has gone blurry; others ask their neighbors for clarification. The neighbor will shake her head, looking pale and dejected, as if the last point confirms that she should have opted for that aseptic-surgery class where you operate on a fetal pig. The last point is: Don’t Write What You Know. The idea panics them for two reasons. First, like all writers, the students have been encouraged, explicitly or implicitly, for as long as they can remember, to write what they know, so the prospect of abandoning that approach now is disorienting. Second, they know an awful lot. In recent workshops, my students have included Iraq War veterans, professional athletes, a minister, a circus clown, a woman with a pet miniature elephant, and gobs of certified geniuses. They are endlessly interesting people, their lives brimming with uniquely compelling experiences, and too often they believe those experiences are what equip them to be writers. Encouraging them not to write what they know sounds as wrongheaded as a football coach telling a quarterback with a bazooka of a right arm to ride the bench. For them, the advice is confusing and heartbreaking, maybe even insulting. For me, it’s the difference between fiction that matters only to those who know the author and fiction that, well, matters.

Savich stood over the metal parcel cage he’d been told was called an OTR, looked at the boxes scattered around it on the floor, streaked and smudged with blood like abstract paintings. Only the packages beneath the body had kept the blood from dripping out of the OTR. He looked down to see the body of an older man with a circle of gray hair around his head. He was torqued into a tight fetal position—difficult because he was heavy—his arms pulled between his legs. No deputy’s uniform. He wore a long-sleeved flannel shirt, old jeans, and ancient brown boots. Impossible to tell what sort of man he’d been—if he’d enjoyed jokes, if he’d loved his family, if he’d been honorable—that was all wiped away, gone in an instant, when the Athame was stuck into his heart. There had to be people out there already worrying about Kane Lewis, wondering where he was. They’d find out soon enough. Savich imagined he’d been a pleasant-looking man, but not in death. No, not in death.

The epic that is brain development involves not just growth, but death. During gestation, the fetal brain grows about twice as many neurons as it will eventually need. This surplus of juvenile neurons is culled and winnowed to what the maturing brain needs; the misfits that aren’t picked to stay on the squad, so to speak, simply wither and die.

She didn't want to be that girl, the one curled up in a little ball. The one under the covers in the fetal position. She'd been there hundreds of times and every single time she'd told herself to stand up. This time, win or lose, if she just stood up, she had the very real opportunity, which would never come again, to be with a man she'd dreamt of.

He’d agreed to turn himself into a vessel for his own enchantments, even though he knew it would come with a cost. He groaned and rolled into a fetal position on the throne room’s cool marble floor. Everything was terrible, and he was tired. He saw now how empty all his delusions of grandeur had been. Gavin might’ve won the Castle, but he was king of nothing at all.

with zero fillings, revealed by the so-so joke—“Have you heard the news about Schrödinger’s Cat? It died today; wait—it didn’t, did, didn’t, did …”; high-volume discourse on who’s the best Bond; on Gilmour and Waters and Syd; on hyperreality; dollar-pound parity; Sartre, Bart Simpson, Barthes’s myths; “Make mine a double”; George Michael’s stubble; “Like, music expired with the Smiths”; urbane and entitled, for the most part, my peers; their eyes, hopes, and futures all starry; fetal think-tankers, judges, and bankers in statu pupillari; they’re sprung from the loins of the global elite (or they damn well soon will be); power and money, like Pooh Bear and honey, stick fast—I don’t knock it, it’s me; and speaking of loins, “Has anyone told

The evidence to date indicates that PEMF works byincreasing the mitotic rate of the healing cells, not by altering calciummetabolism. If so, it can't possibly discriminate between bone-healingcells and any other type. It will accelerate the growth of any cellularsystem that is actively growing; this includes not only healing tissues,but fetal and malignant tissues as well

That was one thing about the Deaf community I always admired beyond belief—they were the most accepting lot I’d ever come across. It didn’t matter what else you had to deal with, blindness, mental challenges, fetal alcohol syndrome, autism, whatever else you were dealing with, if you were culturally Deaf, they accepted you as one of their own. Even, apparently, if you had supernatural sight.

For Freedman, prevention is more than just good medicine; it’s common sense. Billions of dollars are spent each year on developing drugs to treat the symptoms of mental illness after it already manifests. What if some of that money were spent on prevention, not just in the womb but in childhood? Think of all the young people who develop mental illness out of sight of anyone who can help them. What if some of those breakdowns—even suicides—could be prevented, by shoring up the mind’s vulnerability before things get worse? “The National Institute of Mental Health spends only $4.3 million on fetal prevention research, all of it for studies in mice, from its yearly $1.4 billion budget,” Freedman noted recently. “Yet half of young school shooters have symptoms of developing schizophrenia.

I look out at the sad, pre-conditioned faces and am returned to the lost feelings. I taste the screams building up in my throat, the hurling accusations. I immediately remove myself from the physical tantrums and refuse the same old, same old destructive patterns. I will not curl up in fetal position on the bathroom floor, my sobs drenching the carpet. I practice deep breathing and kind thinking.

Hormonal responses to various fetal and childhood experiences have epigenetic effects on genes related to the growth factor BDNF, to the vasopressin and oxytocin system, and to estrogen sensitivity. These effects are pertinent to adult cognition, personality, emotionality, and psychiatric health. Childhood abuse, for example, causes epigenetic changes in hundreds of genes in the human hippocampus.

And no one is obliged to learn something from loss. This is a horrible thing we do to the newly stricken, encouraging them to remember the good times while they are still in the fetal position...The most practical thing I have learned is the power of the present tense. The past is quicksand and the future is unknowable, but in the present, you get to float. Nothing is missing, nothing is hypothetical.

One ancient retired Air Force nurse does nothing but screams 'Help!' for hours at a time from a second-story window. Not six weeks ago, a huge stole HELP WANTED sign was found attached right below the retired shrieking nurse's window. Unit #5, kittycorner across the little street from Ennet House, is for catatonics and various vegetablish, fetal-positioned mental patients. It is, understandably, a pretty quiet place. But in nice weather, when its more portable inmates are carried out and placed in the front lawn to take the air, standing there propped-up and staring, they present a tableau it took Gately some time to get used to. A couple newer residents got discharged late in Gately's treatment for tossing firecrackers into the crowd of catatonics on the lawn to see if they could get them to jump around or display affect.

I felt like I was faking all of this, like I was playing the part of a student. I had the costume and the props, but I didn't really belong here. I'd pinned notes on the stupid corkboard backing of my desk, and I'd highlighted things...But it was all so meaningless. For about an hour, I had an overwheling urge to grab my bag, stuff in a few things, and take the next train to Bristol. I could be back on my parents' couch that night if I got moving. I could admit that I wasn't ready for this, that the semester was a wash. My parents would be thrilled, I was sure. Not about the semester being a wash--but certainly about having me back where they could keep me safe and sound. It would be so easy to do it. The very idea made me warm inside. It was okay to give up. I'd been brave. Everyone would say so. And yet...even as I opened a dresser drawer and figured out which things I would take with me in this hypothetical scenario, i remembered the problem. There would still be ghosts i would still have a future. I would still go back to school eventually. You can't curl up on the sofa and deny life forever. Life is always going to be a series of ouch-making moments, and the question was, was i going to go all fetal position, or was I going to woman up?

ground in a fetal position. The frog man looked down at him with a frown. “Young man, I have no intention of eating you,” he said. “Is he always like this?” the frog man asked Alex. Alex responded with a squeal almost identical to the one her brother had made. “I know, I know. Don’t worry; I’m used to people screaming at me,” the frog man told them. “Get it out of your systems. The shock will only last a minute.” “We’re sorry!” Alex finally managed to say. “It’s just that, where we’re from there aren’t many … um … frog people? Sorry if that isn’t the politically correct term for what you are!” Conner let out another high-pitched noise. It wasn’t a scream this time, but it was embarrassing nonetheless. The frog man studied their faces and paid special attention to their clothes. “Where exactly are you from?” “Pretty far from here,” Alex said.

As soon as I stepped onto the train, I knew why Shifters and Weres shunned the contraptions like E.coli avoided antibacterial agents on a petri dish. It smelled. Badly. A putrid mix of old man, sweaty socks, and cigarettes. My nose hairs didn't shrivel; they curled into the fetal position before they withered and died, leaving my nasal passage a dry, barren wasteland no longer capable of being harmed by the olfactory assault.

Pero el sentido común no ha entrado en el servicio de salud en cuanto a los partos se refiere. Así, se continúa dando a luz en un paritorio y no en una habitación confortable. Las mujeres soportan rasurado, enemas y rotura de bolsa sin razón aparente. Tampoco se sabe por qué aguantan la dilatación, que puede durar horas, tumbadas e inmovilizadas en vez de poder pasear, estar acompañadas por quienes quieran y emplear métodos agradables para soportar el dolor como darse un baño o un masaje... No se entiende por qué las mujeres no pueden elegir la postura más cómoda para dar a luz: taburete obstétrico, en cuclillas, de lado, en la bañera, de rodillas apoyada en la cama... teniendo la fuerza de la gravedad como aliada. Tampoco, salvo por el motivo de acelerar los partos, se explica que se suministre oxitocina sintética sin consultar a la parturienta cuando esta sustancia provoca contracciones más intensas, seguidas y dolorosas y es causa frecuente de sufrimiento fetal y maternal. Cuando las mujeres no tienen estrés, producen oxitocina naturalmente, pero para eso necesitarían estar en un ambiente tranquilo, agradable, íntimo y... no tener prisa. El parto tiene un ritmo lento, pero hasta esto, tan básico, ha sido olvidado por la medicina, la ginecología y el sistema de atención sanitaria.

Importantly, maternal stress impacts fetal development. There are indirect routes—for example, stressed people consume less healthy diets and consume more substances of abuse. More directly, stress alters maternal blood pressure and immune defenses, which impact a fetus. Most important, stressed mothers secrete glucocorticoids, which enter fetal circulation and basically have the same bad consequences as in stressed infants and children. Glucocorticoids accomplish this through organizational effects on fetal brain construction and decreasing levels of growth factors, numbers of neurons and synapses, and so on. Just as prenatal testosterone exposure generates an adult brain that is more sensitive to environmental triggers of aggression, excessive prenatal glucocorticoid exposure produces an adult brain more sensitive to environmental triggers of depression and anxiety.

Amniotic fluid contains fetal urine (from swallowed amniotic fluid) and occasionally meconium: baby’s first feces, composed of mucus, bile, epithelial cells, shed fetal hair, and other amniotic detritus. The Wikipedia entry helpfully contrasts the tarry, olive-brown smear of meconium—photographed in a tiny disposable diaper—with the similarly posed yellowish excretion of a breast-fed newborn, both with an option for viewing in the magnified resolution of 1,280 × 528 pixels.

I lay down on one of [the rocks] in the fetal position. When I awoke it was after one a.m. and the tide was rising higher. My body was coated in salt and ocean foam. I felt like I was part of the rock and part of the ocean, and I wondered if this was how Sappho felt, even in her deepest desperation, part of the earth, like that desperation and longing or eternal cosmic want was something to be celebrated–something natural–holy even, or at least, not just something to be endured.

[God] tells the woman that she will now bring forth children in sorrow, and desire an unworthy, sometimes resentful man, who will in consequence lord her biological fate over her, permanently. What might this mean? It could just mean that God is a patriarchal tyrant, as politically motivated interpretations of the ancient story insist. I think it’s—merely descriptive. Merely. And here is why: As human beings evolved, the brains that eventually gave rise to self-consciousness expanded tremendously. This produced an evolutionary arms race between fetal head and female pelvis.56 The female graciously widened her hips, almost to the point where running would no longer be possible. The baby, for his part, allowed himself to be born more than a year early, compared to other mammals of his size, and evolved a semi-collapsible head.57 This was and is a painful adjustment for both. The essentially fetal baby is almost completely dependent on his mother for everything during that first year. The programmability of his massive brain means that he must be trained until he is eighteen (or thirty) before being pushed out of the nest. This is to say nothing of the woman’s consequential pain in childbirth, and high risk of death for mother and infant alike. This all means that women pay a high price for pregnancy and child-rearing, particularly in the early stages, and that one of the inevitable consequences is increased dependence upon the sometimes unreliable and always problematic good graces of men.

Again as during fetal development, synapses that underlie cognitive and other abilities stick around if they’re used but wither if they’re not. The systematic elimination of unused synapses, and thus unused circuits, presumably results in greater efficiency for the neural networks that are stimulated—the networks that support, in other words, behaviors in which the adolescent is actively engaged. Just as early childhood seems to be a time of exquisite sensitivity to the environment (remember the babies who dedicate auditory circuits only to the sounds of their native language, eliminating those for phonemes that they do not hear), so may adolescence. The teen years are, then, a second chance to consolidate circuits that are used and prune back those that are not—to hard-wire an ability to hit a curve ball, juggle numbers mentally, or turn musical notation into finger movements almost unconsciously. Says Giedd, “Teens have the power to determine their own brain development, to determine which connections survive and which don’t, [by] whether they do art, or music, or sports, or videogames.

Let’s say you are 31 and you undergo the cell-free fetal DNA screening. With a good result on this, the baby’s risk of having Down syndrome is around 1 in 100,000. The risk of miscarriage from the amniocentesis or CVS test is around 1 in 800. What you need to decide for yourself is whether having a baby with Down syndrome unexpectedly would be more than 125 times worse than having a miscarriage (that is, 100,000 divided by 800). If yes, then skip right to the invasive test—probably CVS given the timing. If no, then stick with the noninvasive screen.

The cognitive capacities of near-term fetuses are even more remarkable. For example, fetuses can distinguish between two pairs of nonsense syllables (“biba” versus “babi”). How do you know? Get this—Mom says “Biba, biba, biba” repeatedly while fetal heart rate is monitored. “Boring (or perhaps lulling),” thinks the fetus, and heart rate slows. Then Mom switches to “babi.” If the fetus doesn’t distinguish between the two, heart rate deceleration continues. But if the difference is noted—“Whoa, what happened?”—heart rate increases. Which is what DeCasper reported.61

As a waiter served their medium-rare steaks and, on multicolored rice, cooked into fetal positions, eight medium-large shrimp, Paul realized with some confusion that he might have overreacted. Staring at the herbed butter, flecked and large as a soap sample, on his steak, he was unsure what, if he had overreacted, had been the cause. It occurred to him that, in the past, in college, he would have later analyzed this, in bed, with eyes closed, studying the chronology of images—memories, he’d realized at some point, were images, which one could crudely arrange into slideshows or, with effort, sort of GIFs, maybe—but now, unless he wrote about it, storing the information where his brain couldn’t erase it, place it behind a toll, or inadvertently scramble its organization, or change it gradually, by increments smaller than he could discern, without his knowledge, so it became both lost and unrecognizable, he probably wouldn’t remember most of this in a few days and, after weeks or months, he wouldn’t know it had been forgotten, like a barn seen from inside a moving train that is later torn down, its wood carried elsewhere on trucks.

The Buried Bishop’s a gridlocked scrum, an all-you-can-eat of youth: ‘Stephen Hawking and the Dalai Lama, right; they posit a unified truth’; short denim skirts, Gap and Next shirts, Kurt Cobain cardigans, black Levi’s; ‘Did you see that oversexed pig by the loos, undressing me with his eyes?’; that song by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl booms in my diaphragm and knees; ‘Like, my only charity shop bargains were headlice, scabies, and fleas’; a fug of hairspray, sweat and Lynx, Chanel No. 5, and smoke; well-tended teeth with zero fillings, revealed by the so-so joke — ‘Have you heard the news about Schrodinger’s Cat? It died today; wait — it didn’t, did, didn’t, did…’; high-volume discourse on who’s the best Bond … Sartre, Bart Simpson, Barthes’s myths; ‘Make mine a double’; George Michael’s stubble; ‘Like, music expired with the Smiths’; and futures all starry; fetal think-tankers, judges, and bankers…power and money, like Pooh Bear and honey, stick fast — I don’t knock it, it’s me; and speaking of loins, ‘Has anyone told you you look like Demi Moore from Ghost?’; roses are red and violets are blue, I’ve a surplus of butter and Ness is warm toast.

Is it fun? Doin' all that detectin'? I always wanted to be a detective. I was one, for about a year, I liked the romance of it all. The suits, the hats, the dark alleys, the femme fetale, all that quick talkin' ... But I couldn't stop killin' folk. I mean, they'd hire me, I'd try to solve their mystery, nut halfway through I'd get bored and end up killin' them, and then the case'd be over and that'd be it. I solved one single murder that whole year, but I don't think that really counts, seein' as how I was the killer. I think that's kinda cheatin', in a way - Billy-Ray Sanguine.

of now, the main difference has been found in the HAR1 (human accelerated region 1), a segment of a recently discovered RNA gene. The RNA that is expressed in early development (HAR1F) is specific to the reelin-producing Cajal-Retzius cells in the brain. HAR1F comes to expression together with reelin in the seventeenth to nineteenth weeks of fetal development, a crucial stage in the formation of the six-layered cerebral cortex. The mutations in this human gene are probably over a million years old and could have played a crucial role in the emergence of modern humankind. Throughout our evolution, an enormous

First, can fetal or childhood exposure to synthetic glucocorticoids have lifelong, adverse effects? Glucocorticoids (such as hydrocortisone) are prescribed in vast amounts, because of their immunosuppressive or anti-inflammatory effects. During pregnancy, they are administered to women with certain endocrine disorders or who are at risk for delivering preterm. Heavy administration of them during pregnancy has been reported to result in children with smaller head circumferences, emotional and behavioral problems in childhood, and slowing of some developmental landmarks. Are these effects lifelong? No one knows.

Besides a fascinating story, the John/Joan/David Reimer case highlights several issues of prime importance about sex and gender that can be applied to questions surrounding sexual orientation. First, the body of evidence collected over several decades from adults who underwent unnecessary and wrong gender assignment and sex reassignment surgeries teaches us that trying to match gender to genitals should not be a standard. Gender and genitals do not necessarily align. Gender is an innate trait established within the fetal brain. Furthermore, the attempt to change what is natural and inborn in a person has devastating effects on lives.

I don’t know to what extent ignorance of science and mathematics contributed to the decline of ancient Athens, but I know that the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can’t manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data “highways,” abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer.

parents, your brother. You.” He tried to turn to say something and perhaps get a glimpse of his attacker. But the man held his head down. “Okay, I understand,” Wes said. “I’m done.” “Good. Now, I’m sorry for this.” He released Wes, then gave him another jolt. It went on for what seemed like forever, though it probably only lasted a few seconds. When it was over, he lay in a fetal position, groaning. A figure strode away into the darkness. At last he leaned against the wheel of his car and took in deep breaths of the chill night air. He calmed himself. He brushed away the gravel and bits of ice from his cheek. His muscles ached. He looked around but saw nobody

To the surprise of many sceptics, the results revealed the following associations: Full-fetal: People adopting this position tend to be anxious, emotional, indecisive, and overly sensitive to criticism. Dunkell interpreted the ‘closed’ nature of this position as indicative of a person who does not want to open themselves up to life. Semi-fetal: This position is associated with people who are well adjusted, conciliatory in nature, amenable to compromises, and unlikely to take extreme stances. Royal: This sleeping position is associated with being self-confident, open, expansive, and sensation-seeking. Prone: Those sleeping face down tend to show a tendency for rigidity and perfectionism. Dunkell thought that these sleepers disliked the unexpected, demand strong evidence for any assertion, and always arrive on time for meetings. The research also showed that those who have no preferred sleeping position have a strong need for being active, enjoy challenging work, and find it difficult to relax. However, please don’t be too upset or worried if your sleeping position suggests that you have a less-than-perfect personality. The associations between people’s sleeping positions and their personalities are fairly weak and many scientists would take them with a pinch of salt. I suspect that this is especially true of those researchers who tend to sleep in a prone position.

Okay,” I finally said. “Can we all agree that this is maybe the most screwed-up situation we’ve ever found ourselves in?” “Agreed,” they said in unison. “Awesome.” I gave a little nod. “And do either of you have any idea what we should do about it?” “Well, we can’t use magic,” Archer said. “And if we try to leave, we get eaten by Monster Fog,” Jenna added. “Right. So no plans at all, then?” Jenna frowned. “Other than rocking in the fetal position for a while?” “Yeah, I was thinking about taking one of those showers where you huddle in the corner fully clothed and cry,” Archer offered. I couldn’t help but snort with laughter. “Great. So we’ll all go have our mental breakdowns, and then we’ll somehow get ourselves out of this mess.” “I think our best bet is to lie low for a while,” Archer said. “Let Mrs. Casnoff think we’re all too shocked and awed to do anything. Maybe this assembly tonight will give us some answers.” “Answers,” I practically sighed. “About freaking time.” Jenna gave me a funny look. “Soph, are you…grinning?” I could feel my cheeks aching, so I knew that I was. “Look, you two have to admit: if we want to figure out just what the Casnoffs are plotting, this is pretty much the perfect place.” “My girl has a point,” Archer said, smiling at me. Now my cheeks didn’t just ache, they burned. Clearing her throat, Jenna said, “Okay, so we all go up to our rooms, then after the assembly tonight we can regroup and decide what to do next.” “Deal,” I said as Archer nodded. “Are we all going to high-five now?” Jenna asked after a pause. “No, but I can make up some kind of secret handshake if you want,” Archer said, and for a second, they smiled at each other. But just as quickly, the smile disappeared from Jenna’s face, and she said to me, “Let’s go. I want to see if our room is as freakified as the rest of this place.” “Good idea,” I said. Archer reached out and brushed his fingers over mine. “See you later, then?” he asked. His voice was casual, but my skin was hot where he touched me. “Definitely,” I answered, figuring that even a girl who has to stop evil witches from taking over the world could make time for kissage in there somewhere. He turned and walked away. As I watched him go, I could feel Jenna starting at me. “Fine,” she acknowledged with a dramatic roll of her eyes. “He’s a little dreamy.” I elbowed her gently in the side. “Thanks.” Jenna started to walk to the stairs. “You coming?” “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be right up. I just want to take a quick look around down here.” “Why, so you can be even more depressed?” Actually, I wanted to stay downstairs just a little longer to see if anyone else showed up. So far, I’d seen nearly everyone I remembered from last year at Hex Hall. Had Cal been dragged here, too? Technically he hadn’t been a student, but Mrs. Casnoff had used his powers a lot last year. Would she still want him here? To Jenna, I just said, “Yeah, you know me. I like poking bruises.” “Okay. Get your Nancy Drew on.

Nevertheless I’d like to end this chapter on a positive note about how research into how humans acquire language is leading to better informed, conscious parents. Though there has been a cultural misunderstanding that a baby’s brain is not developed enough to learn and comprehend language, nothing could be further from the truth. The acquisition of language plays a fundamental role in exercising an infant’s brain and shaping its organization, neural connectivity, and intelligence. Research on the fetal brain’s ability to acquire and download environmental experiences in the womb reveal that the nervous system’s sensory input mechanisms, such as hearing, develop long before the system’s motor outputs—in this case, coordinated muscular control needed for speech. Consequently, the brain’s potential to learn and understand language is not dependent on the infant’s ability to speak.

She thinks she’s fighting against lethargy. She does jumping jacks in the motel courtyard, calls her best friend in Juneau from the motel pay phone and anxiously tries to reminisce about their shitty high school band. They sing an old song together, and she feels almost normal. But increasingly she finds herself powerless to resist the warmth that spreads through her chest, the midday paralysis, the hunger for something slow and deep and unnameable. Some maid has drawn the blackout curtains. One light bulb dangles. The dark reminds Angie of packed earth, moisture. What she interprets as sprawling emotion is the Joshua tree. Here was its birth, in the sands of Black Rock Canyon. Here was its death, and its rebirth as a ghostly presence in the human. Couldn’t it perhaps Leap back into that older organism? The light bulb pulses in time with Angie’s headache. It acquires a fetal glow, otherworldly.

Beginning with maternal, fetal, and infant malnutrition, it’s hardly surprising that the enslaved were more susceptible than free people to most infirmities, including crib death, infant mortality of all kinds (including infanticide), death in childbirth, and injuries and deterioration to the mother from repeated childbirth, along with typhoid, cholera, smallpox, tetanus, worms, pellagra, scurvy, beriberi, kwashiorkor, rickets, diphtheria, pneumonia, tuberculosis, dental-related ailments, dysentery, bloody flux, and other bowel complaints. The health conditions of the enslaved were aggravated by overwork, accidents, and work-related illnesses such as “green tobacco sickness,” today known as nicotine poisoning, which plagued tobacco workers.22 The heavy work regimes they endured wore down their bodies and aged them prematurely, with childbirth-related fatalities limiting women’s life spans even more than the men’s.

But we were chumps and we knew it. As makers of sentences we were practically fetal, beneath notice, unlaunched, fooling around in our spare time or on somebody else’s dime. Nobody loved our sentences as we loved them, and so they congealed or grew sour on our tongues. We barely glanced at our wall-scribblings for fear of what a few weeks or even hours might expose in our infatuations. Our photocopied fortune slips we’d find in muddy clogs in storm drains, tangled with advertising flyers, unheeded. Our manuscripts? Those were unspeakable secrets, kept not only from the world but from each other. My pages were shameful, occluded everywhere with xxxxxx’s of regret. I scurried to read Clea’s manuscript every time she left the apartment but never confessed that I even knew it existed. Her title was “Those Young Rangers Thought Love Was a Scandal Like a Bald White Head.” Mine was “I Heard the Laughter of the Sidemen from Behind Their Instruments.

I know that the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can’t manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data “highways,” abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer. How can we affect national policy—or even make intelligent decisions in our own lives—if we don’t grasp the underlying issues? As I write, Congress is dissolving its own Office of Technology Assessment—the only organization specifically tasked to provide advice to the House and Senate on science and technology. Its competence and integrity over the years have been exemplary. Of the 535 members of the U.S. Congress, rarely in the twentieth century have as many as one percent had any significant background in science. The last scientifically literate President may have been Thomas Jefferson.* So how do Americans decide these matters? How do they instruct their representatives? Who in fact makes these decisions, and on what basis? —

We would also expect the more masculine-looking person to have higher levels of autism traits. High functioning autism (or Asperger’s) is characterised by a very strong ability to systematize (create and work out systems) but a very weak ability to empathise. Autistics are socially unskilled, obsessed with detail, and have little interest in other people. These characteristics are associated with high testosterone. Autistics are subject to elevated fetal steroidogenic activity, including elevated levels of testosterone, as evidenced by tests of their amniotic fluid (Baron-Cohen et al., 2015). Dawson and colleagues (2007) have shown that autism is associated with a distinct intelligence profile. Autistics score strongly on the Ravens test (which strongly tests systematizing) relative to scores on broader IQ tests, which include vocabulary tests, for example. They score on average 30 percentile points higher, and in some cases 70 percentile points higher, on the Ravens than they score on the Wechsler, which is a broader test. So,

Next week is Beltane,” she reminded him. “Do you suppose we will make it through the wedding this time?” “Not if Gideon says you cannot get out of this bed,” he countered sternly. “Absolutely not!” she burst out, making him wince and cover the ear she’d been too close to. She immediately regretted her thoughtlessness, making a sad sound before reaching to kiss the ear she had offended with quiet gentleness. Jacob extricated himself from her hold enough to allow himself to turn and face her. “Okay, explain what you meant,” he said gently. “I refuse to wait another six months. We are getting married on Beltane, come hell or . . . necromancers . . . or . . . the creature from the Black Lagoon. There is no way Corrine is going to be allowed to get married without me getting married, too. I refuse to listen to her calling me the family hussy for the rest of the year.” “What does it matter what she says?” Jacob sighed as he reached to touch the soft contours of her face. “You and I are bonded in a way that transcends marriage already. Is that not what is important?” “No. What’s important is the fact that I am going to murder the sister I love if she doesn’t quit. And she will not quit until I shut her up either with a marriage or a murder weapon. Understand?” Clearly, by his expression, Jacob did not understand. “Thank Destiny all I have is a brother,” he said dryly. “I have been inundated with people tied into knots over one sister or another for the past weeks.” “You mean Legna. Listen, it’s not her fault if everyone has their shorts in a twist because of who her Imprinted mate is! Frankly, I think she and Gideon make a fabulous couple. Granted, a little too gorgeously ‘King and Queen of the Prom’ perfect for human eyes to bear looking at for long, but fabulous just the same.” Jacob blinked in confusion as he tried to decipher his fiancée’s statement. Even after all these months, she still came out with unique phraseologies that totally escaped his more classic comprehension of the English language. But he had gotten used to just shrugging his confusion off, blaming it on the fact that English wasn’t his first, second, or third language, so it was to be expected. “Anyway,” she went on, “Noah and Hannah need to chill. You saw Legna when she came to visit yesterday. If a woman could glow, she was as good as radioactive.” She smiled sweetly at him. “That means,” she explained, “that she looks as brilliantly happy as you make me feel.” “I see,” he chuckled. “Thank you for the translation.” He reached his arms around her, drawing her body up to his as close as he could considering the small matter of a fetal obstacle. He kissed her inviting mouth until she was breathless and glowing herself. “I thought I would be kind to you,” she explained with a laugh against his mouth. “You, my love, are all heart.” “And you are all pervert. Jacob!” She laughed as she swatted one of his hands away from intimate places, only to be shanghaied by another. “What would Gideon say?” “He better not say anything, because if he did that would mean he was in here while you are naked. And that, little flower, would probably cost him his vocal chords in any event.” “Oh. Well . . . when you put it that way . . .

The 2D:4D ratio is so variable, and the sex difference so small, that you can’t determine someone’s sex by knowing it. But it does tell you something about the extent of fetal testosterone exposure. So what does the extent of exposure (as assessed by the ratio) predict about adult behavior? Men with more “masculine” 2D:4D ratios tend toward higher levels of aggression and math scores; more assertive personalities; higher rates of ADHD and autism (diseases with strong male biases); and decreased risk of depression and anxiety (disorders with a female skew). The faces and handwriting of such men are judged to be more “masculine.” Furthermore, some reports show a decreased likelihood of being gay. Women having a more “feminine” ratio have less chance of autism and more of anorexia (a female-biased disease). They’re less likely to be left-handed (a male-skewed trait). Moreover, they exhibit less athletic ability and more attraction to highly masculine faces. And they’re more likely to be straight or, if lesbian, more likely to take stereotypical female sexual roles.72

Abruptly, then, and very quickly, she went in the farthest and most anonymous-looking of the seven or eight enclosures-which, by luck, didn’t require a coin for entrance-closed the door behind her, and, with some little difficulty, manipulated the bolt to a locked position. Without any apparent regard to the suchness of her environment, she sat down. She brought her knees together very firmly, as if to make herself a smaller, more compact unit. Then she placed her hands, vertically, over her eyes and pressed the heels hard, as though to paralyze the optic nerve and drown all images into a voidlike black. Her extended fingers, though trembling or because they were trembling, looked oddly graceful and pretty. She held that tense, almost fetal position for a suspensory moment-then broke down. She cried for fully five minutes. She cried without trying to suppress any of the noisier manifestations of grief and confusion with all the convulsive throat sounds that a hysterical child makes when the breath is trying to get up through a partly closed epiglottis. And yet, when finally she stopped, she merely stopped without the painful, knifelike intakes of breath that usually follow a violent outburst-inburst. When she stopped, it was as though some momentous change of polarity had taken place inside her mind, one that had an immediate, pacifying effect on her body.

Eleven people have been killed as a result of violence targeted at abortion providers: four doctors, two clinic employees, a security guard, a police officer, a clinic escort, and two others. Anti-abortion extremists are considered a domestic terrorist threat by the U.S. Department of Justice. Yet violence is not the only threat to abortion clinics. In the past five years, politicians have passed more than 280 laws restricting access to abortion. In 2016, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that would have required every abortion clinic to have a surgical suite, and doctors to have admitting privileges at a local hospital in case of complications. For many clinics, these requirements were cost prohibitive and would have forced them to close. Also, since many abortion doctors fly in to do their work, they aren’t able to get admitting privileges at local hospitals. It is worth noting that less than 0.3 percent of women who have an abortion require hospitalization due to complications. In fact colonoscopies, liposuction, vasectomies…and childbirth—all of which are performed outside of surgical suites—have higher risks of death. In Indiana in 2016, Mike Pence signed a law to ban abortion based on fetal disability and required providers to give information about perinatal hospice—keeping the fetus in utero until it dies of natural causes. This same law required aborted fetuses to be cremated or given a formal burial even if the mother did not wish this to happen.

Sure. When a behavior occurs, we behavioral biologists ask, “Why did that behavior just happen?” And it turns out that that’s like asking a whole bunch of questions. Part of what we’re asking is, “What occurred in the brain of that individual one second ago?” But we’re also asking, “What were the sensory cues in the environment a minute ago that triggered those neurons?” And we’re also asking, “What did that person’s hormone levels this morning have to do with making him more or less sensitive to those sensory cues that then triggered those neurons?” And then you’re off and running to neuroplasticity—over the course of months, back to childhood, and back to the fetal environment (which turns out to be wildly influential in adult behavior). And then you’re back to genes. If you’re still asking, “Why did that behavior occur?” you’re also asking, “What sort of culture was this person raised in?” Which often winds up meaning, “What were this person’s ancestors doing a couple of hundred years ago, and what were the ecological influences on that?” And finally, you’re asking something about the millions of years of evolutionary pressures. So it’s not just the case that it’s important to look at these things at multiple levels. Ultimately they merge into the same. If you’re talking about the brain, you’re talking about the childhood experiences when the brain was assembled. If you’re talking about genes, you’re implicitly talking about their evolution. All of these are a confluence of influences on behavior that are all interconnected.

The expression "fee thulumaatin thalaathin," translated into English as "a threefold darkness," indicates three dark regions involved during the development of the embryo. These are: a) The darkness of the abdomen b) The darkness of the womb c) The darkness of the placenta As we have seen, modern biology has revealed that the embryological development of the baby takes place in the manner revealed in the verse, in three dark regions. Moreover, advances in the science of embryology show that these regions consist of three layers each. The lateral abdominal wall comprises three layers: the external oblique, the internal oblique, and transverses abdominis muscles.91 Similarly, the wall of the womb also consists of three layers: the epimetrium, the myometrium and the endometrium.92 Similarly again, the placenta surrounding the embryo also consists of three layers: the amnion (the internal membrane around the foetus), the chorion (the middle amnion layer) and the decidua (outer amnion layer.)93 It is also pointed out in this verse that a human being is created in the mother's womb in three distinct stages. Indeed, modern biology has also revealed that the baby's embryological development takes place in three distinct regions in the mother's womb. Today, in all the embryology textbooks studied in departments of medicine, this subject is taken as an element of basic knowledge. For instance, in Basic Human Embryology, a fundamental reference text in the field of embryology, this fact is stated as follows: The life in the uterus has three stages: pre-embryonic; first two and a half weeks, embryonic; until the end of the eight week, and fetal; from the eight week to labor.

Ei bine, testiculul fetal trebuie să se ocupe permanent de evoluția embrionului: o mică neatenție poate duce la un haos patologic sau la malformații. În primele opt sau nouă săptămâni de la concepere este nevoie de un efort susținut pentru conturarea genului masculin. Iar când spun „efort” mă refer la muncă istovitoare, la o adevărată luptă cu tendința naturii de a procrea femei. După cum au susținut biologi și psihologi de diferite orientări, bărbatul trebuie făurit, pe când femeia există de la sine. Ea apare pe lume prin efortul și cu binecuvântarea „mamei-natură”, mai precis: dacă structura cromozomială de bază își urmează cursul nestingherită, atunci în mod natural se va naște o femeie. Fără a se dori fatalist, acest start biologic prevestește un făgaș bifurcat, definitoriu pentru existența bărbatului: a) originea sa feminină și b) opoziția față de geneză pentru a-și defini masculinitatea.

estrogen is essential to the maturation and preservation of bones not only in women, as had been known, but also in men; that estrogen metabolism affects glucose metabolism and therefore the risk of diabetes; and that, contrary to dogma, estrogen is not essential to fetal survival. Fetal mice don’t need it, and

estrogen is essential to the maturation and preservation of bones not only in women, as had been known, but also in men; that estrogen metabolism affects glucose metabolism and therefore the risk of diabetes; and that, contrary to dogma, estrogen is not essential to fetal survival. Fetal mice don’t need it, and fetal humans don’t need it.

You are driving me crazy,” I wail. “Why don’t you care?” The last word—CARE—loses elasticity and flattens into another long wail. I am knees on the floor, shoulders on the floor, forehead on the floor. It is the fetal position. I get caught in a loop of feelings. I get louder and louder. I am groping about for the concept of NEGLECT. She is neglecting me. But I can’t find the words. I can’t catch my breath.

The spiral arteries support a large, Draculean placenta. The placenta must be large and rich to support the growth of the fetal brain. Brain tissue is insatiable. Pound for pound, it is ten times more expensive to maintain than any other tissue of the body. During the last three months of pregnancy, the growth of the fetal brain is so explosive that stoking it demands nearly three quarters of all the energy entering the baby through the umbilical cord. No wonder the cord is so fat, so much like a long sausage, and no wonder the expulsion of the meaty placenta after the birth of the baby is considered an event in itself, worthy of being classified as the third stage of labor (the first being the dilation of the cervix, the second the delivery of the infant). The baby’s brain must eat, and it eats blood.

Like a dog's whimper, Mr. Hauser sobs. His high-pitched crying makes my heart ache and my brain freeze. Maybe men don't have it easier after all. I have just seen another piece of what makes a man vulnerable.

He remained knotted there in fetal position, paralyzed, his fists covering his eyes, for a long time. No sound, no sight, only darkness and heat and the press of his knuckles on his eyelids.

One purpose of scientific racism is to identify an outsider in order to define one’s self. Another possibility is to maintain (even enjoy) one’s own difference without contempt for the categorized difference of the Othered. Literature is especially and obviously revelatory in exposing / contemplating the definition of self whether it condemns or supports the means by which it is acquired. How does one become a racist, a sexist? Since no one is born a racist and there is no fetal predisposition to sexism, one learns Othering not by lecture or instruction but by example.

I said, the baby seems to be totally fine. It's a miracle, obviously, and she'll be required to remain in the hospital for the duration of the pregnancy so we can monitor the fetal growth closely. But all signs seem positive so far." He reached out and patted Dallas's shoulder in a comforting way, but my friend seemed totally shell-shocked. Stunned.

Even if nothing were known of fetal hormonalization, cerebral lateraliza­tion, natural selection, or the behavior of infants, the failure of environmen­tal explanations of patriarchy would force the conclusion that male dominance is biologically based.

The next day, Trump toured Fauci’s lab, the NIH Vaccine Research Center, as part of the White House effort to showcase the president’s determination to speed up the creation of a vaccine. Fauci again reminded Trump that getting a vaccine in a year was wildly optimistic. At the end of the tour, Fauci and Azar drove with the president across Wisconsin Avenue from the NIH campus to the helipad at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where Marine One awaited to fly Trump back to the White House. “So how’s Francis Collins doing?” the president asked Azar, referring to the NIH director they had just said goodbye to. “He’s really helped us on the fetal tissue ban,” Azar said. He referred to Trump’s 2019 decision to dramatically cut government funding at NIH and elsewhere for medical research that relied on tissues of aborted fetuses. This was a move to please antiabortion conservatives, a key part of the president’s political base. Collins didn’t agree with the policy, Azar told Trump, but was “being very professional in implementing it.” Azar was surprised when Trump asked, “Is that fetal tissue issue going to slow down the vaccine and therapies?” When he learned the answer was yes, the president said he wanted them to reverse the ban, but that never happened.

Trained Obstetrician and Gynaecologist in Dubai Dr Elsa de Menezes Fernandes is a UK trained Obstetrician and Gynaecologist. She completed her basic training in Goa, India, graduating from Goa University in 1993. After Residency, she moved to the UK, where she worked as a Senior House Officer in London at the Homerton, Southend General, Royal London and St. Bartholomew’s Hospitals in Obstetrics and Gynaecology. She completed five years of Registrar and Senior Registrar training in Obstetrics and Gynaecology in London at The Whittington, University College, Hammersmith, Ealing and Lister Hospitals and Gynaecological Oncology at the Hammersmith and The Royal Marsden Hospitals. During her post-graduate training in London she completed Membership from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. In 2008 Dr Elsa moved to Dubai where she worked as a Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist at Mediclinic City Hospital until establishing her own clinic in Dubai Healthcare City in March 2015. She has over 20 years specialist experience. Dr Elsa has focused her clinical work on maternal medicine and successfully achieved the RCOG Maternal Medicine Special Skills Module. She has acquired a vast amount of experience working with high risk obstetric patients and has worked jointly with other specialists to treat patients who have complex medical problems during pregnancy. During her training she gained experience in Gynaecological Oncology from her time working at St Bartholomew’s, Hammersmith and The Royal Marsden Hospitals in London. Dr Elsa is experienced in both open and laparoscopic surgery and has considerable clinical and operative experience in performing abdominal and vaginal hysterectomies and myomectomies. She is also proficient in the technique of hysteroscopy, both diagnostic and operative for resection of fibroids and the endometrium. The birth of your baby, whether it is your first or a happy addition to your family, is always a very personal experience and Dr Elsa has built a reputation on providing an experience that is positive and warmly remembered. She supports women’s choices surrounding birth and defines her role in the management of labour and delivery as the clinician who endeavours to achieve safe motherhood. She is a great supporter of vaginal delivery. Dr Elsa’s work has been published in medical journals and she is a member of the British Maternal and Fetal Medicine Society. She was awarded CCT (on the Specialist Register) in the UK. Dr Elsa strives to continue her professional development and has participated in a wide variety of courses in specialist areas, including renal diseases in pregnancy and medical complications in pregnancy.

Research by Goldman in 2013 documented an elevenfold increase in fetal loss reports following the 2009–2010 pandemic flu season when pregnant women received two seasonal flu vaccines during pregnancy, and the H1N1 vaccine.

The Bible didn’t offer specific advice on the topic (abortion). Many evangelicals disapproved of “abortion-on-demand,” but not in the case of rape or incest, where fetal abnormalities were present, or when a woman’s life was at risk. In 1968, Christianity Today considered the question of therapeutic abortion—was it a blessing, or murder? They gave no definitive answer. As late as 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution urging states to expand access to abortion. But with the liberalization of abortion laws, and as abortion proponents began to frame the issue in terms of women controlling their reproduction, evangelicals started to reconsider their position. In 1973, Roe v. Wade—and the rising popularity of abortion in its wake—helped force the issue, but even then, evangelical mobilization was not immediate. Only in time, as abortion became more closely linked to feminism and the sexual revolution, did evangelicals begin to frame it not as a difficult moral choice, but rather as an assault on women’s God-given role, on the family, and on Christian America itself.

She was so alive that she moved slowly and drew her body into the fetal position. Grotesque as ever. That reluctance to give in, but that longing for the great embrace. She embraced herself longing for the sweet nothing. She was cursed and didn't know it. She clung to a thread of consciousness and mentally repeated over and over: I am, I am, I am. Who she was, was what she didn't know. She'd gone to seek in the very deep and black core of her self the breath of life that God gives us.

I noticed that the more severe TMS sufferers had early disconnects with their mothers— some, so overwhelmed by the next fear of separation that they found themselves curled up in the fetal position, unable to move or speak. They had reverted back to an earlier, preverbal state of brain development. Most everyone I communicated with who was suffering from chronic pain had admitted that they had experienced early abandonment fear, or rejection. So there is some form of residual panic in TMSers from infancy —childhood separation anxiety, causing a chronicity of anxiety— most likely mother’s absence due to her attention being directed toward younger siblings, or an infinite number of other reasons.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that it occurred to Republicans that they could lock in the religious vote by attaching themselves to the anti-choice movement. They abandoned the argument that abortion was an individual right and reframed the debate as one of the protection of fetal rights. The culture already treated women like vessels whose life purpose was the creation and carriage of babies. By prioritizing the welfare of fetuses, Republicans had turned women into second-class citizens and expendable ones at that.

An assortment of prenatal tests is available to identify physical defects in the fetus, chromosomal abnormalities such as Down syndrome, and genetic anomalies such as sickle-cell anemia. There are two general types of fetal tests: screening and diagnostic. Screening tests, including ultrasound and maternal blood tests, provide the information needed to determine whether diagnostic testing should be conducted. Diagnostic tests definitively show the absence or presence of a fetal abnormality.

much longer-lasting adverse effect of the pandemic: the fact that Americans who were in utero during the pandemic had, over the course of their lives, reduced educational attainment, higher rates of physical disability, and lower income relative to those who went through fetal development immediately before or after.119 Those born at the crests of the three waves also had higher lifetime risk from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.120 Similar impacts on fetal development have also been found for other countries, including Brazil, Italy, Norway, Sweden,121 Switzerland, and Taiwan.122 There is also some evidence that the Spanish flu eroded social trust in the countries most adversely affected.123

When he came back to the car he glanced wary to the backseat, but Austen had curled fetal at his approach, had curled like those bugs they used to call cannonballs that became tiny spheres when you touched them. When they were scared.

The placenta is not alive, and never will be. The woman doesn’t need it. It seems to me that, if a woman is a person, she has the right to remove an unnecessary organ from her body. Certainly if the placenta malfunctions, as in the case of preeclampsia, which can cause liver or kidney damage, it would seem that the woman should have every right to remove this needless organ that is affecting her health. Nobody makes a constitutional case over an appendectomy. If I seem flippant about the whole thing, it is because the legal argument that a fetus has a legal status on par with the woman to whom it is literally attached is illogical trash sprinkled with bad faith and misogyny. Fetal personhood amendments are the state writing a check it cannot cash, then forcing women to cover the bill against their will. It cannot be done in a “free” society. The Thirteenth Amendment flatly prohibits forced labor, and it doesn’t have an exception for labor that white men won’t do themselves but think is really important for others to do for society. When it comes to amending the Constitution, conservatives still haven’t figured out how to grant personhood rights to all of the born people. If you think it’s really important for fetuses to become people, then, by all means, make one yourself.

sperm and an egg meet, called fertilization, to make one cell called a zygote. That zygote doubles (divides in two) over and over to achieve 36 doublings (236 cells) over 270 days of pregnancy for a total of 68 billion cells at birth; that averages doubling about every 7.5 days. This growth happens in the lowest oxygen environment imaginable (the placenta delivers to the fetus a partial oxygen pressure of 30 millimeters of mercury (30 mm Hg), compared to the 100 mm Hg that the lungs deliver to adult cells). So how do fetal cells grow so fast with so little oxygen?

The silence that surrounds mom rage is filled with fear. This fear gets instilled in us through cultural messaging that tells us motherhood is just the best. And if anyone dare disagree? Shame! We worry if our shameful words hit the air, our monstrousness might be true. So many of us struggling with mom rage don't tell our partners. We are afraid our friends will think badly of us, or they won't relate. We are terrified that if we share how furious we've become since having babies, it will get twisted into "I hate being a mom," which will further twist into "I don't love my children." At the end of the a rage-filled day, we lie in bed curled in a fetal position, sobbing. We think of the softness of our babies' skin, the way our children have a dep knowing that our bodies are nests, and they snuggle in till everything's just right, like a cat turning circles before she settles down. Not loving our children? This couldn't be further from the truth. But the fear that someone might misunderstand takes our breath away. So we retreat - into our beds, our cars, our drinks, our screens, ourselves. We shut the windows. We lock the doors. We don't tell a soul.

She was just quietly teaching history when it happened. Woke up one morning to a president-elect she hadn’t voted for. This man thought women who miscarried should pay for funerals for the fetal tissue and thought a lab technician who accidentally dropped an embryo during in vitro transfer was quirky of manslaughter.

No fingers on his right hand. They cut them off. He was lying on the bed in a fetal position. He was charred."…When it comes to the brutality of Hamas terrorists, miracles are not part of the package, certainly not mercy.

were producing and using energy. Even my enormous size at birth—which medically fit the criteria for fetal macrosomia (literally “big-bodied baby”)

The moment her cheek touches my pillow, she lets out a purr-like sigh and curls into a fetal position. I tilt my head to the side, observing my little hacker. Asleep. In my bed. Tangled strands of jet-black hair partially cover her sweet face, so I reach and push them aside, and then just stare. Like some hypnotized fool.

If I believed a quarter of what’s written about me, about my husband, or about us, I’d spend my days in a fetal position, bawling my eyes out. I’d like to think most people understand that. You just have to stand strong through the storm and show them who you are unapologetically and so loudly that they can’t help but hear you, see you, know you.

She pulled into a fetal position, covered her head with the road atlas, and cried with a violence that shook the car.   Their

To recommend that fetuses having vaginal delivery receive analgesia or anesthesia establishes a dual standard of care that society is unlikely to embrace.21 Clinicians traditionally avoid any consideration of fetal analgesia or anesthesia in labor and delivery, because of potentially depressive effects on the newborn.

no direct answer about fetal pain will ever be possible. However, several compelling, indirect lines of evidence indicate that concern about possible perception of fetal pain is misplaced: no fetus can feel “pain” in the true sense during abortion. First, the neural pathways that carry sensations to the brain are not yet in place. Second, even if these pathways were connected, a fetus lacks the emotional context required for pain perception.

It’s not a major crisis that will typically cause a woman to melt down. Forces somehow rally to meet these big challenges when they come. It’s the little things, the drip-drip-drip of Chinese torture, the dozens of daily irritations that, over time, can send us straight into the fetal position crying for our mommy. Or God. Or chocolate. Or medication. Or all four, depending on the day

Debates similar to those about the fetus were once conducted about the personhood of women and girls. A woman was once viewed as incorporated into the “one flesh” of her husband’s person; she, too, was a form of bodily property. In all unjust patriarchal systems, lesser orders of human life are granted rights only when wanted, chosen, or invested with value by the powerful. As recent immigrants from “nonpersonhood,” feminists have traditionally fought for justice for both themselves and others who have their personhood threatened by the powerful. Rejecting male aggression and destruction, feminists seek alternative, peaceful, ecologically sensitive means to resolve conflicts. It is a chilling inconsistency to see pro-choice feminists demanding continued access to assembly-line, technological methods of fetal killing. It is a betrayal of feminism, which has built the struggle for justice on the bedrock of women’s empathy and nonviolence.

Women’s rights and liberation are linked with fetal rights. If a woman claims the right to decide by herself whether the fetus becomes a child or not, what does this do to paternal and communal responsibility? Why should men share responsibility for child support or child rearing if they cannot share in what is declared to be the woman’s sole decision? Furthermore, if explicit intentions and consciously accepted contracts are necessary for moral obligations, why should men be held responsible for what they do not voluntarily choose to happen? Abortion on demand, often advocated as a response to male irresponsibility, legitimates such irresponsibility.

Actually, we do have our Mengele, and his name is Kermit Gosnell. Since 1979, Gosnell ran an abortion clinic called the Women’s Medical Society in West Philadelphia. There he performed late-term abortions and partial-birth abortions, mostly on poor women. If by some mistake children were born alive, Gosnell killed them in a process he termed “ensuring fetal demise.” Gosnell’s preferred technique for abortion was to heavily drug the premature infants and then stick scissors into their necks and cut the spinal cord. Over a period of three decades, Gosnell killed hundreds if not thousands of children in this way, far more than Mengele killed during his two-year stint at Auschwitz.4 If Gosnell is our Mengele, we also have our Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and its name is Planned Parenthood.

This means that most of the births they have seen were to women on epidurals lying still during labor, waiting for it all to be over. Seeing this kind of birth over and over again causes a subconscious imprint on the mind, and many women develop enough fear of the pains of childbirth that they block the messages their bodies give them about other positions they might take in labor. Others may simply fear diverging from the norm. A woman in the first stage of labor may find it beneficial to try several upright positions: standing, perhaps leaning on a counter or tray table; slow dancing with her partner; sitting while leaning forward or propped up with pillows; squatting; or sitting in a rocking chair. Sometimes one position suffices, but laboring women usually like to change from one position to another as labor progresses. One of the most effective labors I ever witnessed was that of a first-time mother giving birth to a very large baby. She moved through the first part of labor very efficiently by belly-dancing while putting as much of her weight as possible on a long staff she was holding to steady herself. She then pushed her baby out while leaning on the bed in a kneeling position. A woman’s position during labor and birth may affect her ability to breastfeed in a couple of ways. Dr. Roberto Caldeyro-Barcia, an Uruguayan obstetrician, was one of the first to scientifically investigate the effects of maternal position on labor. In 1979 he published a study now regarded as a classic, which demonstrated that mothers in a “vertical” position had thirty-six percent shorter opening stages of labor than “horizontal” women; the “vertical” women also reported less pain than the “horizontals.” Walking helped labor progress as well, because it brought the pressure of the baby’s head against the cervix, helping it to thin and open. And the “vertical” mothers’ babies’ heads were less apt to be extremely molded just after birth, indicating a somewhat smoother passage through the mother’s birth canal. Equally important, the babies of women who gave birth in upright positions had less fetal distress at birth.5 These factors all increase the chances that a woman will have a good early breastfeeding experience. Dr.

Endometriosis Endometriosis is a painful condition in which bits of the endometrium (uterine lining) grow outside your uterus. These are called endometriosis lesions. Chocolate cysts The most common site for endometriosis lesions is the ovaries. This growth is referred to as an endometrioma or chocolate cyst. Endometriosis lesions also grow on Fallopian tubes, pelvic ligaments, and on the outside of your uterus, bowel, and bladder. Actually, they can grow anywhere—even inside your nose. Endometriosis lesions are sensitive to estrogen, so they swell and bleed with every menstrual cycle. Eventually, this causes pain, scar tissue, and heavy periods with large clots. Endometriosis can also impair fertility. What Causes Endometriosis? How does endometrial tissue ends up outside the uterus? There are a couple of theories. One theory is that menstrual fluid enters the pelvis via retrograde flow through the Fallopian tubes. This is not likely to be the correct explanation because retrograde flow occurs in most women, yet only a few women develop endometriosis. A second theory is that the endometrial tissue is laid down before birth—during your own fetal development. The tissue then lies dormant until it is activated by your hormones at puberty. Whatever the original source of the endometriosis lesions, your immune system is a big part of the problem. Your immune system produces inflammatory cytokines and autoantibodies that inflame endometriosis lesions and promote their growth. Without that inflammation, you are unlikely to suffer the condition of endometriosis (although you may still have dormant endometriosis lesions in your pelvis). Researchers have come to view endometriosis not as a hormonal condition, but as an autoimmune disease.

Physicality’s a cage. And a liberation. The cells I’ll fill in, they’re magnificent, burgeoning with aliveness! I’m dialed into them like a station on a radio transmitting constantly. First faint and distant, but growing, amassing, volumizing the very idea of a person this body aims to harbor. Glowing like the universe, always growing. Each new cell increases my momentum, tightening the tether.

Miss Owens, why do we dissect fetal pigs?” Up close his comb over seemed to defy gravity. How much hairspray did he use? He cleared his throat, I quickly replied, “Because of the similarities to humans.” “Yes. Now, before we cut we study the specimen. What can you tell me about this pig, Miss Owens?” What could I tell him about the pig? Seriously? He was little, pink and soon to be removed of all his organs. It was a dismal fate, so I created a better one. “He was the smallest in his litter. His brothers and sisters climbed over him to

get to their mama’s milk. They called him piglet five, but he thought of himself as Peter. He had dreams to father hundreds of piglets, to live his life slopping around in the mud and to die fat and happy. Life had other plans. They came at night…” “Miss Owens!” And the story was just getting good. “It’s a fetal pig. It was never born.

Now, before we cut we study the specimen. What can you tell me about this pig, Miss Owens?" What could I tell him about the pig? Seriously? He was little, pink and soon to be removed of all his organs. It was a dismal fate, so I created a better one. "He was the smallest in his litter. His brothers and sisters climbed over him to get to their mama's milk. They called him piglet five, but he thought of himself as Peter. He had dreams to father hundreds of piglets, to live his life slopping around in the mud and to die fat and happy. Life had other plans. They came at night ..." "Miss Owens!" And the story was just getting good. "It's a fetal pig. It was never born." "I know, but it seems wrong to dissect him without at least giving him a story. I mean we could raise a glass for his sacrifice, but you're not allowed to serve alcohol to minors." I leaned closer and added, "But I won't tell if you won't" What the hell was wrong with me? Did one slip slowly into madness or did it happen fast?

Mens formalwear is not conducive to such un-refined things as cowering in an office corner, or curling up in the fetal position on a desk.

Wilderness leaders need to understand that there are varying normal responses to a crisis. Until there is time to regroup, behaviors may seem unusual when, in truth, they should be expected. Some behaviors that may emerge in the face of a crisis include: 1. Regression. Many grown people revert to an earlier stage of development. The theory is that, since their parents used to care for them as children, someone else may care for them now if they behave in a childlike manner. In particular, tantrums used to be very effective. Tantrum-like or very dependent behavior is not unusual. 2. Depression. Closing into one’s inner world is another common response to crisis. This is where some people find the sources of strength to cope with an emergency. This is characterized as a shutdown effect: fetal positioning, slumped shoulders, downcast eyes, arms crossed over the chest, and unwillingness or difficulty in communicating. 3. Aggression. Some people lash out, physically or emotionally, at threats, including the vague threat of an emergency. High adrenaline levels may intensify the response, and so may the feelings of frustration, anger, and fear that commonly surround unexpected circumstances. This response is characterized by explosive body language, including swinging fists and jumping up and down. What one should do about the various behaviors that surface during a crisis depends somewhat on the individual circumstances. As a general rule, open communication, acknowledgement of the emotional impact of the event, and a healthy dose of patience and tolerance can go far during resolution of the situation. Some basic procedures to consider in crisis management might include the following: 1. Engage the patient in a calm, rational discussion. You can start the patient down the trail that leads through the crisis. 2. Identify the specific concerns about which the patient is stressed. You both need to be talking about the same problems. 3. Provide realistic and optimistic feedback. You can help the patient return to objective thinking. 4. Involve the patient in solving the problem. You can help the patient and/or the patient can help you choose and implement a plan of action. Someone who completely loses control needs time to settle down to become an asset to the situation. Breaking through to someone who has lost control can be a challenge. Try repetitive persistence, a technique developed for telephone interrogation by emergency services dispatchers. Remain calm, but firm. Choose a positive statement that includes the person’s name, such as, “Todd, we can help once you calm down.” (An example of a negative statement would be, “Todd, we can’t help unless you settle down.”) Persistently repeat the statement with the same words in the same tone of voice. The irresistible force (you) will eventually overwhelm the immovable object (the out-of-control person). Surprisingly few repetitions are usually needed to get through to the patient, as long as the tone of voice remains calm. Letting frustration or other emotions creep into the tone of voice, or changing the message, can ruin the entire effort. Over time, the overwhelming responses that generated the reaction may occasionally resurface. This is normal. Without being judgmental or impatient, regain control through repetitive persistence. A crisis may bring out a humorous side (sometimes appropriately, sometimes not) among the group. When you wish to release the intensity surrounding a situation or crisis, appropriate laughter is one of the best methods. It should also be noted that many people cope just fine with emergency situations and unexpected circumstances. They are a source of strength and an example of model behavior for the others.

Me curvo en posición fetal y estiro los brazos entre las piernas dobladas, como desperezándome hacia dentro.

I become familiar with cold hard grounds. On a Friday night, I drink three too many glasses of wine and I call Finn. She makes no black humor jokes. It is not an erotic mess anymore, like Sabine once told me it was. The conflict and torture is not a sign of intelligence anymore, as Finn once told me it was. It is ugly. We are exhausted. Gutted. You're too hard! she yells at me. Be soft, she orders. I'm confused, I tell her. I don't know what to grieve. I can't be in a relationship with anyone, she says, so if you have to grieve something, grieve that. She says this strongly. She means it. When we get off the phone I am in fetal position on the bathroom floor, holding my heart, while it literally aches.

I motion yes with my head. “I’m gay, Kendall.” And then there is silence—a very deep, impenetrable stillness. I want to curl into the fetal position and die right here in the middle of this world class museum

Una volta arrivato, il silenzio mise radici in lui e cominciò a diffondersi. Gli uscì dalla testa e lo avvolse tra le sue braccia melmose. Lo cullò al ritmo di un battito amico, fetale. Allungò le ventose dei suoi tentacoli furtivi centimetro dopo centimetro dentro il suo cranio, ripulendo come un aspirapolvere le vallette e le colline della memoria, sloggiando vecchie frasi, scotendole via dalla punta della lingua. Spogliò i pensieri delle parole necessarie a descriverli, lasciandoli nudi e spellati. Indicibili, intorpiditi. E quindi, agli occhi di un osservatore esterno, quasi assenti.

The fetal REM periods are something like "look here" messages given to the fetus, possibly resulting from these stimuli, thus training its brain for its opening appearance into the world of sights, sounds, and other sensations after birth.

is a bullshit business that produces a product that causes as much or more cirrhosis, car wrecks, fetal alcohol

The fetal balls kicked in protest and turned, but they did not stir.

An hour later we were pulling into the hospital parking lot. Sparkly and shiny from my hair and makeup job, I had to stop and bend over six times between the car and the front door of the hospital. I literally couldn’t take a step until each contraction ended. Within an hour after checking in, I was writhing on a hospital bed in all-encompassing pain and wishing once again that I’d gone ahead and moved to Chicago. It had become my default response when things got rough in my life: morning sickness? I should have moved to Chicago. Cow manure in my yard? Chicago would have been a better choice. Contractions less than a minute apart? Windy City, come and get me. Finally, I reached my breaking point. It’s an indescribable feeling, the throes of hard labor--that mind-numbing total body cramp whose origin you can’t even begin to wrap your head around. After trying to be strong and tough in front of Marlboro Man, I finally gave up and gripped the bedsheet and clenched my teeth. I groaned and moaned and pushed the nurse button and whimpered to Marlboro Man, “I can’t do this anymore.” When the nurse came into the room moments later, I begged her to put me out of my misery. My salvation arrived five minutes later in the form of an eight-inch needle, and when the medicine hit I nearly began to cry. The relief was indescribably sweet. I was so blissfully pain-free, I fell asleep. And when I woke up confused and disoriented an hour later, a nurse named Heidi was telling me it was time to push. Almost immediately, Dr. Oliver entered the room, fully scrubbed and wearing a mask. “Are you ready, Mama?” Marlboro Man asked, standing near my shoulders as the nurse draped my legs and adjusted the fetal monitor, which was strapped around my middle. I felt like I’d woken up in the middle of a party. But the weirdest party ever--one where the hostess was putting my feet in stirrups. I ordered Marlboro Man to remain north of my belly button as nurses scurried into place. I’d made it clear beforehand: I didn’t want him down there. I wanted him to continue to get to know me the old-fashioned way--and besides, that’s what we were paying the doctor for. “Go ahead and push once for me,” Dr. Oliver said. I did, but only hard enough to ensure that nothing accidental or embarrassing would slip out. I could think of no greater humiliation. “Okay, that’s not going to work at all,” Dr. Oliver scolded. I pushed again. “Ree,” Dr. Oliver said, looking up at me through the space between my legs. “You can do way better than that.” He’d watched me grow up in the ballet company in our town. He’d watched me contort and leap and spin in everything from The Nutcracker to Swan Lake to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He knew I had the fortitude to will a baby from my loins. That’s when Marlboro Man grabbed my hand, as if to impart to me, his sweaty and slightly weary wife, a measure of his strength and endurance. “Come on, honey,” he said. “You can do it.” A few tense moments later, our baby was born. Except it wasn’t a baby boy. It was a seven-pound, twenty-one-inch baby girl. It was the most important moment of my life. And more ways than one, it was a pivotal moment for Marlboro Man.

Any children born within the city are squeezed out with the standard nano package. It’s programmed in, parent to kid. First thing they do is carve a Security Identification Number into the fetal brain, upload that data to the system.

Night took the faces of this man and woman and peeled them off like a question formed inside a fetal darkness mouth.

Actually, we do have our Mengele, and his name is Kermit Gosnell. Since 1979, Gosnell ran an abortion clinic called the Women’s Medical Society in West Philadelphia. There he performed late-term abortions and partial-birth abortions, mostly on poor women. If by some mistake children were born alive, Gosnell killed them in a process he termed “ensuring fetal demise.” Gosnell’s preferred technique for abortion was to heavily drug the premature infants and then stick scissors into their necks and cut the spinal cord. Over a period of three decades, Gosnell killed hundreds if not thousands of children in this way, far more than Mengele killed during his two-year stint at Auschwitz.4

Does it seem far-fetched, and wrong, to compare the core institution of Nazi eugenics to Planned Parenthood? Not at all. In some respects, Planned Parenthood’s conduct is worse. While the organization poses as a benign promoter of “birth control,” its modus operandi was confirmed by a series of undercover videos showing officials willing to sell fetal body parts resulting from the organization’s nationwide abortion industry. The officials represented in the videos showed no moral revulsion or compunction about the practice.

In the early stages of fetal development, it is difficult to tell the difference between human and chimp embryos. And yet, as they grow, they reach a point where differences become apparent, and from that point on, the differences become more and more obvious. For instance, the choice of what comes first, the brain or the skull. In human beings, the priority is brain first, skull next, because the emphasis is on maximizing the size of the brain. Any time you look at a newborn human infant you can see that the skull is not yet fully closed around the top of the still-growing brain. With chimpanzees, the priority is reversed: skull first, then brain—probably for reasons that have to do with the harsher environment into which the chimp is born. The command from the chimp’s sequence is, “Fill up this empty space with as much brain as you can.” But there’s only so much brain you can get in there before you can’t fill it up anymore. At any rate, it seems to be more important for a chimp to be born with a hard head than a big brain. There’s a similar interplay between an endless list of things: The thumb and the fingers, skeletal posture, certain bones being fully formed before certain muscular developments, etc.

The first stage of labor is evaluated by the rate of change of cervical effacement, cervical dilatation, and descent of the fetal head.

You and I are not getting out of this alive. An exception will not be made in our case so that we’ll live forever. So what are you going to do with that? Are you going to curl up into a fetal position? Sure. It’s a reasonable existential response to that reality. Or what do you do? You make art, you make music, you have ideas, you come to people, you talk, you make films, you write, whatever it is. You know what it’s like to be at a party and to be talking to someone and looking beyond them. You’re not present. We’re human beings, not human doings. And I think that is the great challenge. That we’re not getting out of this alive.

Rage and despair shook her for minutes or hours. She was unaware of the passage of time. Finally spent, she retreated inward and collapsed onto the floor in a fetal position, the letter in shreds around her. The room had grown dark. Like a gentle snowfall, the cold mantle of an unbearable silence descended.

Only few people enjoy life in better way rest of the made just to facilitate those few.

Quite a few soldiers . . . had ended up spending some time wrapped around each other, alone in the night. Most often, it was just for the touch of another person and not in the pursuit of an entangling relationship. In fact, when it happened there was usually an unspoken covenant which existed between soldiers to just forget whatever had happened and move on, as many preferred not to talk about how you secretly needed to curl up in basically the fetal position, tucked away with another psychologically damaged human, deep in the bowels of your tin-can refuge from the deep black, just to get through another week of it all.