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What does that mean?
Emily Ratajkowski photographed for Vogue in 2020
I asked, both times.
Dont worry, the first doctor said.
Nature knows what its doing.
Dont worry, the second doctor said, and then gave me forms to sign for chorionic villus sampling.
Neither of them actually answered my question.
Even before these moments, Id found pregnancyuneasy,unknowableterrain.
Here, at my core, was a region I had no access to.
A sealed black box on which everythinga whole lifesuddenly depended.
Were things all right, inside?
Not my doctors, it seemednot with the certainty I craved.
Id somehow turned my own body into a sort of restaging ofSchrodingers cat.
Both possibilities existed, and neither could be ruled out.
When my doctors didnt answer my questions to my satisfaction, I set off in search of answers elsewhere.
The numbers were objectively in our favor, yet failed to reassure me.
Every possible cause was quickly supplanted by the next, sometimes with wildly different ramifications.
Ive found, in speaking to friends whove been pregnant, that some version of this experience isnt uncommon.
Medicine hasnt fully recovered from this view because society hasnt.
I kept coming up against the limits, sometimes deliberately set, of what everyone knew.
Children, after all, are definitionally unprecedented.
Clare Beams is the author of the novelThe Garden,out next week.
