Who Is Trusted to Have a Child?
A few years ago, while I was completing my pediatrics residency, I spent a month working in the newborn nursery. Each day, our team gathered in a narrow corridor on the fourth floor of the county hospital and looked through a tall pane of glass into a room full of babies.
Nurses would clean and change them, and then we would do our exams and write our notes. When the babies cried, we would hold them until they quieted.
The room filled and emptied, babies coming in and out all day, their wheeled bassinets arranged in haphazard rows like shopping carts left out in an empty parking lot.
One day, on a slow morning with only one laboring mother on the board, we did our rounds with the attending pediatrician, decided who would do circumcisions, who was too jaundiced and needed to start phototherapy.
