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Increasingly, we live with an illusion of control - control over nature, over our reproductive bodies, and over illness, damage and death through medical supremacy. This book punctures that illusion, dealing as it does with what happens when nature takes an unexpected course propelling babies into the world before their time, and it charts in minute detail the high emotional and physical toll of medical efforts to keep them alive.
These are stories of life and death - of babies desperately fighting for survival; of mothers and fathers engaging with their baby on the brink of death - helping him hold on for dear life at all costs, facing the prospect of sudden death or, for some, having to find resources in themselves to relinquish their hold so as to enable the non-viable infant to die. However, as the observer notes, despite its frequency in intensive care units, the death of a baby rips away the ‘thin veneer of rationality’ (p. 129) confronting us with ‘terrifying thoughts’.
The author's meticulous observations take place under extreme conditions for all concerned - when life in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) tests the premature and sick babies' fragile processes of integration with excruciating disruptive interventions. There for days, weeks, sometimes even months, mothers are unable to mother their incubated babies and fathers feel helpless. Staff operate under constant strain, routinely administering painful medical procedures and having to make spur-of-the-moment crucial decisions for tiny babies who deteriorate very rapidly. As described, the atmosphere can be one of high irritability as baby, parents and staff evacuate unbearable feelings. Defences tend to evolve under these traumatizing conditions, involving either denial of the reality of the baby's emotional experience or imposition of an adult construction upon it - to avoid seeing the infant's confused struggle for understanding given his/her immature cognitive apparatus (pp. 47-8). Observing in