“Anna, this is important. Whatever this is could be seeping through your skin. It could hurt the baby.” For a moment I was breathless with rage. I couldn’t believe he’d just said that, It could hurt the baby, as if I didn’t already know, as if I hadn’t spent every second of the last eight months worried that some small innocent thing I did would hurt her. For a moment I actually wanted to laugh. No—I didn’t want to laugh. I wanted to scream in his face. I wanted him to feel, for just a second, what it was like to have your body taken away from you, to be treated like a vessel, a thing.
