《新生儿》：内克尔医院里的六个月

The babies in the incubators weigh only about nine hundred grams and are no more than fifty centimetres long.

Their skin is almost transparent; even a piece of tape could tear it.

The French journalist Clémentine Goldszal saw these children in a hospital ward in Paris.

She went there because of her own son, Lucien.

When Lucien was born, she heard some very gentle sounds and even thought they were pleasant.

Only later did she learn that those sounds were actually signs of acute respiratory distress.

As a journalist, Goldszal wanted to understand one thing.

What does birth actually feel like for a child who has just come into this world?

She also wanted to know what these babies actually experience when doctors give them injections and insert tubes.

So she observed for six months in the neonatal ward of the Necker Hospital in Paris.

An independent assessment said this is the busiest neonatal ward in France, and seriously ill babies from all over the country are sent here.

The ward has a very detailed set of rules.

Every child is called by name, not by bed number.

When changing nappies, the nurses cover the incubator with a blanket so that no one can see.

But the same child is also injected and intubated, surrounded by roaring machines and harsh lights.

No one ever asked them whether they agreed to these things.

We often discuss whether a premature baby can survive, but we rarely ask what he actually goes through.

There are a few figures in the book that may illustrate the point.

Of babies born between twenty-seven and thirty-one weeks of pregnancy, ninety-four percent left hospital alive.

Of babies born at twenty-five weeks, fifty-nine percent survived.

And of the babies who survived, eighty-one percent were left without serious after-effects.

These observations eventually became a book, titled simply Newborn, two hundred and seventy-two pages long.

The English edition was translated by Natasha Lehrer and published by Pushkin Press.

The book also quotes a line from the writer Ballard.

He said that in the first few seconds after his daughter was born, she looked extremely old, and then suddenly became very young.

What a newborn actually feels, we still cannot really say even now.

The book says that new life appears in a place where originally there was nothing.

What medicine can do is its utmost to keep it from returning to that place where there was nothing.