Born Too Soon

Born to 40-year-old Los Angeles Times East Coast correspondent Mehren ( Overcoming Infertility ), Emily was among an annual American crop of 275,000 pre-term babies. While the dramatic, often poignant story centers on the author's chemically induced conception of Emily, the six-month gestation and birth of the 1-lb., 11-oz. baby--and the infant's 53-day valiant but vain struggle to live--Mehren discusses in detail the medical technology to which, along with the exceptional skill of nurses, she credits the miraculous survival of many premature babies. However, she notes that hospital bureaucracy and what she denounces as technicians' insensitive treatment of the newborn (and parents) as laboratory experiments within a hermetic but crowded and noisy environment, impede bonding between child and powerless, stressed parents. Mehren's second pregnancy ran full-term and resulted in a healthy son. (June)