In researching this book, I drew upon sources including Eyal Press’s Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America; Izidor Ruckel’s Abandoned for Life; Rachael Stryker’s The Road to Evergreen: Adoption, Attachment Therapy, and the Promise of Family; the work of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project; and episode 521 of This American Life, “Bad Baby.” All My Sons was written by Arthur Miller and first performed at the Coronet Theatre in New York City in 1947. Grease was written by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey and first performed at Kingston Mines in Chicago in 1971. The quotations by D.W. Winnicott are taken from The Child, the Family, and the Outside World, published in 1964. The strange situation was devised and described by Mary Ainsworth in 1970. The photograph that Lauren sees on television is “Untitled (Buffalo)” (1988–89), by David Wojnarowicz.
Thanks to Sarah Stein, Alicia Tan, Claudia Ballard, and Jessie Chasan-Taber for their faith in this project; Jynne Dilling and Louie Saletan for providing me with a place to write in the woods; Andrea Lynch, who helped me to broaden and deepen my own ideas about reproductive justice in conversations that spanned twenty years; Oana Marian for her translation work; Julia Turner and David Remnick for their encouragement and patience.
I am grateful to all of those who read this manuscript—in sections or in full, and in wildly varying stages of its progress—for their candor and expertise: Rumaan Alam, Thayer Anderson, Katherine Bonson, Callie Collins, Cris Cruz, Jesse Dorris, Liz Maynes-Aminzade, Siobhan Phillips, Darby Saxbe, Clare Sestanovich, and Katy Waldman. Ed Park made an exceedingly crucial suggestion for improving the book, and I owe him a great debt. I am likewise indebted to Carrie Frye, the most creative, thoughtful, and lucid reader a writer could ask for. Whatever may be worthwhile in this text, it is most likely due to Carrie.
This book is dedicated to the memories of two physicians who served the women and children of Western New York, Dr. Barnett A. Slepian (1946–1998) and Dr. Robert J. Patterson (1923–2016).