She was over twenty weeks old. This was the arbitrary cutoff point that made burial a necessity. If you were over twenty weeks old, you had to have a death certificate and you had to be buried. “Its the law”, he had been told by the senior resident. He knew her parents would have to give her a name. She couldn’t be buried as “Baby Girl Adams”. He did not want to know her name…not now, not ever.

He swallowed hard. His mouth felt like it was full of cotton balls. He took a handful of ice chips and shoved them into his mouth and chewed slowly. He took his ice-cold hand and rubbed the back of his neck. His mouth was cold now, like the steel, the room, the scalpel…the baby. He knew the specimen was for genetic testing and had to be sent off on all stillborns, even if the cause of death was known. He wondered if whoever wrote that policy had ever seen a dead infant. It seemed foolish to do the tests in this case with the bruise from the cord around the baby’s neck.

He touched the baby’s thigh and pinched it between two fingers hoping she would wake up. He wished this was a dream and Baby Girl Adams was really in her mother’s arms breastfeeding with her father looking on. The pinch made no mark. He took out the scalpel and forceps and took the specimen and placed it in the cup. He scrawled BABY GIRL ADAMS on the label and wrote THIGH TISSUE. He felt sick looking at the oval shaped gash the cut had made. He had made it. It frowned dully at him and there was no blood. He felt his mouth fill up with acrid saliva, and knowing what was coming hung his head over the sink and retched. His eyes ran with tears and he stifled the rising sob in his chest. He could not stop the tears though. Tears for the baby girl, for her parents, and for himself.

Five minutes passed that felt like an eternity. He covered the baby in the blanket, walked out of the room and turned off the light. He left the baby where she lay and called the hospital morgue. It was somebody else’s job to come and get the body just as it had been his to deliver her. He dropped the plastic specimen container in a receptacle at the desk marked “Pathology” after placing the container in a small white bag to conceal its contents.

He went over the mothers chart line by line to see if there was anything he could learn to keep this from happening to anyone else. He hoped there was something there, but found nothing out of the ordinary. He found it difficult to return to the care of his other laboring patients and asked the attending if he could go home. After some explanation, he was allowed to leave. The attending did his best to reassure him that the baby was lost through no ones fault. He walked out of the hospital through the same door he used to reach the parking lot each day, but he knew things would never be the same…