How the Fencing Reflex Connects Life and Death - Issue 59: Connections
▻http://nautil.us/issue/59/connections/how-the-fencing-reflex-connects-life-and-death
By the seventh month of my pregnancy, I sometimes felt a stroking motion on the inside of my abdomen, a repeated arc of movement traced by a tiny limb.My daughter Lucy weighed 6 pounds when she was born two months later. My father’s side of the family often produces small babies. Too small to regulate her own body temperature, she needed to be held in order to sleep. She was “living on” me, the pediatrician said.Sometimes to free up my hands I would lay her along my thighs, the dip between them holding her snug. Her wrinkled arms and legs stayed drawn in to her chest, but then one arm and leg would extend, the arm reaching out in front of her and sweeping out to the side, taking in the expanse of the room until she lay twisted like an archer. The motion already was familiar to me: the (...)