(Comment) – There is, of course, something a bit ridiculous to this whole scene: the “ideal” measurements for girls and boys at each month calculated down to the inch, the doctors with clipboards, the very concept of the most “scientific” baby. There is, too, something comical in the false confidence and the utter inadequacy of a score between one and a hundred to grab hold of even the smallest corner of the personhood of these babies—smiling and blinking and clutching at fingers—much less the personhood of all the babies not represented in those rosy, white rows.  

And yet there is also something unsettlingly familiar, something so human in the attempt. We want a world we can measure. We want a world we can master.  (Read More)