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This chapter examines the definitions of prematurity over time and specifically explores how racial science has been used to animate the definitions and etiology, or causes, of premature birth. This chapter focuses on the birth stories of four women, who gave birth prematurely in different centuries, between the nineteenth century and the present, to shed light on the temporality of Black women’s birth outcomes. The birth stories, including one contained in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, an autobiographical narrative by Harriet Jacobs, highlight questions about the definition and etiology of prematurity. The stories also illustrate some of the clinical causes of premature birth and present the situations that women describe as evidence of medical racism.

Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917) signals the death of romantic myths of adoption and nation building. Rescued from a renegade Mountain community, Charity bears a name ironically referencing acts of child saving in nineteenth-century adoption narratives. Reflecting the novel’s World War I context, Charity’s is a refugee, then a rebel, as she copes first with adoption by and then with marriage to her adoptive father after a brief love affair leaves her pregnant. Charity’s decision to raise rather than abort or abandon her child anticipates twentieth-century issues facing birth mothers, just as her marked ethnicity positions the novel in a larger dialogue about nationhood, race, and eugenics. Charity improves the quality of her lineage and implicitly of the nation but loses her bid for autonomy.

The introduction sheds light on the crisis of premature birth among Black women. It lays out the theoretical terrain on which premature birth is generally understood and develops the rationale of linking the issue to past ideologies and practices of medical racism. Premature birth and medical racism are introduced through the birth story of a young African American woman who was a college student when she became pregnant and later gave birth to a daughter, born three months prematurely, who was admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Grounded in a Black feminist framework, which privileges Black women’s experiences as a site of knowledge production, the chapter describes the book’s theoretical foundation; its methodological approach; and its use of birth stories, interviews, ethnographic observations, and archival sources to understand Black women’s medical encounters.

Similarity across religious boundaries attracts many comparative theologians to the effort of their work. But what happens if the similarity is so striking that a doctrinal turf war erupts? Engaging the Chinese Taoist tradition, Bede Bidlack looks to the similar beginnings of two stories to ask, “What Child is This?” His chapter examines the birth narratives of Jesus Christ and Lord Lao, the sixth-century BCE author of the Daode jing, for clues to their roles as “saviors.” Instead of letting the comparison dissolve into a quarrel over competing truth claims––who is the real savior?–– the chapter allows the similarities to propel closer examination of what the texts claim about these divine children and the function of those claims within their original contexts. The result is a Christology that holds Jesus’ cosmic function in tension with his call for the temporal realm.

Chapter 1 describes the Karmapas’ multi-life tale and the construction of their narrative. It does this by outlining the life stories of the first two Karmapas and then describes how the second Karmapa, Karma Pakshi, Rangjung Dorje, and later storytellers retold their individuals’ tales as part of the grander Karmapa narrative. To contextualize this process, chapter 1 then looks at the broader tradition of Buddhist biography and the two primary genres that the Karmapa tradition employed to tell its tale: birth stories, or jātaka (Tib. skyes rabs), and liberation stories (rnam thar). It ends by looking more specifically at the most influential retellings of the early Karmapas’ tale and the texts in which their tale has been preserved.

The chapter begins with a brief history of lukewarm Indo-US relations during the Cold War and the reasons for the lack of depth. The chapter then traces the converging trends including the collapse of the Soviet Union, India’s neoliberalization, India’s 1998 nuclear tests, the Indian American diaspora, the rise of China and re-emergence of Russia that resulted in movement towards a Indo-US strategic embrace undergirded by a grand nuclear accommodation of India’s hitherto sanctioned nuclear programme culminating in the July 18, 2005 joint statement. Multiple narratives of the nuclear deal’s origins are explored and the more salient ones are highlighted. The chapter ends with a brief summary of the constructivist Science and Technology Studies (STS) approach’s key principles such as thick description, multidimensional narration and rejection of technological determinism.

Matthew’s Gospel builds on the portrait of Jesus and sin found in Mark, but adds a birth story to make it clear that Jesus will save his people from their sins. Matthew thus invokes the significance of Jesus’ death already in the birth story. Although Joseph seeks to divorce Mary because she is scandalously pregnant with Jesus before they are married, Matthew goes out of his way to assure the reader that God has worked in similar fashion before with other women heroes of the faith: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, the wife of Uriah (Bathsheba) each of whom gave birth in seemingly scandalous circumstances. But like these women, Mary is righteous in the eyes of God and she faithfully bears Jesus regardless of outward appearances. This motif of righteousness continues in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), where we find a Jesus who stresses the moral disposition of one’s heart rather than mere outward observance of the Jewish law. Sin originates from within. Like Mark, Matthew’s Jesus will die a sacrificial death for the forgiveness of sins.

This chapter describes how children begin to understand the meaning of donor conception to make sense of the hollow concept of a donor. It explores how children of different ages imagine the sperm donor. Sex education in schools and conversations with other children become factors in their understanding. As children invent the donor from the bits and pieces of information available, they also try to figure out which parts of themselves came from the donor; they thus invent the self. Siblings who live in the same home can help children figure out who the donor is and what he has contributed. During adolescence children use the donor to help in the processes of separation and self-assessment. The chapter considers the following questions: How do children go beyond a birth narrative to understand themselves? How do their parents help them understand that some aspects of the self might come from a stranger?