Because her sudden pregnancy doomed her—as she saw it—to diapers and daycares she couldn’t afford and the same drab job she already disliked, Abby asked for Marcia’s advice. At thirty months, Marcia was already the size of a glacier. She moved slowly and inexorably, lowering herself cranelike onto couches from which she might never extract herself.

“The law only says we can’t abort,” Marcia told her, hands fluttering like angry birds. “It says nothing about keeping it in.”

“But how,” Abby said, “do you keep it in?”

They were sunk into the couch in the office common room. Marcia’s ankles looked like bean bags, but her eyes were storms. “You just do,” she said. She tried to cross her legs. “I’ll carry to fifty months if I have to. I can’t have a child now.” Her voice rose on the word child, as if she were trying to find the right outrage at the law and the asshole men who passed it.

Abby couldn’t imagine fifty months. At a little more than nine weeks, she already woke at least once during the night needing to pee. In the city twilight at two a.m., Hart snoring open-mouthed beside her, traffic noises distant as a dream, she found herself rubbing her womb. She cocked her head as if she could hear her unborn child. She listed Pros: There’s a small human growing inside me. Cons: Everything else.

She looked around the apartment. Her bed folded into the wall and the bathroom opened off the kitchen. When Hart came home they had to step around each other. “It’s like a closet,” her father had said when she moved in, and she shut her eyes less at the remark than the reminder. In the mornings she went to work in an old warehouse-turned-office-space where she wrote greeting cards for barely more than minimum wage. She specialized in Sympathy, the saccharine sense of loss: Thinking Of You In This Difficult Time; May Your Tomorrow Be Brighter Than Your Today, phrases that insulated her from the world, the way her womb now insulated her unborn child.

• • • •

In her mid-twenties Abby had become an activist: the marches, the protests, the cleverly-worded signs. Keep Your Cold Dead Hands From Prying Into My Vagina. Uteruses Are People, Too. House Bill 77 had been in place for a few months, but she hadn’t met Hart yet—her sexual adventures after college involved batteries.

When she slept with Hart the first time, she asked if he had a condom. He raised up on one elbow and looked at her. He kept his head shaved to hide that he was going bald, something she didn’t understand. When he said condoms couldn’t be sold anymore, it took her a moment to remember why.

Within a year of House Bill 77, she was seeing pregnant people everywhere. There were more of them, and many refused to give birth. Abortions had been outlawed along with contraceptives, but Marcia had been right—the law only said they couldn’t abort. Her sister in Salisbury was at twelve months when she broke her water. A friend of a friend went to almost eighteen months before she felt secure enough to give birth. At night Abby lay with Hart in the small apartment and listened to the rain. She said she’d like a child someday. She waved a hand to indicate the distant future, a house in the suburbs with a manicured lawn and address painted on the curb. When she had sex with Hart he pulled out and sprayed her stomach. She dreamed that his semen was absorbed through the skin and she became pregnant anyway.

• • • •

And then she did.

She didn’t know right away, as some of her friends said they did. When her period didn’t come she wondered if, with the upheaval of pregnancy, periods might have gone wonky as well.

She took a test at lunch in the warehouse bathroom, staring at the heating vents hanging from the ceiling. There was always an echo in the building, and when she saw the plus sign she felt the echo in her head. She went home and crawled in bed. She could not let herself cry. Instead she came up with sympathy cards: Sorry Your Uterus Is Harboring A Fugitive. It’s Not For You To Decide What To Do With Your Body, So Give It All Over To God And Congress.

She thought the company could create a whole new line of Sympathy Cards for people who weren’t ready to give birth. They could even have anniversary cards: It’s Been Two Years Since You Got Pregnant And You Still Look Great. We Hope Your Child Is Happy Still Inside You.

• • • •

There were two women at work more pregnant than Abby. Jillian was at seven months, not having yet gone into Overtime. She leaned back when she walked. She kept her hand in the small of her back and went to the bathroom twice an hour. She brought hideous lunch combinations: sardines and peanut butter sandwich, Ramen noodles with maple syrup.

“You’re a walking cliché,” Abby said to her in the hallway.

“I can’t feel my toes,” Jillian said. “I want this to be over.”

“I take it you’re not waiting?” Abby leaned into Jillian’s rotten breath. Jillian was a year younger and had only been with the company a few months, but her husband had a hedge fund and a house in Hembstead—they could afford a kid.

“I’d have it now if I could,” Jillian said.

The other woman was Marcia. At thirty months, she had trouble getting through doorways. She couldn’t sit or stand for more than a few minutes at a stretch, and she was always eating: there was a bakery on the first floor and the smell of bread drifted through the heating vents and soaked into the old bricks.

Two days after Abby took the pregnancy test Marcia stopped at her cubical. Abby closed out the window where she’d been working on her new greeting card line. So far today she had only come up with: Your ankles are swollen and your boobs are too, and thanks to congress there’s nothing you can do. Out the window the rain fell like lead.

She felt Marcia standing behind her. She pretended to be working. It was mid-morning and the warehouse smelled of yeast.

“How long have you known?” Marcia said.

Overhead the lights flickered. It was too cold for thunder. Abby turned in her chair. “Known what?”

Marcia rolled her eyes. She looked down at her swollen womb. When Abby didn’t answer, Marcia stepped inside the cubicle. “It’s written all over you, for anyone who can read.”

• • • •

So she bought bigger bras. She quit drinking coffee. She started throwing up. Her doctor confirmed the pregnancy and told her she was required by law not to abort.

“I’ll need to see you once a month,” her doctor said.

Abby had been eating lunch with Marcia and Jillian, both of whom complained constantly: of sickness and sore backs, of not being able to sleep. The depth of Marcia’s rage—at the abortion law, at her husband who told her to have it, at the government who thought they could control people by reproductive proxy—was refreshing. Abby found hope in the complaining—it meant they were coping, that they could continue. She was afraid of everything, not sure she was strong enough for what was coming.

“Are the visits for the baby, or for me?” Abby asked the doctor. “You know, my mental health.”

The doctor, whose name was Eve, Abby remembered, smelled like KY jelly. Abby wondered how many ultra-sounds she had done. “They’re the same thing,” Eve said.

• • • •

She came home from work one Friday to find Hart there. She was six months pregnant. Already she looked like a battleship. She hit things with her extended womb. At night she lay awake thinking of the child inside her. Jillian and Marcia still complained, but when they forgot to stay furious, she could see them cradling the child inside.

“You have to see a psychiatrist,” Hart said. He was cutting a lampshade into the silhouettes of bodies. Hart was always doing things that made no sense to her.

“Is it that obvious?”

He put the lampshade down and picked up an envelope. “House Bill 99,” he said. “All pregnant women have to report for ‘prenatal counseling.’”

She had lowered herself onto the bed and didn’t know if she could get back up. “You read it?”

“It was addressed to me.”

“To you?”

“To me. About you. I don’t like it either.” He had picked up the lampshade again. The silhouettes, she could see, entwined in various sexual positions.

“Help me up,” she said, and he put down the lampshade with silhouettes in positions she could never perform now.

• • • •

She went to work the next day in a black mood made blacker still by the weather. Tiny flakes of hard snow spit out of a gray sky. The people on the road drove like maniacs. My mood, too, she thought, scowling in her side mirror.

At work she found Jillian and Marcia in a mood even blacker.

“They can’t,” Marcia was saying. She held a letter in her hand, waving it around as if it were a knife. “They can’t make me. I won’t go.”

In the office park across the street Abby had seen groups of people standing in the snow and waving letters at one another like they’d use them to burn the world.

“Psychiatrist?” she said. It hadn’t occurred to her that other pregnant people would be forced to see a shrink, too.

Marcia nodded. Jillian held hers up, too. “As if this wasn’t already bad enough,” Jillian said.

Marcia had been crying. Abby wondered what three years of pregnancy would be like, if you’d ever get used to it, then realized that was why the laws were forcing them to see a shrink. He’d say something about the welfare of the unborn, make vague threats of child endangerment. Or perhaps attack from a religious perspective, blessed are the children and all that. She realized the government hadn’t foreseen the response from pregnant people, but of course they wouldn’t have. They never thought that far in advance, or looked at anything from an angle other than their own.

“They can,” she said, “and they will.”

Jillian pointed at herself. She had gained fifty pounds. When her husband’s hedge fund had tanked, she decided to wait, and was thirteen months pregnant now. “Whatever they do can’t be worse than this.”

Marcia said, “They don’t want us pregnant. They don’t want us not pregnant. I think they want us with our feet in stirrups, spitting out babies or taking in dick.”

Abby spit coffee. In a moment all three were laughing, the black mood lifted for a moment. Then—of course, Abby thought—she felt the baby kick.

“What is it?” Marcia said.

“It’s moving.” She bit back tears.

“Probably wants out,” Jillian said.

• • • •

The psychiatrist’s name was Phelps. He worked out of a stucco and glass art deco arrangement near the hospital. Abby thought it looked like a dentist’s office.

The letter had indeed said she was required to report for prenatal counseling. House Bill 99, in an effort “to minimize the distress extended pregnancies had caused/was causing . . . required all pregnant people who had maintained their pregnancies for a period greater than six months . . . to see, for a period equal to the continued length of their pregnancy, a qualified government psychiatrist no less than twice a week.”

“Twice a fucking week?” she had said, shaking the letter at Hart, who was still cutting sexual silhouettes into the lampshade.

“They want to make pregnancy as inconvenient as possible,” he said. He finished cutting and put the lampshade back on the lamp. Outside, the Charlotte skyline was turning dark, the sun still reflected in the tops of the glass buildings downtown. The world, she thought, could be beautiful and ugly at the same time. She suspected that simple fact was the cause of all human concern.

“Pregnancy is inconvenient enough,” she said.

Now she parked in front of Dr. James D. Phelps’s office. The alcove outside smelled like cigarettes. Faint muzak—Toto’s “Africa” rendered almost unrecognizable by horns—drifted down from speakers mounted in the ceiling. She gave her name to the secretary—also pregnant—and decided not to sit. She was eight months now. She had thrown the letter in the trash, but a week later a second one had come, this one speaking of fines and sentences, so she had called only to find out there was a wait list.

“I may have had the child by then,” she said.

“We certainly hope so,” the man on the other end said.

• • • •

When she went in, Phelps was sitting behind his desk. There were no books in the room, and nothing on the desk but a small globe. She looked around for a couch.

“We don’t do that here, Mrs. Crane.”

“Miss,” she said. “And my last name isn’t Crane.”

Phelps looked like someone’s grandfather, but she couldn’t decide what kind of person would have him as a grandfather. His eyes were big and wet. His fingernails looked like square teeth.

“You’re partnered with Sheldon Crane, who goes by Hart after the famous writer.”

“Partnered,” she said. “We’re not married.” She bit back the anger she’d felt since receiving the letter, or since the laws were passed that made sex, and the outcomes of it, a state-sponsored affair. “Why am I here?”

Phelps put his elbows on the desk and steepled his hands. His wool sweater made her eyes sting. “We want to know if you’re planning on having the child. Or if you’re . . . considering other options.”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

“It’s not my business, Miss—” He raised an eyebrow but she refused to answer. “But there is the matter of national security.”

Abby didn’t think she’d heard him correctly. He was staring at her with his wet eyes. She tried twice to find her voice. “How is my vagina a matter of national security?”

“Your . . . parts are not a matter of national security, Ms. Crane. But the population is.”

She ignored that he’d called her Crane. “The population.”

Phelps unsteepled his hands. “The birth rate has dropped dramatically in the last seven years. We’re close to zero population growth.”

She was beginning to strongly dislike Dr. Phelps. “The world is overpopulated already.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But without a rising population, our economy could tank. Not enough taxpayers to fund the government. Our industries won’t have a new population of workers to replace the retired. In eighteen years we won’t have enough people to man the military.”

“Seems like you should have thought of that before the anti-abortion bill.”

“We might have been short-sighted, yes. But how could anyone foresee what women would do?”

“Did you ask any of them?”

• • • •

Hart was designing another lampshade when she got home. The silhouettes on this one were pregnant women. The apartment smelled of spray paint. All week he walked the streets looking for old furniture to refurbish, then sold lamps and ladder-back chairs to the uptown crowd for more money than she could imagine, though still not enough to move them from the cramped apartment. Not enough for health insurance or a college fund. Some nights they stayed up late listing things they wanted: a bigger kitchen, a bed that didn’t fold up.

Hart put his paints and scissors away. He hadn’t shaved his head in a week. “So how was it?”

She put her feet on the coffee table. “Apparently, my pregnancy is a matter of national security.”

“I’ve always thought so,” Hart said, handing her a jar of olives.

“He said there’s a woman in Lexington seven years pregnant. Since right before the law passed. He sees her twice a week and she knits the whole session. She’s made seventy-two sweaters since it started.”

Hart was now re-sewing the seams of a beanbag. Abby licked olive juice from her fingers. “I can’t even imagine that,” she said. She rubbed her swollen stomach. “Eight months and I want to die.”

“So you’re going to have it?” Hart said. He had stopped sewing and was looking at her.

“That’s what Phelps asked. That’s what everyone asks.” She threw an olive at him.

“So what did you say?”

“I told him to go suck a sock.”

“Poetic,” Hart said, sewing again. “Pros and cons. Go.”

“Pro,” Abby said. “I won’t be pregnant. Con: We can’t afford it.”

Hart sewed the last stitch then bit the thread. “We can always figure out a way to afford it.”

“It’s the principle of the thing now,” Abby said.

• • • •

On Monday she caught Jillian in the office kitchen. She was eyeing the coffee pot as if it had insulted her. When Abby walked in, she reached for it.

“I’ll have to pee fifty times today instead of only twenty, and he’ll be kicking me all afternoon from the caffeine, but I need something to even me out.”

“Bad night?” Abby said.

“Bad weekend. My psychiatrist is an asshole.”

It hadn’t occurred to Abby until that moment that other pregnant people might be forced to deal with assholes as well. She hated Phelps and his square fingernails, the way he smiled when he was judging her, how he started sentences with “Actually.” She wondered if all of them were assholes, if they’d been chosen because of their asshole-ness.

“Yours is too, isn’t he?” Jillian said.

Abby nodded. “What did yours say?”

Jillian was pouring sugar into her coffee. “Nothing,” she said. “It was hard to believe someone could talk so much and still not say anything.”

“Sounds like mine.”

Marcia came in, one hand resting on the curve of her womb. She was enormous, and seemed to be in great pain as she leaned against the counter. Abby wondered how big she would get if she kept going. “Mine is a woman.”

“A woman?” Jillian said. “Why in the world would a woman—”

“I asked her that. She said she couldn’t stand the thought of children suffering.”

Jillian winced as her child kicked. “Did you ask her how much she would suffer being pregnant for three years?”

• • • •

Her next session Phelps asked if she wanted a boy or a girl.

“Triplets,” Abby said. “A boy, a girl, and an intersex child.”

That afternoon, Marcia had said she liked to think up ways to piss off her therapist. “I tell her I can’t give birth because I want to be a man,” Marcia had said. “Because I think she does, the way she sits and looks down her nose. Her chair is three inches higher than mine—that’s not an accident. She wants to be taller and bigger and she clears her throat a lot, so I tell her I want to be a man and she gets mad at me.”

Phelps didn’t get mad. He steepled his hands. “What are your hopes for your unborn child?”

Phelps said “unborn child” at least twenty times each session.

“I hope it’s a tiger,” she said.

“Do you mean you hope your child is fierce?”

“I mean I hope it’s a tiger. An actual tiger. A sabertooth preferably.”

Phelps exhaled through his nose. It was the other thing he did, besides steeple his hands. It was meant to show her how silly she was.

“Your humor is merely hiding the deep fear you feel,” he said. “You’re terrified: of being a mother, of the world outside the window, of being responsible for the life inside you.”

“I’m terrified,” she said, “Of men like you.”

“You’re terrified of having a child.”

“It’s the same thing,” she said. “Why don’t you see that?”

• • • •

At work the next morning, Marcia said she couldn’t continue.

“If I have to be pregnant one more day I might kill someone,” Marcia said.

“What happened?”

Marcia blew a strand of hair from her face. “I couldn’t get up from my chair at the therapist’s office. She had to help me.”

“You haven’t been able to get out of a chair for two years,” Jillian said. She had on heavy mascara this morning, which meant she hadn’t slept well. None of them had, for more than nine months. Phelps was right that they were terrified of everything. He just didn’t understand the reason.

“But she had to help me. Her. Mrs. Frankenstein. Who has taken their side. Who upholds their laws. She says ‘unborn child’ every two seconds, as if I might forget I have one inside me. She smirked when she helped me up, and I thought I was going to murder her. Then I rode the bus here because I’m too big to get in my car, and I wondered the whole time why I was doing this.” She pressed the heel of her hand hard against her cheekbone. “I just want to end this,” she said.

Jillian touched Marcia’s arm. “You won’t,” she said. “I’ve seen how you hold yourself when no one is watching.”

“I’m just trying not to pee,” Marcia said, and then they were laughing again. But Abby had seen the shine in Marcia’s eyes. She imagined Marcia sitting up late at night singing softly to her unborn child, forming bonds these fascists would never understand. She imagined Marcia carrying her child to four years, then five, growing larger but more serene, her songs longer and more complicated.

“My therapist is trying to shame me,” Jillian said. She pitched her voice deeper. “‘Imagine, Jillian, how constricted your unborn child must feel,’ he says. ‘Imagine wanting out and being unable to.’”

“I’d tell him to go get in a casket,” Marcia said.

Jillian shook her head. “I told him I already knew what it felt like.”

• • • •

Phelps watched her as if he had something else on his mind. She had settled into the sessions with something like resignation, the way she would a dentist’s appointment, or a pap smear, but his restlessness irritated her.

“What?” she said.

He couldn’t keep his hands steepled together. “I was wondering if you had made a decision?”

“We’ve talked about nothing else for the last month. Twice a week. That’s eight sessions. This is the ninth. You keep asking me what my decision is, and I keep telling you it’s none of your business.”

“But it is my business,” he said. “By my calculations, you’re now at 280 days. Which means—”

“Nothing. 280 is an average.”

Phelps kept talking as if he didn’t hear her. “Which means that as of tomorrow, you’ll be past due.”

“Again, it means nothing,” Abby said, but Phelps raised a hand.

“Being past due has consequences, Abby. It changes your status. Legally.”

“I’ve never heard anything about this.”

“You’ll be hearing about it tomorrow. The law is being signed now.”

Abby imagined a steamroller running over Phelps’ legs. Then his head. “What does that mean?” She felt her voice rising. “What does it mean?”

“We haven’t studied the long-term effects of extended pregnancies, but we have theories. I’ll be discussing those theories with you: over-development, increased dependency, difficulty in birth as well as difficulty in adjusting post-natal, both mother and child.”

Abby grabbed her purse. “Perhaps you should study the long-term effects of dumbass laws.”

She meant to storm out, but it took her a moment to get up from her chair. Phelps watched her with his wet eyes, and for a moment she thought he might actually care about her. She was at the door when he spoke.

“It means you’ll be considered in contempt of government law. You can be fined, jailed, your assets seized.”

“I don’t own any assets, you idiot. If I did, I’d have the child.”

• • • •

When news broke that night of Senate Bill 117, signed, sealed and delivered by senate officials to the president, who added his signature on national TV, the protests began on social media. By midnight, a dozen organizations—the NRDC, the ACLU, the last vestiges of Planned Parenthood—had announced protests in DC, and by eight the next morning had formed them all into a march on Congress.

By mid-morning, Abby had signed up for the march. She cornered Marcia and Jillian at lunch to make plans—they’d drive to DC that Friday night. Jillian had a friend with a house in Arlington. They’d take the metro into the city Saturday morning.

She stayed after work to print signs: Leggo My Eggos; I’d Call You a Cunt But You Don’t Have Depth or Warmth; If I Wanted Politics In My Vagina I’d Fuck a Senator.

When she got home, Hart was staring out the window. It was raining again. When he turned to look at her she saw the hurt on his face. She knew he was going to say that he had heard about the new law. And he would come to her and they would stand there before the window watching the rain. She’d put her head on his shoulder and he’d pull her close. But the awful thing about it, she thought, was that he would never really know what it felt like for another being to live inside him. Not Hart or Phelps or Marcia’s husband, none of whom could understand why anyone would want to keep it away from a world that would hurt it.

On Thursday, Phelps called her at work. “I hope I’m not interrupting you,” he said.

“We’re not scheduled until next week,” she said.

Phelps sounded like he was on speaker phone. “I know, Abby.” He said her name softly. “I wanted to warn you.”

Her hand went to her womb. The baby moved all the time now. Abby wondered how she would get through the rest of her life. “About what?”

“The march,” Phelps said. He paused. She imagined him sitting in his ridiculous sweater, looking out the window. “Don’t go.”

She wondered how he knew, then remembered telling him of her protests in the early days of HB 77, the shouting and signs. “How did protesting make you feel?” he had asked.

“Worthless,” she had answered. “Because no one listened.”

Now she listened to the silence from the speaker. She imagined his office: the sparse decor, the empty desk. She imagined him at home, eating alone in front of the TV.

“Why do you care?” she said now into the silence. She thought he was calling from home, not his office. Sitting in a dark den after pouring a drink. She waited again. She’d learned cis men would tell you what they really wanted if you waited long enough.

“In the fine print of the law,” Phelps said slowly, “protests are illegal.”

She switched the phone to her other ear. She would think later she had heard concern in his voice. “Pregnancy is now illegal, Phelps. As is having any control over your body. Forgive me if I’m not scared of a protest.”

“You should be.”

She hung up, but she would hear his voice come back to her, at the march, when it all began to go horribly wrong. Or right. She couldn’t be sure, not then, not for a few more years, but she had hope—that the end of an era was upon them, that the men who had passed these laws would no longer act like monsters, that the bonds of servitude into which people with uteruses had been shackled would fall away.

• • • •

They drove to Alexandria on Friday after work and arrived near midnight. Abby slept uncomfortably on a fold-out couch. She woke once to find Marcia standing over her, big as a moon.

“You can’t sleep either?” Abby said.

“I haven’t slept in three years,” she said.

They brewed tea neither drank. They watched the faint traffic out the window. Abby thought of her own mother, thin as a playing card, walking her three laps around the block every night. Her PTA presidency. Her small organic garden. She thought of women’s magazines with pictures of kid’s lunches—sandwiches with smiley faces, fruit arranged in the shape of an animal.

Such hope for the future.

• • • •

The pregnant people on the metro spoke quietly into their phones and stood because they could not sit. The weather had turned foul. Sleet predicted that evening. Gray clouds and a cold wind off the Potomac. Abby watched DC roll past the window, the expensive hotels and restaurants catering to cis men in gray suits. She wondered if she’d worn the right coat.

They eased into the march near the National Archives, making big slow sweeps around corners. The streets seethed like a stomach. Reporters from local stations stood miserable in the gray weather, their microphones held like flaccid penises. The protesters wore pink hats and pussy signs. They looked desperate with hope. Their signs rose and fell like stars: Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries. Zero Days Without a Reproductive Law. Think Outside My Box.

Marcia had to stop every block to rest. She smelled like baby powder and misery, but she kept saying she was glad they’d come, that surely someone would do something now. Around them, bullhorns barked and settled. At every street corner cops on horseback sat eyeing the crowd like they were convicts.

Most of the protesters were pregnant. One had to weigh 500 pounds. Another might have gone a thousand. Their faces were red from carrying such weight. They struggled through the streets while around them smaller protesters stood like steel beams.

They couldn’t get near the National Mall to hear the speakers. Abby’s ankles had swollen. She imagined Hart at home, refurbishing furniture in the hopes it would live again. She saw her mother, fully dressed at eleven at night, making lunches for school the next day. In the crowd were kids bundled miserably in their coats, holding their mothers’ hands.

At noon the speeches began, but they were too far away to make out the words. Marcia had to sit on the steps of some government building, where the people in charge made backroom deals limiting what everyone else could do. It was all too much for Abby. She was suddenly exhausted. Even her mother’s yellow pastel slacks and white sleeveless shirts exhausted her: how she would come home from work and start dinner, then sit up with Abby doing homework after she’d cleaned the kitchen. One night Abby came downstairs late and found her mother sitting at the kitchen island drinking wine. She held a cigarette in her hand, unlit—she had quit before Abby was born. She drank from her glass and set it down slowly, as if she didn’t have the strength to hold it.

Abby was still thinking of her mother when the microphone cut off. She had been listening to the rise and fall of the speech, the angry rants punctuated by hopeful rhythms. When the mic cut out, there came a squawk of feedback, then silence. She stood to see. In front of the Lincoln Memorial, a long line of policemen on horses had formed. By the reflecting pool, protesters were falling into an opposing line.

She was too far away to see the signal, but the policemen started forward and the women were pushed back. One woman fell into the reflecting pool. Another went down under the horses. A policeman tore down the podium; others had their nightsticks out.

When the first tear gas canister was fired, Abby knelt next to Marcia. She felt nauseous. Her child was kicking hard.

In a few moments the shouting reached her. The police were still pushing the protesters back, but they had nowhere to go. A loudspeaker said that all protestors would disperse or be arrested. More tear gas went up. She saw a cop swinging his nightstick. Her child kicked again. She felt the first contraction hit, tearing her breath from her body.

The second contraction came when the police began aiming the water cannons. Marcia was moaning beside her. Her water had broken, and a moment later—amidst the fear and confusion—Abby’s did as well. She felt the release on her legs, her panties suddenly wet. When she looked down, Marcia was leaning back on her elbows. Her legs were spread, and she had pulled down her pants.

“It’s happening,” she said.

Beside her, Jillian was easing herself to the concrete. “Mine, too.”

The signs hung overhead like prophecy. In her pain and sudden joy—at this burst of life amid all the anger and arrogance—Abby wondered how they didn’t see it. She felt her own child coming, the breath drawn out of her as the pain went through her in waves. She went to one knee beside Marcia and Jillian.

When she looked up again, protesters everywhere were easing themselves to the ground—on the lawn, in the streets, on the steps of the government buildings. Somehow, spaces were clearing in the gathering, where women began giving birth. She saw a sign amid all the shouting that said We Will Not Be Silenced, and her laugh turned into a wail that joined the thousands of others.

She was wondering how she could give birth, here, now, with no help, when she felt a hand on her forehead. A woman—silver-haired, with an aged, kindly face—knelt beside her and told her to relax. She felt hands pull her panties away and she heard people whispering to her, reminding her to keep drawing breath.

When her child came, she felt emptied for a moment. Then they handed him to her, wrapped in swaddling clothes. He smelled like spring. Like sunlight on the first warm day in forever.

When the women left her to help others, she saw Marcia holding her child—a son too, only much older—almost three. Already walking and talking. He was asking his mother if he could help her. He was asking if she was all right.

Other children were even older. One must have been six or seven, forehead streaked with blood from the birth. She saw another, four or five, helping his mother stand. She saw a hundred of them kneeling down, faces creased with concern. Still others—the younger ones—were crying, as if they didn’t understand why they’d been born into such confusion.

They were all boys. And Abby realized, with something like sinking into the sea, that they would grow up to be men. But she held her own son, and she hoped, lying there near the halls of government, that these men would be different. They had long soft fingers and high cheekbones. They had soft curly hair. They had been carried so long inside that surely some sympathy had been born into them. They would become people with conscience. Caring people, who would wear their birth like a badge—I was born in DC during the March, they would say. Yes, that one, where everything changed. They’d be marked all their lives, from this moment, as the reporters began relating what had happened here. They’d carry themselves differently, these men. They’d grow up to write the greatest greeting cards and congressional laws ever amended.