Tortie Tuesday: A Fetus Is Not a Baby

Babies of any species are so vulnerable that a part of my mind is now going "Don't ill-wish that one little kitten by telling people about it!" Well, I have no choice; a kitten, especially an only kitten, is such an irresistible excuse to spend more time at home revelling in pleasant weather and useful outdoor work. Readers needed to know. I'll be taking the laptop home more often in order to write on it, spending less time in town, falling behind on e-mail and Twitter. Call it a Kitten Vacation.

Samantha, who is now one year old, understands many words but does not trust humans enough to obey any words that don't suit her. She does know that "no," uttered loudly when she's trying to run around someone's feet, means that the human saying "no" would prefer that she not run past the said feet. She pauses. But if she really wants to go in through that door, she doesn't stop.

Samantha's official picture 

Samantha also likes to eat until she bulges. Samantha is also very close to Burr, who is supposed to be a Cat Sanctuary Graduate, but spent a lot of time in my home last winter. (Visiting cats don't usually find the cat door, but Burr was the one who showed it to Samantha.) I recommended neutering for Burr, because he has the horrible Manx gene, so I wasn't sure whether he had anything to do with Samantha's bulging last week. She didn't bulge all that much.

Nevertheless, on Friday, she darted into the office room--which was also the warm room, during the Big Freeze--and confirmed that the cage I've nicknamed her Safe Place, or the Samantha Box, was still there.

I locked her into it for the work day.

Any other Cat Sanctuary cat would have taken that as the punishment it was. Any of them except Bisquit would have glared and refused to cuddle up to me for up to an hour after being released. (Bisquit spent a lot of time in Cat Jail, and always expressed her feelings by making the burying gesture, but then tried to cuddle and make peace.) Samantha, however, really is carrying around a lot of fear, and has consistently reacted to being placed in Cat Jail as if she takes it to mean that at least I care enough not to leave her alone in the big mean world outdoors.

Not that she wants to be an indoor cat. Not that, when I'm home, she'll lie around in the office room purring and cuddling and napping the way Heather was beginning to do, even on cold or wet days. I don't think she intends to take a nap during the daytime until she's caught a big fat gray squirrel. But apparently she feels safe in the orchard when I'm in the house, and wants to be locked indoors when I'm in town. She'd stay in the yard when Heather was there, and will if Burr happens to be there; otherwise she runs after me crying "Don't leave me alone!"

Anyway, on Friday night she went out and scampered about as usual. On Saturday she ran into the cage again (I hadn't lowered the door) and curled right up on her blanket, although it wasn't cold. I left her there, with the door ajar, and got on with what I was doing.

Two hours later I heard tiny squeaks from the cage. Samantha is still a kitten, still too small to scramble in and out of a nest box Heather chose; nevertheless, beside her on the blanket were some other bodies so tiny they made Samantha's body look suddenly large.

So were they Burr's, or had Samantha had enough sense to mate with one of the other male Cat Sanctuary Graduates in the neighborhood, e.g. Tickle? I restrained my curiosity and waited for Samantha to tell me I could look, on Sunday morning. Of course Burr and Tickle, being first cousins, would have passed down much of the same DNA, so only the Manx gene would confirm that a kitten was Burr's...I hadn't nagged about it, but a tomcat has to be either extremely social, or neutered, to stay as close to one female for as long as Burr has trailed around after Samantha. It's not as if he'd ever been my pet or as if I'd offered him food this winter.

But the kittens? Eww. Two of them had been jammed into an empty food bowl. The bowl was dry, but the bodies were wet and cold. The one that looked exactly like Tickle was completely lifeless. The one whose face looked like Burr's, but who had an extra-long tail like Samantha's, waved a paw feebly when tipped out into the garbage.

So of course, bleedingheart that I am, I scooped it up again, laid it on a stack of newspapers near the heater, turned up the heater, and invited Samantha to see whether, together, we could get the poor little thing's heart and lungs going. I'd stroke its back until Samantha nudged my hand aside, nonverbally saying "I'll groom my own kitten; you can scratch my back," and then she'd get bored and I'd stroke the fetus again.

All newborn kittens look fetal. Even when the placental slime was cleaned off its fur, this one was clearly a fetus not a baby. Its umbilical cord hadn't dried up and snapped off naturally, which suggested that it might not have developed the ability to breathe air.

The difference between a fetus and a baby is that, although late-stage fetuses look very similar to adorable tiny babies of whatever species they are, they're not. Babies breathe air. Fetuses are still growths that are capable of surviving only hours after separation from their adult host, or mother. No matter how much love and hope you gush out over a fetus, it does not embody the miracle of new life; it's not going to live.

The kitten who looked the way Burr probably wanted to look would have been male, if it had lived. It kicked several times, took maybe half a dozen separate gulps of air, even uttered a tiny stifled squeak, but it never really began to breathe. Its heart never started pumping blood to warm its tiny paws, either.

Its head and body together stretched almost all the way across my hand. One of its little ears started to unfold from the side of its head before our eyes. It was a cute little thing. I loved it, and Samantha loved it, for more than an hour. But it never really was alive, nor meant to be alive. It was a fetus not a baby.

Samantha went back to her two living kittens. One had a tail like Irene's, complete but short, and a calico coat. One was black, with a long tail, but it had that "runt of the litter" look, despite being the next to largest in this litter. Runts are often baby animals that started gestating later than their litter mates, and may be weak or stunted for life. The black kitten was definitely alive and not much smaller than Minnie, the "miniature kitten" who grew up to be a big tough Queen Cat. Samantha and I wanted it to live, too, but it didn't.

So at the time of writing there's one more Patchnose kitten, an adorable little girlcat with a patchy nose--but even she could have spent another day or two gestating before being born, and she'll probably be spayed this fall if she lives through the summer.

Samantha? Not yet. Cats seem to have some voluntary control of when they give birth. Annie held on to her first litter too long; Sisawat aborted her first litter by trying to time their birth to help "mother" Heather's and Irene's younger kittens; Samantha didn't hold on to hers long enough. Cats live and learn about these things.

This weekend I, also, learned something, or re-learned something I'd known for a long time: A fetus is not a baby. A fetus looks enough like a baby to trigger a gush of parental hormones, but it never will be a baby, no matter how hard you try. Only inside its mother's body can a fetus become a baby. When you can see a fetus you're seeing a death.

This web site will never for a moment suggest that women should imagine that they've gained a "right" to exercise a rational "choice" when they allow men to start unwanted fetuses, and then risk their lives and their ability to have babies they want later by using dangerous pills or surgical procedures to get rid of those fetuses. Being abused and exploited is not a right. Liberation for either women or men, even if they're Catholic, means accepting that there are other things nature intended us to do when we want to "make love not babies." But some fetuses are so incapable of ever becoming babies that they up and abort themselves, and "pro-life" correspondents would sound a lot more intelligent, to me, if they'd stop trying to pretend that a fetus is a baby.

This book is about the left-wing spirituality that helped its author survive the horrors of spontaneous abortion. In humans, who have little control over the timing of birth, a baby may pop out two or even three months short of the normal period and grow up normal and healthy. Before that, it's only a fetus.