...And just down the hall.

To reach the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, they tell me at Information, go to the fourth floor, to Maternity, but then turn right.

Of course I've heard of the NICU before, but like any intensive care unit, you only focus on it when your loved ones require extraordinary care. And then it amazes you when you realize that every day, every night of your normal life, someone will be there.

On Labor Day, my sister's twin boys decided that nine months of pregnancy were excessive. Without warning, they cut their gestation to less than seven months. Actually, Colin did that; lan found himself along for the ride that culminated in a danger-fraught whoosh down the birth canal.

The NICU has glass windows, but the blinds are often drawn to spare onlookers the sight of certain procedures. It is a small, brightly lit room, packed with banks of technology, an efficient, serene staff in serviceable shoes, and distressed, angry, tiny humans. Next to the NICU is a waiting room with a nap-length couch, a TV, a water cooler, and an inspiring photo montage of babies who outgrew the need for this place. Unlike the well-baby nursery down the hall, this room is a place of serious, dark, anxious waiting. While the larger nursery in Maternity draws visits from casual well-wishers and even strangers, the NICU serves far more specific watchers. Here, everyone waiting is intimately involved with the patients.

Most of the waiting at NICU is for premature infants, like Colin and lan. Born well before they were expected to parents who thought they still had plenty of time to pick middle names and take the hospital tour, they survive their first days here. Cheated of their third trimester, they are thrust off schedule and into the dangerous uncertainty of life. For the new parent, daily, customary life has screeched to a dizzying halt. Fathers with thwarted protective instincts and mothers overflowing with new milk must simply wait. What preemies need most from all the medical advances is time: time to grow strong, and function unaided on the outside.

Lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Colin through the soundproof glass, between nurses and machines, I see a tiny, hairy creature with a head the size of an orange. His skin miraculously clings to bones without the help of any apparent fat or muscle. and somehow supports tubes and wires from feet, arms, stomach, heart, nose, mouth, lungs. He is naked. A blindfold protects his eyes from the jaundice lights, intensifying the image of newborn as hostage. Every bodily function that I take for granted is monitored. But small and unhappy as Colin is, everything is there: fingernails, eyelashes, nipples, scrotum, nostrils. It's not that anything is missing; it's just that, at twenty-six weeks or so, they are not quite ready. Within hours of birth, Colin can expertly guide his thumb past all entanglements into his mouth and satisfy his primal urge to suck. This to me appears magical, until I realize that he has been sucking his thumb for months, deep within my sister.

This realization takes me by the mental lapels and shakes me. As I gaze through the silence at this child/man, I reflect that while the hospital is now employing every human and medical resource it can muster to save his young life, a mere six weeks earlier it might have legally aborted him. This scares and astounds me.

I am not a rabid anti-abortionist: there was a time in my life when, but for a little luck, I might have been the grateful recipient of one. I have considered myself reluctantly prochoice, prochoice with a weak stomach. I wouldn't have one, but who am I to force other women to bear children? Besides, I'd rather not think about it.

But I am sorely troubled by these faces from the womb in the NICU. Twenty years ago my sister's babies would not have survived their premature birth. Twenty years from now, how much earlier will preemies be medically enabled to survive? Will the twenty-week deadline for abortion become a day or two in the transformation of nonviable plasma into someone's offspring? And will that be enough time for future parents to turn on the suppressed urge to nurture their children?

I fear that we have been kidding ourselves with talk of trimesters and viability. Babies, after all, are babies. It's just that sometimes they are in utero. Sometimes they are early. Sometimes they die in spite of our best efforts.

My nephews are going to be fine, thanks to the NICU. They will get chubby and rosy, and grow to be boys of ten and men of twenty. But their tumultuous arrival has forced me to question myself and a society that, depending on some square on a calendar, would just as easily kill them as it would accord them their dignity and human rights.

These vertiginous thoughts refuse to remain on the fourth floor. They accompany me down into the gift shop. They hinder my careful choice of a greeting card. They are not daunted by my gulps of bracing outdoor air. They are emphatically mine.

The boys' crescent-moon slivers of fingernails haunt me long after I am back on the street. Today is the day that I am no longer prochoice.

Valerie Schultz is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Midwifery Today, and Mothering.