Medicine: Births

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Before one dawn last week Mrs. Amelia Toner, 27, lay alone with her unborn baby in a rented Brooklyn bedroom. Her Irish husband had deserted her. Her other four children were in a Catholic orphan asylum on Staten Island. No companion stood by for her impending travail.

Labor pains roved through her. She cried for help. No one came. She tried to hold the baby back at least until daylight. But there could be no waiting. Mrs. Toner got out of bed and like solitary females of primitive times, bore her baby, an 8-lb. girl, without any assistance.

The woman rested a while, until she regained strength to expel the placenta. Then without pausing to tie the umbilical cord, she dressed herself, wrapped baby and placenta in a sheet, went forth for medical help. Two blocks away she found an incredulous policeman in a patrol car. He thought she was fooling until he looked at the baby. Then it was only a matter of minutes until Amelia Toner and daughter were in the best of civilized hospital care, both getting along well.

Fully as astounding as Mrs. Toner's fortitude was the precocity of Mildred Morgan, 11, of Kodak in the foothills of Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains. Last week the child, who weighs 82 lb., bore a healthy 7½-lb. baby whose father was a 14-year-old-boy. Only two dozen similar cases of young motherhood are known to have occured in this country.

In New York City one morning two years ago Mrs. Ida Weiner, a public school teacher, went to her classroom, taught her moppets as usual. When she had finished, she proceeded to a hospital, bore a child. For this performance the City's Board of Education, whose bylaws require a teacher to begin a two-year, payless furlough as soon as she is aware of pregnancy, last week fined Teacher Weiner $300. Teacher Weiner's reported defense: not until the baby arrived did she know that she was pregnant.

Following up his theory that stormy weather causes the conception of malformed babies such as hermaphrodites in Montana, hairlips in Maine (TIME, July 23), Dr. William Ferdinand Petersen of the University of Illinois analyzed the seasonal trend on Chicago conceptions and last week, in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, was able to state that almost every Chicago baby conceived in calm July, August and September was born perfect. But babies conceived in stormy March and April showed an abnormal percentage of abnormalities—imperfect spines, cleft palates, club feet.