Janetha Richards was terribly excited to be pregnant, but that wasn’t the reason she fainted.
She loved kids so much that she had signed on as a teacher’s aide a their local kindergarten, and she had always wanted her own. She had been trying to conceive for six years, but until seven weeks ago, she had gotten nothing from her efforts except a chlamydial infection from a cheating boyfriend. She had been thrilled to see the pink stripe on the home pregnancy test kit. But she was deliberate and more than a little superstitious, so she had waited to call for an obstetrician’s appointment for fear she would miscarry. After all, she’d had an episode of spotting a month after missing her period, and she’d had worsening cramps over the last three weeks. Then, too, she was 32, older than most of the first-time mothers in her neighborhood in south Chicago.
