On the Limits of Hope in Cross-Racial Conception

There is a tendency, when discussing cross-racial conception in purely anatomical terms, to forget that the failed pregnancies represented in tables and case histories were wanted by someone.

I was reminded of this many years ago by a Human physician named Esten Vale and his wife, an Elf called Lethria. They had been married for nearly twenty years by the time I met them, which in Human terms made theirs a long union and in Elven terms hardly more than a beginning. They were both educated, sensible people. This is worth emphasising, because grief is too often described as though it were evidence of foolishness. They wanted a child.

They knew the literature. Esten had read my earlier work on reproductive incompatibility before writing to me, and Lethria had consulted two Elven healers, three Human obstetricians, and a Dwarven embryologist of considerable reputation. Every one of us told them the same thing: conception was possible, but no verified Human-Elven pregnancy had ever produced a viable child. The odds were not poor. There were no odds. They tried anyway.

Their first pregnancy ended early. The second lasted five months, and the third progressed far enough that Esten began building a cradle. I saw it once. He had made it himself, badly, which is not an unkind observation, since he was a physician and possessed no talent whatsoever for woodworking. One side was slightly higher than the other and the joints were unnecessarily reinforced with brass brackets. When I pointed this out, he told me that if the child complained, he would build another.

The child was stillborn, and I performed the examination at their request. There are occasions when a physician’s duty is merely to identify the mechanism by which hope has failed. I found what I expected to find: severe abnormalities of the circulatory system, incomplete development of several organs, and incompatible patterns of tissue differentiation which could not have sustained life independently. There was no single defect to correct. There was no intervention which had been missed. The pregnancy had not failed because of an error in care. I told them this, and it did not help.

Lethria asked me whether the child had suffered. I told her no, and I believe that was true. Esten asked whether anything could have been done differently. I told him no, and of that I was certain. Then he asked whether they might succeed if they tried again. I should like to say that I answered immediately. I did not.

There are facts which become no less true simply because speaking them aloud feels cruel. I eventually told him that another pregnancy would almost certainly end the same way and might end worse. Repeated cross-racial gestation carries risks to the mother which are not adequately represented by the word miscarriage, particularly when development continues into the later months. I advised them not to try again. They did.

The fourth pregnancy nearly killed Lethria. Development became grossly abnormal before the sixth month, and the pregnancy had to be ended surgically while Esten assisted until another physician ordered him from the room. Lethria survived. She was left unable to carry another pregnancy, which I confess I regarded at the time with a shameful degree of relief.

I visited them several weeks later, and the cradle was gone. They did not blame me. I almost wished they had. Instead, Lethria apologised for having ignored my advice, which remains among the most unpleasant apologies I have ever received. I told her, rather inadequately, that I had not been offended. She said, “I know.” There was nothing more useful to say.

Years later, I learned that they had taken in the orphaned daughter of one of Esten’s patients, by then nearly grown. Lethria wrote to me once to say that the girl had become a teacher and that Esten had rebuilt the cradle into a small bookcase because neither of them could bear to throw the wood away. I have retained that letter.

I include this account because the mythology surrounding half-blood children is not harmless merely because it is false. Stories create expectations. Expectations become hopes, and hope can become very difficult to abandon when enough people insist that somewhere, somehow, someone has succeeded before. No one has. I would prefer that this were otherwise, and it is not.