Natalie Angier - Woman: An Intimate Geography

At some point midway through my pregnancy, when I knew I was carrying a daughter, I began to think of myself as standing in a room with two facing mirrors, so that looking into one mirror you see the other mirror reflecting it, and you, off into something approaching an infinity of images. At twenty weeks' gestation, my girl held within her nine-ounce, banana-sized body, in a position spatially equivalent to where she floated in me, the tangled grapevines of my genomic future. Halfway through her fetal tenure, she already had all the eggs she would ever have, packed into ovaries no bigger than the letters ova you just passed. My daughter's eggs are silver points of potential energy, the light at the beginning of the tunnel, a near-life experience. Boys don't make sperm their proud "seed" until they reach puberty. But my daughter's sex cells, our seed, are already settled upon prenatally, the chromosomes sorted, the potsherds of her parents' histories packed into their little phospholipid baggies. Minimize