(excerpt)

This part is true.

It is true because it is named and found. People have investigated and made inquiries. And inquires result in findings and findings can be documented and published and circulated and so people pay attention and they search for solutions.

Dystocia is the name given to any difficult childbirth or abnormal labour. During childbirth, when the anterior shoulders of the infant cannot pass below the mother’s pubic symphysis, when a baby’s shoulders are wider than the opening in a mother’s pelvic bone, it is called Shoulder Dystocia. Imagine an infant gasping for breath, trying to emerge into the world. Imagine watery panic. Contractions. Bone against bone, unyielding.

The quickest solution is to break the baby’s clavicle bones. Reach inside, first one side and then the other, thumb on tiny collarbone, hand grasping around the curve of shoulders, fingers on shoulder blades. And snap. Yes. Snap. This must be done with force and conviction. A clear fracture heals with fewer complications. We tell mothers that their babies will not remember that excruciating pain. We tell mothers that their children, their daughters, will cross a threshold into life with limp and broken shoulders. But the bones will bind themselves back together again and the breaks will set and arms will again stretch out strong, poised for running, running, and being alive with breath pulled deep into lungs.

It’s enough to make a person cry. With relief.

This next part is no less true.

And it hurts no less.

But there is nothing named or found and so nothing is documented or published. The sparseness of findings and inquiries has resulted in almost nothing and so nothing has been circulated and solutions are slippery and invisible.

No name is given to a child born to vanish. There is no diagnostic term for those who slip into this world born to disappear.

There are no solutions or diagrams or carefully recorded scientific data about the daughters who effortlessly take their first breath, who pull air into their lungs for years and years but for whom each breath is a breath closer to the moment when, on the shoulder of a highway, they will go missing.

“Soft Shouldered” appears in its entirety in PRISM 52:1.

Sarah de Leeuw is a creative writer and human geographer. A two-time recipient of a CBC Literary Prize for Creative Non-Fiction, she is the author of three books including Geographies of a Lover which, in 2013, won the Dorothy Livesay Award, a BC Book Prize granted annually to best book of poetry by a BC author. With a PhD in cultural-historical geography from Queen’s University, de Leeuw is an associate professor in the Northern Medical Program at UNBC and the Faculty of Medicine at UBC, where she teaches and undertakes research in the areas of medical humanities and health inequalities. Her literary and academic work appears widely in journals, anthologies and textbooks. She lives in Prince George, British Columbia.