Storking Term Analysis

The mother is nineteen, but she doesn’t feel that old. She feels no wiser, no more capable of dealing with this situation, than a little girl. When, she wonders, did she stop being a child? The law says it was when she turned eighteen, but the law doesn’t know her.

“Anyway, since it was legally ours, we paid for the funeral. It didn’t even have a name, and my parents couldn’t bear to give it one. It was just ‘Baby Lassiter,’ and even though no one had wanted it, the entire neighborhood came to the funeral. People were crying like it was their baby that had died...And that’s when I realized that the people who were crying—they were the ones who had passed that baby around. They were the ones, just like my own parents, who had a hand in killing it.”

“People shouldn’t do a lot of things,” says Connor. He knows they’re both right, but it doesn’t make a difference. In a perfect world mothers would all want their babies, and strangers would open up their homes to the unloved. In a perfect world everything would be either black or right, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn’t a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is.

There’s nothing keeping them tied to this baby anymore. They could stork it again first thing in the morning [...] And yet the thought makes Connor uncomfortable. They don’t owe this baby anything. It’s theirs by stupidity, not biology. He doesn’t want it, but he can’t stand the thought of someone getting the baby who wants it even less than he does.