One baby? Fine. Twins? Surprise. Triplets? How nice...I think. Quadruplets? Gulp. Quintuplets? In the range of five babies and beyond, we enter a realm of fascinated horror, sublimated into sentimentality. We call the Guinness Book of World Records and the local TV news. If P.T. Barnum were here, we'd alert him; the circus loves biological anomalies, in the way that it cherishes those stunts in which eight clowns emerge from a Volkswagen.
But the intimate reality--what could be more intimate?--poses a sequence of haunting questions that ascend to the metaphysical. The womb is a very small apartment, and overcrowding creates...
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