private lives; When Lori Campbell's second pregnancy developed complications,_ she was faced with a painful decision.

Byline: Lori Campbell

Last year, when I was 43, I was convinced I was pregnant. I'd been pregnant four times before and knew the early signs well-_cramping, nausea, and a general feeling of queasy excitement. After a few days I went to the drugstore, bought a pregnancy test kit, ran home, and did the test right away. It was negative. Of course it was negative! My husband, Ian, had been traveling. We'd been using contraceptives. I was 43! What was I thinking?

What surprised me most was that by the time I returned home from the drugstore, not-yet-_taken pregnancy test clutched in a slightly sweaty palm, I already had feelings for the baby. No matter that nothing was confirmed; I had a hunch, and that was enough to put me into full-on _mother-to-be mode: protective yet giddy, serious yet over the moon. That single line-not _pregnant-took my breath away. I realized then how much we are hardwired to love our children at every stage of development: child, toddler, baby, fetus, embryo, zygote, and even potential zygote. I stared at the stick in my hand, at that pink "I was almost a baby, but I wasn't" stripe, and it thrust me back into the past-to the four times the test was actually positive.

Four chances at the ineffable thrill of giving life, four entirely different outcomes. My first pregnancy ended in an early miscarriage. The third resulted in a healthy baby boy, now eight years old, and the fourth a healthy baby girl who is now six. But the second pregnancy was quite unlike the others. It took my husband and me on a journey for which nothing in life had prepared us, one a person can only fully understand once they live through it.

In the summer of 1998, Ian and I rented a small house on the beach in Montauk, New York, and were happily, yet cautiously, preparing for our first child. We were cautious not just because my first pregnancy had ended in miscarriage but also because the miscarriage had floored us in a way neither of us expected. We were heartbroken. We'd gone from trying to get pregnant to ecstatically being pregnant to "Can we or can't we have a baby?" I was 34, and Ian was 38. We struggled to find the balance between accepting our loss and recapturing our optimism. A few months later I was pregnant again.

During my second pregnancy, it wasn't until we were past the "danger zone," at a full five months, that we started to breathe a little easier. We'd had an amniocentesis at sixteen weeks, the results were good, and we found out we were having a girl. We took turns feeling the baby kick and talking to her. We'd nicknamed her Bean. Then, in the middle of one hot August night, when I was about 22 weeks along, I suddenly woke up to the feeling of gushing fluid. I went to the bathroom, and the liquid kept flooding out of me. In my half-_awake stupor, the dreaded realization dawned on me: My water had broken. I woke Ian, and we drove straight to the emergency room. We were admitted into the hospital's maternity ward, where we would spend the next five days, during which time many doctors would examine me and the baby and guide us through an extraordinarily difficult _decision-one ultimately made not by a doctor but by a husband and wife, alone.

Viability. Anatomical threshold. NICU. Words that had little or no meaning to us a day earlier were now the focus of our lives. We were told I'd most likely go into labor within seven days, so we had to learn fast. First we met with the head of the hospital's _neonatal-_intensive-care unit (NICU). A straightforward man in his mid-50s, he did not sugarcoat the situation. The threshold of viability, or the earliest a fetus is potentially able to live outside the womb, is generally accepted to be around 25 weeks. (This statistic has remained relatively constant over the past decade.) Mostly because of the immaturity of their lungs, babies born before this time cannot survive, even with assistance. They are too small, often weighing between 500 and 650 grams, which is little more than a pound-the weight of a pint of water, four sticks of butter.