Ann Young wasn’t sure whether she would ever be a mother. She was 32 years old, married and completing a fellowship in paediatric emergency medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital – the final step in her 15 years of medical training. She was devoted to her work, and looking forward to becoming a doctor. In her free time, she loved rock climbing; she enjoyed the focus she felt while scaling rock faces. Young valued her autonomy, and wasn’t sure she was ready to give it up to have a child. “I don’t necessarily want control of everything in the world around me; I just want control of myself,” she told me.

But once Young, a devout Christian, started praying, she began questioning her resistance to motherhood. She came to believe that becoming a parent could, in part, help her deepen her relationship with God by helping her learn about service and sacrifice. She and her husband Alex started trying to conceive and, in August 2022, she became pregnant.

Up to that point, Young had believed that as long as she worked hard enough, she could achieve almost anything she wanted: “I want to be a doctor. All right. These are the 1,000 steps you have to do. And I will do all of them.” But that idea began to dissolve when she had a miscarriage at 11 weeks. Some things were out of her control after all. Then, in January 2023, she found a lump in her left breast.