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They called them the Lost Generation: the generation of the Rising. The Lost included all those children who survived the Rising. A generation whittled by illness, suffering and violence and so many of them orphans. The first generation of children who had little to no memory of life before the Rising.
There were just over 360,000 babies born in the world per day, pre-Rising, approximately. Almost 11,000 of those births happened in the United States. With all the confusion and panic happening at the start of the Rising, no one thought much about childbirth, at first.
Maternity wards all over the country were buzzing with their usual activity. There may be a strange flu virus on the loose, but labor waited for no man or virus. Menstrual periods seemed to have no risk to the women experiencing them, so the hope was that maybe the blood associated with delivery would be the same.
Delivering a baby was always a messy affair. Before modern medicine, it was the most dangerous day in both a woman and child’s life. With the advent of antibiotics and c-sections and other interventions though, in developed countries, surviving childbirth was assumed. Even with survival though, there was blood, always. Mother’s skin would tear pushing the baby out, and then the placenta had to detach and deliver, all of which caused the most normal delivery to be filled with risk to the unamplified.
It didn’t take long to discover that unfortunately, the blood coming from tears in the skin and the placenta detaching from the uterus all were loaded with active Kellis-Amberlee (KA). What used to be the most normal and natural thing in the world was now almost guaranteed to kill you. There were a few mothers who survived a vaginal birth, but even fewer survived when those helping them give birth amplified.
Hospitals were already feared because of the likelihood of amplification in a place where people go to die, not to mention the blood inherent in wounds. When the Rising started, people avoided going to a hospital to deliver, which was just as catastrophic. The babies were too small to amplify, but unfortunately the mothers were not and if mother amplified at home before anyone could get the baby away, well those mothers would have been grateful for their bullets. A rare few mothers survived without amplifying, but no one was sure what was different about the survivors.
It became a huge priority to discover how to protect the infants and mothers and everyone around them, because if pregnancy was a death sentence to women, humans that survived the Rising had no hope for the future, they were just a coda playing out the final notes in the symphony that was existence.
C-sections at least took the risk of killing the birth attendants way down. They would kill the mother just prior to delivery which stopped blood circulation, cauterizing as they cut, decreasing the amount of blood that could infect others. Unfortunately, a dead mother would quickly mean a dead baby, even before the Rising, and getting the timing right was important. No matter what, it felt like murder, because to be successful they had to kill mom before amplification. That gave them the time and ability to restrain her properly and set up for delivery. Even with that, the infants still died sometimes, from overwhelming KA infection. It wasn’t a real solution, clearly.
Dr. Ann Kerry was the one who figured out a concoction of sedatives and hyperstimulated white blood cells could prevent amplification, if it was given during delivery. She was inspired by Group B strep infections, how they couldn’t rid the body of the pathogen, they just needed to tamp it down for a little while. But if they performed a c-section while the mixture was being actively infused, the chance of amplification for the mother was low.
They discovered the cocktail could be used post-exposure in other cases to slow conversion, but it wouldn’t stop it entirely. Luckily for the species, the serum didn’t have to be specific to the mother, if they kept it running for one hour before and after the surgery. It worked best for slowing conversion if one’s own white cells were used, but for pregnancy completion, the artificial form could be mass-produced. It was a breakthrough and ensured that humans would be able to reproduce and grow, instead of slowly dwindling to nothing.
But that took years to perfect. A lot of families were decimated in the meanwhile. The first year after the Rising, there were less than 500 infants worldwide that survived their birth. The second year was better, with many fewer people who had gotten pregnant during the Rising, before it was known just how bad it was to get pregnant. Those infants were far less likely to develop lethal KA, since mother’s primary infection was prior to pregnancy.
For the nearly three years that followed the Rising, birth rates became nearly non-existent, with the only pregnancies occurring by accident. Even with a miscarriage, if the mother was into the second trimester, she might amplify. It wasn’t until Dr. Kerry’s discovery that birth rates slowly started improving. Birth was still more dangerous than pre-rising, but it wasn’t a death sentence: humanity would survive.
The Little Losts were those babies born immediately post-rising, those whose whole families were destroyed, but they were still alive, against all odds. The babies who would become Shaun and Georgia Mason were born in year three, post-Rising.
A superstition had developed about those babies. There weren’t many of them, and they were viewed as almost a harbinger of bad luck. Their birth signaled the death of their parents and family. Plus, no one knew if/how prenatal exposure to KA would affect them. They were an unknown in a time where people were afraid of the unknown.