What's more, Evie was reluctant to be born, and her late birth killed her mother.
But the birth kills his wife - and the baby is a monstrosity, a tiny baby version of a super-annuated little old man.
In early childhood, Peterkiewicz was told by an old peasant woman that his birth was killing his mother.
Kolbert's article comes just weeks after the Journal of Medical Ethics published a paper whose authors argue that "'after-birth abortion' (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is".
So what's Mr Will really on about?Here's the oddity of the column: it begins with a discussion of a recent academic paper in which "the authors argue that what we call 'after-birth abortion' (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled".
He deals with his own egocentricity by being wryly amusing about it: his birth almost killed his mother, he comments, because even then his head was too big.
The only exceptions are where birth would kill the mother or render her, in a narrowly applied test that drips with misogyny, a "physical or mental wreck".
But when she died, more than 30 years after my birth – she killed herself after a depressive episode – and I checked, many years later, on her medical records, there it was in black and white.
I hope that the decline in the use of general anaesthetic during labour, particularly in the US, would give him some comfort – and perhaps that advances in medicine and pain relief have taken away some of the fear he saw in middle- and upper-class women who, unlike that lucky East End mother, knew that giving birth might kill them.
"Naturally my birth almost kills my mother, for my head is too big," he writes, and off we go – into the Irish diaspora in the inner-city Manchester of the 1960s, where packs of boys playfully stone rats to death, and "no one we know is on the electoral roll".
