Baby Boom

Baby boom. What baby boom? Fertility rates are down all over the globe. What if a young girl living in Nazareth had second thoughts about bringing a child into the world?

Her name is Aaliyah, meaning “high” or “exalted.”

It’s a perfect name, as you’ll soon see.

When Aaliyah was born, she weighed just 12 ounces, and fit into the palm of her mother’s hand. She arrived about four months early, and had been growing too slowly in her mother’s womb. When she entered the world, she was the second-smallest surviving baby ever to be born in Great Britain.

Before her delivery, doctors warned Aaliyah’s mother that her daughter had only a 10 percent chance of surviving. They recommended termination, but she and her husband said no. They had been trying to have a baby for more than 10 years. And while demographers and sociologists are always looking for signs of a baby boom, and while the last huge boom was shortly after World War II and those boomers will now begin turning 60 starting in — like — two weeks, 2006 (!), the parents of this little girl were desperate for their own little baby boom.

Against...