Editor's Note: Joshua M. Sharfstein was supposed to write an opinion piece for today. Instead, the Social Studies concentrator selfishly chose to work on his thesis. As he ran out of the Crimson building towards Widener--mumbling something about "not graduating"--a stack of papers fell out of his bag. We were able to reconstruct the following from his notes.

THE following thesis deals with the tragic problems of infant mortality and lack of access to prenatal care that continue to plague our society.

Our society--plagued as it is by tragic infant mortality and lack of access to prenatal care--is the subject of the following thesis.

Infant mortality, lack of access to prenatal care: two issues that comprise the subject of the following thesis.

Theses can be on many different topics. This particular thesis is about infant mortality and the lack of access to prenatal care.

Lack of access to prenatal care causes infant mortality. Infant mortality, in turn, causes me to write the following thesis.

A dead infant. A woman with no access to prenatal care. A thesis with no first sentence.

Infant mortality plagues the nation like a modern-day plague.

Unique among animal species, human offspring are vulnerable and dependent until

Billions and billions of years ago

What could be more tragic than the death of an infant before it reaches the age

Nothing could be more tragic than

It's hard to imagine anything more tragic than

Very few things are more tragic

PRENATAL care, as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, derives from the old Latin prenatus.