poisoned before it could grow a face
her baby had been poisoned before it could grow a face or make any personal choices, it would have soon died of Substance-Withdrawal in the free clinic’s Pyrex incubator if it had emerged alive anyway
Context
The addiction rendered as an authorship of ruin that precedes the victim's existence. The child is "poisoned before it could grow a face or make any personal choices" — the Disease reaching a life that never got the chance to choose anything, and that would have been born already in Withdrawal. The clause fuses the theme's darkest possibilities: the substance-cage is heritable in the most literal way, transmitted in utero, and the responsibility the speaker is learning to carry is for a harm done to someone who had no self yet to protect. (The faceless, webbed, arachnodactylic body itself is disability-deformity's register — routed; landed here as addiction's transmitted toxification.)