From the text:
I had been told all my life that this was a good and necessary thing The and Terran did together—a kind of birth. I had believed it until now. I knew birth was painful and bloody, no matter what. But this was something else, something worse. And I wasn’t ready to see it. Maybe I never would be. Yet I couldn’t not see it. Closing my eyes didn’t help.
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“Terrans should be protected from seeing.”
I didn’t like the sound of that—and I doubted that it was possible. “Not protected , I said. “Shown. Shown when we’re young kids, and shown more than once. Gatoi, no Terran ever sees a birth that goes right. All we see is N’Tlic—pain and terror and maybe death.”