Directed by: Matt Shakman
Written by: Russel Friend and Garrett Lerner
Emma Sloan (Anne Ramsay) is a celebrity baby photographer whose first pregnancy runs into complications. Dr. House strongly recommends the fetus be aborted in order to save the mother's life. But Dr. Cuddy takes extreme measures to ensure the survival of the baby.
This episode contains examples of the following tropes:
- Good Girls Avoid Abortion, displaced: Dr. Cuddy takes it upon herself to advocate for the fetus when the mother is too ill to say anything on the matter.
- Meaningful Name: At the end of the episode, you see Sloan with her infant son, and by reading her lips we learn that his name is "Greg"; after the doctor who helped save both their lives.
- Never Tell Me the Odds!, subverted: Dr. House says that in cases like Sloan's, the odds are 99 to 1 that both mother and child die. Dr. Cuddy asserts that the one case beats the odds is more important than the others.
- Swapped Roles: Cuddy and House does this without even realizing it (with Cuddy only giving a subtle lampshade towards the end), as House takes up the role of Cloudcuckoolander's Minder when he realizes that the best chance of the patient's survival is to terminate her pregnancy, while Cuddy goes to extreme lengths doing morally dubious things to make sure both survive (with her eventually succeeding). Even the last lines has House pulling the "you got lucky this time" card on Cuddy before walking away and leaving her alone in the lobby, where as the reverse usually happens in most other episodes before.
