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Dave Barry.

Natural Childbirth

TO SEE YOUR BABY BEING BORN

IS TO KNOW THE TRUE MEANING OF YUCKY

A father who was in the delivery room strips

the romanticism from "NaturalChildbirth"

Let's take just a quick look at the history of baby-having. For thousands of years, only women had babies. Primitive women would go off into primitive huts and groan and wail and sweat while other women hovered around. The primitive men stayed outside doing manly things, such as lifting heavy objects and spitting.

When the baby was born, the women would clean it up as best as they could and show it to the men, who would spit appreciatively and head off to the forest to throw sharp sticks at small animals. If you suggested to primitive men that they should actually watch women have babies, they would have laughed at you and probably tortured you for two three or four days. They were REAL men.

At the beginning of the 20th century, women started having babies in hospital rooms. Often males were present, but they were professional doctors who were paid large sums of money and wore masks. Normal civilian males continued to stay out of the baby-having area; they remained in waiting rooms reading old copies of Field and Stream, an activity that is less manly than lifting heavy objects but still reasonably manly.

What I'm getting at is that, for most of history, baby-having was mainly in the hands (so to speak) of women. Many fine people were born under this system. Charles Lindbergh, for example.

Things have changed, though, in the 1970's. The birth rate dropped sharply. Women started going to college and driving bulldozers and carrying briefcases and freely using words as "Debenture". They just didn't have time to have babies. For a while there, the only people having babies were unwed teenage girls, who are very fertile and can get pregnant merely by standing downwind from teenage boys.

Then, some professional couples began to realize that their lives were missing something – a sense of stability, of companionship, of responsibility for another life. So they began to get Labrador Retrievers. A little later, they started having babies again, mainly because of the tax advantages. These days you can't open your car door without hitting a pregnant woman. But there's a catch; women now expect men to watch them have babies. This is called "natural childbirth", which is one of these terms that sound terrific but that nobody really understands. Another of these terms is "ph balanced".

At first, natural childbirth was popular with hippie-type, granola oriented couples who lived in geodesic domes and named their babies things like "Peace Love Understanding Harrington-Schwartz. The males, their brains badly corroded by drugs and organic food, wrote swarmy articles about what a Meaningful Experience it is to see a "New Life Come Into the World". None of these articles mentioned the various other fluids and solids that come into the world with the New Life, so people got the impression that watching somebody have a baby was just a pack of meaningful fun. At cocktail parties, you'd run into natural-childbirth converts who would tell you how much they bought their houses for in 1973 and how much the houses are worth today.

Before long, natural childbirth was everywhere, like salad bars, and now perfectly innocent civilian males all over the country are required by federal law to watch females have babies. I recently had to watch my wife have a baby in our local suburban hospital.

First, we had to go to 10 evening childbirth classes at the hospital. Before the classes, the hospital told us, mysteriously, to bring two pillows. This was the first humiliation because no two of our pillowcases match and many have beer or cranberry juice stains. It may be possible to walk down the streets of Kuala Lumpur with stained, unmatched pillowcases and still feel dignified, but this is not possible in suburbia.

Anyway, we showed up for the first class, along with about 15 other couples consisting of women who were going to have babies and men who were going to have to watch them. They all had matching pillowcases. In fact, some couples had obviously purchased tasteful pillowcases especially for childbirth classes; these were the North Shore couples, wearing golf and tennis apparel, who were planning to have wealthy babies. They sat together through all the classes and eventually agreed to get together for brunch.

The classes consisted of sitting in a brightly lighted room and openly discussing, among other things, the uterus. How I can remember a time, in high school, when I would have killed for reliable information on the uterus. But having discussed it at length, having seen actual full-color diagrams, I must say that although I respect it a great deal as an organ, it has lost much of its charm.

Our childbirth class instructor was very big on the uterus because that's where babies generally spend their time before birth. She also spent some time on the ovum, which is near the ovaries. What happens is the ovum hangs around reading novels and eating chocolates until along comes this big crowd of spermatozoa, which are tiny, very stupid, one celled organisms. They're looking for the ovum, but most of them wouldn't know it if they fell over it. They swim around for days, trying to mate with the pancreas and whatever other organs they bump into. But eventually one stumbles into the ovum, and the happy couple parades down the fallopian tubes to the uterus.