In the uterus, the "Miracle of Life" begins, unless you believe the Miracle of Life doesn't begin there, and if you think I'm going to get into that, you're crazy. Anyway, the ovum starts growing rapidly and dividing into lots of specialized little parts, not unlike the federal government. Within six weeks, it has developed all the organs it needs to drool; by 10 weeks, it has the ability to cry in restaurants. In childbirth class they showed us actual pictures of a fetus developing inside a uterus. They didn't tell us how these pictures were taken, but I suspect it involved a great deal of drinking.
We saw lots of pictures. One evening, we saw a movie of a woman we didn't even know having a baby. I am serious. Some woman actually let some movie-makers film the whole thing. In color. She was from California. And another time, the instructor announced, in the tone of voice you might use to tell people that they had just won a free trip to the Bahamas, that we were going to see color slides of a Caesarian section. The first slides showed a pregnant woman cheerfully entering a hospital. The last slides showed her cheerfully holding a baby. The middle slides showed how they got the baby out of the cheerful woman, but I can't give you a lot of detail here because I had to go out for 15 to 20 drinks of water. I do remember that at one point our instructor cheerfully observed that there was "suprisingly little blood, really". She evidently felt this was a real selling point.
When we weren't looking at pictures or discussing the uterus, we practiced breathing. This is where the pillows came in. What happens is that when the baby gets ready to leave the uterus, the woman goes through a series of what the medical community laughingly refers to as "contractions"; if it referred to them as "horrible pains that make you wonder why the hell you ever decided to get pregnant", people might stop having babies and the medical community would have to go into the major-appliance business.
In the old days, under President Eisenhower, doctors avoided the contraction problem by giving lots of drugs to women who were having babies. They'd knock them out during the delivery, and the women would wake up when their kids were entering the 4th grade. But the idea with natural childbirth is to try to avoid giving the woman a lot of drugs so she can share the first intimate moments after birth with the baby and father and the obstetrician and the pediatrician and the standby anesthesiologist and several nurses and the person who cleans the delivery room.
The key to avoiding drugs, according to natural childbirth people, is for the woman to breathe deeply. Really. The theory is that if she breathes deeply, she'll get all relaxed and won't notice that she's in a hospital delivery room wearing a truly perverted garment and having a baby. I'm not sure who came up with this theory. Whoever it was evidently believed that women have very small brains.
So, in childbirth classes, we spent a lot of time sprawled on these little mats with our pillows while the women pretended to have contractions and the men squatted around with stopwatches and pretended to time them. The North Shore couples didn't care for this part. They were not into squatting. After a couple of classes, they started to bring little backgammon sets and playing backgammon when they were supposed to be practicing breathing. I imagine they had a rough time in actual childbirth, unless they got the servants to have contractions for them.
Anyway, my wife and I traipsed along for months, breathing and timing, respectively. We had no problems whatsoever. We were a terrific team. We had a swell time. Really.
The actually delivery was slightly more difficult. I don't want to name names, but I held up my end. I had my stopwatch in good working order, and I told my wife to breathe. "Don't forget to breathe", I'd say, or "You should breathe, you know". She, on the other hand, was unusually cranky. For example, she didn't want me to use my stopwatch. Can you imagine? All that practice, all that squatting on the natural childbirth floor and she suddenly gets into this big snit about stopwatches. Also, she almost lost her sense of humor. At this point, I made an especially amusing remark and she tried to hit me. She usually has an excellent sense of humor.
Nonetheless, the baby came out all right, or at least all right for newborn babies, which is actually pretty awful unless you're a big fan of slime. I thought I had held up well for the whole thing when the doctor, who up to then had behaved like a perfectly rational person, said, "Would you like to see the placenta?". Now, let's face it. That's like asking, "Would
you like me to pour hot tar into your nostrils?". Nobody would like to see a placenta. If anything, it would be a form of punishment.
Jury:We find the defendant guilty of stealing from the old and crippled.
Judge:I sentence the defendant to look at three placentas.
But without waiting for an answer, the doctor held up the placenta, not unlike the way you might hold up a bowling trophy. I bet he wouldn't have tried that with people who have matching pillowcases.
The placenta aside, everything worked out fine. We ended up with an extremely healthy, organic, natural baby, who immediately demanded to be put back into the uterus.
All in all, I'd say it's not a bad way to reproduce, although I understand that some members of the flatworm family simply divide in two.