TO: Those who like watching babies being born
FROM: A grandfatherly primitive type man who never indulged in
baby borning watching telling about the experience of a young
friend who watched his baby being born.
RE: The "Fantastic experience" Birthing rooms give baby borning
------------------------------------------ ----------------------------- 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
they could and show it to the men who would spit appreciately
and head off to the forest to throw sharp sticks at small animals.
If you had suggested to primitive men that they should actually
watch women having babies, they would have laughed at you and
probably tortured you for 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 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 such 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 down-wind from teenage boys. Then, young professional
couples began to realize that their lives were missing
something---a sense of stability, of companionship, or reponsibility
for another life.
So they got Labrador retrievers. A little later, they started having
babies again, mainly because of 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 those terms that
sound terrific, but that nobody really understands. Another one is
"ph balanced." At first, natural childbirth was popular only with the
hippie-type, granola oriented couples who lived in geodesic domes
and named their babies thing like Peace, Love, World
Understanding, Barrington- Schwartz.
The males, their brains badly corroded by drugs and organic food,
wrote smarmy 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
peck of meaningful fun.
At cocktail parties, you'd run into natural-childbirth converts who
would drone on for hours, giving you contraction-by-contraction
account of what went on in the delivery room.
They were worse than the Moonies, or people who tell you how
much they bought their homes for in 1973, and how much they're
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.
First, we had to go to 10 evening childbirth classes at Bethesda
Hospital. Before the classes, the hospital told us, mysteriously, to
bring two pillows.
This was the first humiliation, because no two of our pillowcases
matched, 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 Zanesville.
Anyway, we showed up for the first class, with about 15 other
couples consisting of women who were going to have to have
babies and men who were going to have to watch them. They all
had matching pillow cases.
In fact, some couples had obviously purchased tasteful
pillowcases especially for childbirth class; these were the Country
Club type 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 lit room and openly
discussing, among other things, the uterus.
Now I can remember at 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 in all honesty 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 were 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
spermatoza, 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.
eventually, however, one stumbles into the ovum, and the happy
couple parades down the fallopian tubes to the uterus.
In the uterus, the Miracle of Life begins, unless you believe the
Miracle of Life does not 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
little specialized 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 restarurants.
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 moviemakers film the whole thing. In color.
She was from California. Another time, the instructor announced,
in the tone of voice you might use to tell people that they had just
won free trips to the Bahamas, that we were going to see color
slides of a Caesarian section.
The first 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 or 20 drinks of water.
I do remember that at one point our instructor cheerfully observed
that there was "surprisingly little blood, really." She evidently felt
this was a 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 throught a series of what the medical community
laughingly refers to as "contractions"; if it was 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 older days, under President Eisenhower, doctors avoided
contraction problems 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 the kids were entering the fourth
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 the 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 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 pretend to
have contractions and the men squatted around with stopwatches
and pretend to time them.
The Country Club couples didn't care for this part. They were not
into squatting.
After a couple of classes, they started bringing little backgammon
sets and playing backgammon when they were supposed to be
practicing breathing. I imagine they used 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 actual 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 breath," 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 classroom floor, and she suddenly gets into this big snit
about stopwatches. Also, she almost completely lost her sense of
humor.
At one 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 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 is 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 placenta.
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, everthing 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, it's not a bad way to reproduce, although I understand
that some members of the flatworm family simply divide into
two.

Worth the read.

Nice read, it's really not a very pleasant experience for some, personally I would rather wait for the doctor to bring me the news than seeing how it happened

this is an epistle nah

This is HILARIOUS!!!! Op, thumps up.