Natural Childbirth

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 "Natural Childbirth"

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 begi

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 i

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 te

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.

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 a

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.