Natural Childbirth by Dave Barry
Gary Benson
Natural Childbirth - My Least Favorite Spectator Sport
by Dave Barry
Reprinted (without permission, naturally)
from THE PLAIN DEALER magazine, 8/2/81
Let's take 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 appreciatively 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 have 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 1970s, 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 girs, who are very fertile and can get pregnant merely by
standing downwind from teenage boys.
Then young professional couples began to realize that their lives were
missing something - a sense of stability, of companionship, of
responsibility for another life. So they got 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 those
terms that sound terrific but that nobody really understands. Another one is
"pH balanced".
At first, natural childbirth was popular only with hippie-type,
granola-oriented couples, who lived in geodesic domes and named their babies
things like Peace Love World Understanding Harrington-Schwarz. 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 a contraction-by-contraction account of what went
on in the delivery room. They were worse than Moonies, or people who tell
you how much they bought their houses for in 1973 and how much they're worth
today.
Before long, natural childbirth was everwhere 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 Bryn Mawr. *Bryn Mawr*, for God's sake.
First we had to go to 10 evening childbirth classes. 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 some
towns with stained, unmatched pillowcases and still feel dignified, but that
is not possible in Bryn Mawr.
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 class; these were the Main Line-type couples, wearing golf and
tennis apparel, who were planning to have wealthy babies. They sat together
through all the calsses, 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 a time, in
high school, when I would have *killed* for reliable information about 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 where babies generally spend their time before birth. She also spent
some time on the ovum, which is near the ovaries. What happens is that 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 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 organs it needs to
drool; by 10 weeks, it has the ability to cry in restaurants. In childbirth
class, they showed us these pictures of a fetus developing inside a uterus.
They didn't tell us how the 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 Caesarean section. The first slides showed her
cheerfully holding a baby. 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 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 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 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 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 several nurses and the person who
cleans up the delivery room.
The most important thing 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 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 out 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
Main Line 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 had a rough time in 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 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 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 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
humorous 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 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, this 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 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 eay to reproduce, although I
understand that some members of the flatworm family simply divide into two.
THE DAVE BARRY PARENTAL APTITUDE TEST
How do you feel about having partially digested food on your self and
virtually everything you own?
a) Fine b) No Problem c) Very Attractive
How much sleep do you need each night?
a) Less than one hour b) None c) Sleep makes me very irritable.
How much do you want to know about excretions?
a) A great deal b) Everything c) The more the better
Scoring: 0-10 You should have a baby immediately.
10-20 Go ahead and have a baby.
20-30 A baby would be very good for you to have.
--
From the ever smiling, .).
ever happy fingers of: V
Gary Benson + +
John Fluke Mfg. Co. ILLEGITIMI NON CARBORUNDUM
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