textfiles/sex/babyhave.hum

  Taken From an unknown source (if anyone does know, please feel free to give
the proper credit to the proper individual).

  Adapted to this format (That really just means typed-in) by Fred Hensley
Olympia WA


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

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  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.  Thay 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 a 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.
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