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 girls, who are very fertile and can get pregnant merely by standing downwind from teenage boys.

Then, young professional couples began to realize 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 sounds 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-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 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.