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 "NaturalChildbirth"

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 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 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.