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 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 our local suburban hospital.

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.