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 movie-makers film the whole thing. In color. She was from California. And another time, the instructor announced, in the tone of voice you might use to tell people that they had just won a free trip to the Bahamas, that we were going to see color slides of a Caesarian section. The first slides showed a pregnant woman cheerfully entering a hospital. 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 to 20 drinks of water. I do remember that at one point our instructor cheerfully observed that there was "suprisingly 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 a series of 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 4th 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.