For thousands of years, only women had babies. Primitive women would go into huts and groan and wail and sweat while other women hovered around. The primitive stayed outside. When the baby was born, the women would clean it up as best they could and show it to the men, who would spit appreciatively and go into the forest to hurl sharp sticks at animals. If you had suggested to primitive men that they should watch women have babies, they would have laughed and tortured you for three or four days.

At the beginning of the 20^th Century, women started having babies in hospital rooms. Often males were present, but they were doctors who were paid large sums of money and wore masks. Civilian males stayed out of the baby-having area; they remained in waiting rooms reading old copies of Field and Stream.

What I'm getting at is that for most of history, baby-having was in the hands (so to speak) of women. Many fine people were born under this system. Things changed in the 1970's. The birth rate dropped sharply. Women started going to college and driving bulldozers and carrying briefcases and using words like "debenture." They didn't have time to have babies. For a while there, the only people having babies were unwed teenage girls, who can get pregnant merely by standing downwind from teenage boys.

Then young professional couples began to realize that 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. Now 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.

At first, natural childbirth was popular only with granola-oriented couples who 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 the articles mentioned the various fluids and solids that come into the world with the New Life, so people got the impression that watching somebody have a baby was fun. Now innocent males are required by law to watch females have babies.

I recently had to watch my wife have a baby in out local hospital. First we had to go to ten childbirth classes with fifteen other couples consisting of women who were going to have babies and men who were going to have to watch them. Some of the couples were wearing golf and tennis apparel and were planning on having wealthy babies. The classes consited of openly discussing, among other things, the uterus. In high school I would have killed for reliable information about the uterus. But having discussed it at length and having seen full-color diagrams, I must say that it has lost much of its charm, although I still respect it a great deal as an organ.

Our instructor also spent some time on the ovum, which is near the ovaries. What happens is that the ovum hangs around until along comes this big crowd of spermatozoa, which are tiny, stupid, one-celled organisms. They’re looking for the ovum, but most of them wouldn't recognize it if they fell over it. They swim around for days trying to mate with the pancreas or whatever other organs they bump into. Eventually one stumbles into the ovum, and the happy couple parades down the fallopian tube to the uterus.

In the uterus, the Miracle of Life begins, unless you believe the Miracle of Life doesn't 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 specialized parts, not unlike the federal government. Within six weeks it has developed all the organs it needs to drool; by ten weeks it has the ability to cry in restaurants. The class was shown photographs of a fetus developing inside the uterus. We weren't told how the photos were taken, but I suspect it involved a lot of drinking.

One evening we saw a movie of a woman we didn't even know having a baby. I am serious. She was from California. Another time we were shown slides of a Caesarian section. The first slides showed a pregnant woman cheerfully entering the hospital. The last slides showed her holding a baby. The middle slides showed how they got the baby out of the cheerful woman. I can't give you a lot of details here because I had to leave the room fifteen or twenty times. I do remember that at one point our instructor observed that there was "suprisingly little blood." She evidently felt that this was a real selling point.

When we weren't looking at pictures or discussing the uterus we practiced breathing. In the old days, under President Eisenhower, doctors gave lots of drugs to women having babies. They'd knock them out during the delivery and the women would wake up when the kids were entering the 4^th grade. The idea with natural childbirth is to avoid drugs so the mother can share the first intimate moments after birth with the baby and the father and the obstetrician and the standby anesthesiologist and the nurses and the person who cleans the room.

The key to avoiding drugs, according to the natural childbirth people, is for the woman to breathe deeply. Really. They theory is that if she breathes deeply, she'll get all relaxed and won't notice that she's in a hospital delivery room wearing a truly perverted garment and having a baby. So in childbirth class we spent a lot of time on pillows and little mats while the women pretended to have contractions and the men squatted around them with stopwatches and pretended to time them. The golf and tennis couples, who had pillows with matching pillowcases, didn't care for this part as they were not into squatting. They started playing backgammon when they were supposed to be practicing breathing. I imagine they had a rough time in childbirth, unless they got the servants to have contractions for them.

My wife and I traipsed along for months, breathing and timing. We were a terrific team and had a swell time. The actual delivery was slightly more difficult. I don't want to name names, but I held up my end. My stopwatch was in good order and I told my wife to breathe. She, on the other hand, was unusually cranky. She almost completely lost her sense of humor. At one point, I made an especially amusing remark and she tried to hit me.

The baby came out all right, which is actually pretty awful unless you're a big fan of slime. The doctor, who up to then had behaved like a perfectly rational person, said, "Would you like to see the placenta?" Nobody would like to see a placenta. It's like a form of punishment:

Without waiting for an answer, the doctor held up the placenta as he might hold up a bowling trophy. I bet he didn't try that with the people who had matching pillowcases.

We ended up with a healthy, organic, natural baby, who immediately demanded to be put back in the uterus.

I understand that some members of the flatworm family simply divide in two.