[I want specifics on the general idea]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about having a baby. Good god no — not me incubating a miniature humanoid in my stomach and birthing it myself! I’ve just been thinking about the barbaric, frightening process of having a baby. I work with a 22-year-old who is due in less than a month, and she’s beginning to get a little skiddish about the final hurrah of the pregnancy, so she’s constantly talking about it with me and our other co-workers.

All the older ladies we work with have horrific stories about giving birth. Kathy told us that she had induced labor, but that the epidural was done incorrectly so she was only numbed on one side and her other side was in complete agony. So they gave her more drugs, and eventually she was so drugged that she couldn’t even push the baby out when the time came. So the nurse pushed on her stomach to squeeze the baby out, giving her a hernia in her umbilical region.

Then there’s Brenda, whose bowels released from all the grunting and pushing, leaving her and her newborn sitting in a pool of placenta juice and poop. Her baby would shake violently when held, so she took to holding him on top of a pillow. Four weeks later she found out that the kid had a broken collarbone and the doctor didn’t bother to tell her. Kathy escaped exploding bowels by consenting to an enema.

Patti said she was in labor for 12 hours with one child and two and a half with another. All the women still shudder about the time their water broke and gushed down their legs. And no one enjoys the inevitable vaginal tearing, stretch marks, and flubbery stomach.

Nikki, the 22-year-old, gets sharp pains every now and again and says she can feel the baby’s fingers moving. Right now, she said, he has turned so that he’s head-down with his butt up against her side and his feet pushing toward her spine. She said she sometimes wishes her skin was transparent so she could see exactly what he’s doing in there.

I just can’t imagine ever waking up one day and wanting to go through anything so horrific. Sure babies are cute and all, blah blah. But man, what a trial to put yourself through just to enrich a lifelong bond with a kid who’ll probably grow up to hate you anyway, or at the very least, be mildly embarrassed by you. Patti said that “God won’t lay anything on us that we can’t handle,” but when it comes to squeezing a little person out of one of my favorite body parts, I’m not so sure. It doesn’t seem practical or wise. When will we evolve to the point where outer-uterine pregnancies are the norm? Will I have to wait for a brain pan? Yeesh. I might change my mind eventually, but for now I’ll stand by the assertion I made weeks ago to a co-worker who stared at me stupidly: Babies are weird.