Amazing Science Facts!

We had our first class on how to be parents on Tuesday. We signed up with a company calledRealBirth. Apparently, all you need to be a parent is to sign up for five three-hour classes! If only I had known it was so easy, I would have done this years ago.

I learned some Amazing Science Facts about reproduction during our first session:

• The uterus is the strongest muscle in a woman's body -- stronger than the gluteus!

• During the third trimester, the body releases a hormone called relaxin, which causes the tendons and ligaments that bind the various parts of the pelvis together to, well, relax. The allows the baby's head to widen the pelvic opening as it descends during birth.

• One of the things that triggers labor is the production of certain hormones in the baby's body -- crazy! It's like the baby is saying, "Hey, I'm ready to come out!" Only in hormones, not in English.

• One of the signs of impending labor is a multi-day bout of diarrhea. There are so many beautiful things about pregnancy!

• We all know that the birth of a baby is preceded by the "water breaking" -- the breaching of the amniotic sac, causing the amniotic fluid (the baby's comfy, cushioning bath) to spill out. Some babies, however, are born without the water ever breaking -- they come through the (sexily-named) birth canal inside an intact amniotic sac, which then has to be broken open after the birth. These rare babies are reputed to have clairvoyance.

• The vast majority of babies begin the birth process head down, with their backs facing the mother's belly. As they emerge, they rotate 180 degrees, like a screw being removed from its socket, and are born facing towards the mother's front, able to look their mother in the eye (assuming that both parties have their eyes open, and aren't too busy yelling).

• In addition to the spreading of the pelvic opening, birth is eased by the fact that the bones of a baby's skull are not yet fused -- during birth, they actually slide over one another like tectonic plates, making the head somewhat smaller (leading to the "conehead" appearance of most newborns). The head returns to a more normal shape within a few hours.

We did not discuss what is, to me, the most interesting fact about human reproduction -- that birth is not painful for most other mammals. (Hyenas, apparently, are among the few mammal species that are even less fortunate than us in this regard.) Humans have, of course, long noted this discrepancy, and have advanced many theories to explain it, including the one in Genesis 3:16: it's Eve's fault. God didn't want to make childbirth painful, but she pissed him off.

The more commonly-accepted scientific explanation is that, on the road to homo sapiens sapiens, the sizes of our hominid forerunners' brains increased very quickly (on an evolutionary scale), and the size of the female pelvis and birth canal could not keep pace.

A more recent theory holds that we are actually paying the price for being bipedal: walking upright requires relatively broad shoulders and a narrow pelvis, a bad combination for comfortable childbirth.

Either way, I demand that genetic engineers get to work on this problem. Because, you know, it would be great if birth were less painful ... we need people to have more babies, and to hesitate less when deciding whether to procreate! Right? Okay, maybe not.