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Several airlines refuse to allow a woman on board if she is more than 36 weeks pregnant. What do they do, measure the fetus at the gate? I assume this policy exists because airlines fear for the safety of a lavatory delivery at 20,000 feet. Nope. It stems from the high cost of diverting a plane for an emergency landing. Ah, the friendly skies of United. We got in just under the wire on our flight to San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was Sarah’s family vacation, and my traveling companions were an older man, a pregnant woman, a 9-month old baby, and a mother and father obsessed with the 9-month-old baby. The most reliable member of the crew was the baby…

Why the hate? That’s what I want to know. Misogyny is alive and well and living in male-oriented books about pregnancy. Take a look at these excerpts:

•”There are many reasons to resent your wife when she’s pregnant.”
•”[Y]our wife should be treated like any other savage creature ready to attack.”
•”Instead of acting like a temptress, she’ll act more like a toddler. Once you start thinking of your wife as a baby, not a broad, you’ll notice other similarities as well.”
•”[T]hink of pregnancy as a nine-month stint at a prisoner-of-war camp . . .”
•”Sure, living with a pregnant woman can’t kill you, but it sure can take the fun out of living.”

Boy. No wonder so many men bail out just after they’ve pulled out…

I just read a new study that claims the average pregnancy is not 40 weeks, but rather 41 1/2. Great. I feel like we just got another couple of years tacked on to our life sentence.

Regardless, a healthy woman should gain between 25 and 35 pounds over the course of a pregnancy. A few years back, I saw a woman—let’s call her Sharon—gain roughly 70 pounds. She didn’t look like Sharon; she looked like a person who had eaten Sharon. With a side of fries. She was predictably miserable. Her wedding ring went in a drawer for nine months because her finger was too bloated to accommodate it. I recall the moment she realized she could no longer cross her legs. “Well, shit,” she said, trying to locate her feet for a few seconds. Then she went back to looking miserable…

We’ve begun watching horribly graphic childbirth videos in our Bradley class. Yes, I understand their purpose: no one is trying to candy-coat this whole delivery thing, nor should they. Labor is obviously painful and wet and loud and bloody, and if we aren’t ready for that we’re doing ourselves—and our baby—a major disservice. But it’s still gross.

There was the video in which the husband crumpled to the floor like an empty tent when the doctor presented the massive needle for his wife’s epidural.

There was the water birth in some kind of icky prenatal jacuzzi that eventually had nine or so different kinds of fluid floating in it, none of which you’d want to see in your kitchen sink…