Dave Barry: Babies and Other Hazards of Sex: How to Make a Tiny Person in Only 9 Months, with Tools You Probably Have Around the Home

Female birth control is much more complicated, because once sperm are safely inside a female, they become very aggressive. They barge up and down the various feminine tubes and canals, hooting and whistling, until they locate the egg. Then they strike up a conversation, feigning great interest in the egg’s personality, but actually looking for the first opportunity to penetrate.

There is no absolutely foolproof way to stop this fertilization process. The old wives’ tale, of course, is that a female could avoid getting pregnant by not having sex, but this was disproved by a recent experiment in which Harvard University biologists placed 50 old wives in a locked condominium for two years, and 35 percent of them got pregnant anyway merely by looking at pictures of Raymond Burr.

But there are things that a woman can do. She can insert one of the many feminine insertion devices shaped like alien space vehicles, which are designed to scare the sperm into stampeding right back out the vestibule. Or she can take the pill, which messes with her hormones in such a way that her body gets fooled into thinking it is already pregnant. The egg gets all bloated and starts to feel weepy and nauseous in the morning, and when it comes clomping down the fallopian tubes, the sperm all go stampeding right back out the vestibule.

What the public is eagerly awaiting, of course, is a birth-control pill for males. If you ever see members of the public gathering in eager little knots, that’s what they’re waiting for. The male medical establishment has been assuring us for years that such a pill is right around the corner. “Believe us,” they say, “there’s nothing we’d rather do than come up with a pill that messes with our hormones, so we can take this burden from the women, who have been unfairly forced to bear it for far too long. In fact, we’d probably finish developing the male birth-control pill tonight, but we have to play league softball.”

In primitive times, having a baby was very inexpensive. When women were ready to give birth, they simply went off and squatted in a field; this cost nothing except for a nominal field-rental charge. Today, of course, the medical profession prefers that you have your baby in a hospital, because only there can doctors, thanks to the many advances in medical equipment and techniques, receive large sums of money.

It is difficult to predict exactly what the doctor’s bill for your pregnancy will be, because every situation is different. If your doctor’s Mercedes-Benz is running well, he may charge you as little as $2,000; if there are complications, such as that he has been hearing a little ticking sound in the transmission lately, then he may be forced to charge you much more. It is a good idea to “shop around” before you settle on a doctor. Ask about the condition of his Mercedes. Ask about the competence of his mechanic. Don’t be shy! After all, you’re paying for it.

Again, it is very hard to be specific here, largely because I haven’t done any research. In my own case, I estimate that the cost of raising our son, Robert, to age three, which is where he is at the moment, breaks down as follows:

Little metal cars—$13,000

Everything else—$4,000

If we extrapolate this out for the next 18 years, assuming that inflation continues, and that we don’t have a nuclear war, which would pretty much render the point moot, we can conclude that in the long term a child can cost just scads of money. Maybe you should go back and read the section on birth control.

The advantage of quitting your job is that if you want to, you can make a really nasty speech to your boss, right in front of everybody, where you tell him he’s incompetent and has the worst case of bodily odor in the annals of medicine. The disadvantage is that you’ll lose your income, which means for the next eight or nine years the only new article of clothing you will be able to afford for yourself will be dress shields.

The advantage of keeping your job is that you will be able to stand around the Xerox machine for a couple of months showing pictures of your child to your co-workers, who will ooh and ahh even though very young infants tend to look like unwashed fruit.

Don’t worry. Your insurance needs will automatically be taken care of by squadrons of insurance salesmen, who can detect a pregnant woman up to 11 miles away on a calm day, and who will show up at your house carrying sleeping bags and enough freeze-dried food to enable them to stay for weeks if necessary.

Of course, you can’t reduce children to mere dollars and cents. There are many intangible benefits, by which I mean benefits that, when coupled with 50 cents, will buy you a cup of coffee.

For example, I know a person named Michael, who, although he does not personally own any children, once got a major benefit from his five-year-old nephew. What happened was they were at this big open-air concert in Boston to celebrate the Bicentennial, and when it was over the crowd was enormous and it looked as though they’d never get out. So Michael held his nephew aloft and yelled, “Sick child! Sick child! Make way!” loud enough so nobody could hear the nephew saying, “I’m not sick, Uncle Mike.” And the crowd made way, which meant Mike got home hours sooner than he would have otherwise.

So there is an example of a person getting a large intangible benefit from a child, and it wasn’t even technically his child. Also, you can get terrific tax deductions for children. Of course, the same can be said for insulation, but you’d look like an idiot, waving insulation aloft at an outdoor concert.

What on earth is going on inside pregnant women that makes them become so large and weepy? This is the fascinating biological topic we will explore in this chapter, at least until we start to feel nauseous.

The female reproductive system is extremely complicated, because females contain a great many organs, with new ones being discovered every day. Connecting these organs is an elaborate network of over seven statute miles of tubes and canals. Nobody really understands this system. Burly male doctors called “gynecologists” are always groping around in there with rubber gloves, trying to figure out what’s going on. Or so they claim.

The fertilization process starts in the ovaries, which each month produce an egg. After a hearty breakfast, this egg treks down the fallopian tubes, where it is propositioned by millions of sperm, which are extremely small, totally insincere one-celled animals. Often, to attract the egg, the sperm will engage in ritual behavior, such as ruffling their neck feathers. No wait, I’m thinking of birds.

Anyway, the egg, a fat and globular kind of cell with very little self-esteem, finds itself in this dimly lit fallopian tube surrounded by all these sleek, well-traveled sperm, and sooner or later one of them manages to penetrate. Then the sperm all saunter off, winking and nudging each other toward the bile duct, while the fertilized egg slinks down to the uterus, an organ shaped like Webster Groves, Missouri. The egg attaches itself to the uterine wall, and thus begins an incredibly subtle and complex chain of hormonal secretions that signal to the woman’s body that it is time to start shopping around for fluffy little baby garments. Pregnancy has begun.