I like babies just fine, thanks. But I don't want to have another one.
When I was pregnant with Michael, I was very sick. When I wasn't vomiting, there was vomit at the base of my throat. I had to change my hours of work and go on drugs. I actually injured my larynx and couldn't speak for six months. This was particularly troublesome, because I was a radio reporter. I used to be able to sing reasonably well. No more. My voice still sounds different, and I have an odd tickle in the back of my throat that never goes away no matter how much I cough.
Steve really really really really really really wants to have another baby. It is getting stressful. I just can't go through that again. One of my friends just went through a really tough pregnancy with an extreme form of nausea called hyperemesis gravidarum (about a thousand times worse than what I went through). Some days, she could barely eat or move. It was like watching her die.
Sorry, I'm not up for that. The grandparents are going to have to look to their other kids to produce the next grandchildren.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Babies
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5 comments:
"It was like watching her die."
But I lived. And she was worth it. :-)
Having another baby is up to you. And I respect your decision. But it does affect Steve.
So hugs to you both -- this stuff is so hard, isn't it?
Not saying it's not difficult to be pregnant & give birth to a child, but I would think that through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution we would have become somewhat able to keep the species going through childbirth. How have our bodies managed to be molded to better suit our environment throughout the ages, but not have molded to make it easy to give birth? After all, isn't giving birth perhaps the most important step in evolution?
I am no scientist, but I have heard the answer to this question:
Scientists say that this is because the large human head is relatively new to our species. This probably wouldn't have caused problems if our ancestors hadn't decided to start walking upright, which is easier for creatures with narrow hips. Over millions of years, we became big-headed and narrow-hipped. This causes problems when an especially narrow-hipped woman is pregnant with an especially big-headed baby. With recent advances in medical science, this isn't such a big deal, but without C-sections and so on, both the woman and the baby could die.
This is similar to the "moth to the flame" phenomenon: every once in a while, something that would normally help you will actually kill you.
Easy for a guy to say -- you can't get pg! :-)
Seriously, before modern medicine, pregnancy and childbirth killed women all the time.
The pregnancy condition I had, hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), killed the writer Charlotte Bronte and her 4-month-old fetus.
HG killed a woman named Maria Giani and her unborn twins last year -- her husband George is a member of my Internet support group.
However, pregnancy death is extremely rare nowadays, even from HG.
Life's not always neat and tidy. (shrug)
You forgot to mention that because we're so heavy and walk upright, our hips have compressed far more than our closest evolutionary cousins, Chimpanzees. They almost never die during birth, despite the fact that their proportions are almost identical to our own.
Clayton
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