Mission Impossible star Cruise vows to eat placenta after birth

Toms wife gave birth to a 7lb boy...just wondering what Hannibal the Cannibal wore for dinner and was it raw or medium rare! :scratch:

Opp's...CNN got it wrong again...turned out to be a girl...oh well maybe CNN thought it was a Hollywood Tranny! or Metro boy! :huh:
 
Must read with this topic:

http://lib.luksian.com/texte/healcook/003/

TO SEE YOUR BABY BEING BORN
IS TO KNOW THE TRUE MEANING OF YUCKY
A father who was in the delivery room strips
the romanticism from "Natural Childbirth"

By Dave Barry


Let's take just a quick look at the history of baby-having.
For thousands of years, only women had babies. Primitive women
would go off into primitive huts and groan and wail and sweat
while other women hovered around. The primitive men stayed
outside doing manly things, such as lifting heavy objects and
spitting.

When the baby was born, the women would clean it up as best as
they could and show it to the men, who would spit
appreciatively and head off to the forest to throw sharp sticks
at small animals. If you suggested to primitive men that they
should actually watch women have babies, they would have
laughed at you and probably tortured you for two three or four
days. They were REAL men.

At the beginning of the 20th century, women started having
babies in hospital rooms. Often males were present, but they
were professional doctors who were paid large sums of money and
wore masks. Normal civilian males continued to stay out of the
baby-having area; they remained in waiting rooms reading old
copies of Field and Stream, an activity that is less manly than
lifting heavy objects but still reasonably manly.

What I'm getting at is that, for most of history, baby-having
was mainly in the hands (so to speak) of women. Many fine
people were born under this system. Charles Lindbergh, for
example.

Things have changed, though, in the 1970's. The birth rate
dropped sharply. Women started going to college and driving
bulldozers and carrying briefcases and freely using words as
"Debenture". They just didn't have time to have babies. For a
while there, the only people having babies were unwed teenage
girls, who are very fertile and can get pregnant merely by
standing downwind from teenage boys.

Then, some professional couples began to realize that their
lives were missing something - a sense of stability, of
companionship, of responsibility for another life. So they
began to get Labrador Retrievers. A little later, they started
having babies again, mainly because of the tax advantages.
These days you can't open your car door without hitting a
pregnant woman. But there's a catch; women now expect men to
watch them have babies. This is called "natural childbirth",
which is one of these terms that sound terrific but that nobody
really understands. Another of these terms is "ph balanced".

At first, natural childbirth was popular with hippie-type,
granola oriented couples who lived in geodesic domes and named
their babies things like "Peace Love Understanding Harrington-
Schwartz. The males, their brains badly corroded by drugs and
organic food, wrote swarmy articles about what a Meaningful
Experience it is to see a "New Life Come Into the World". None
of these articles mentioned the various other fluids and solids
that come into the world with the New Life, so people got the
impression that watching somebody have a baby was just a pack
of meaningful fun. At cocktail parties, you'd run into
natural-childbirth converts who would tell you how much they
bought their houses for in 1973 and how much the houses are
worth today.

Before long, natural childbirth was everywhere, like salad
bars, and now perfectly innocent civilian males all over the
country are required by federal law to watch females have
babies. I recently had to watch my wife have a baby in our
local suburban hospital.

First, we had to go to 10 evening childbirth classes at the
hospital. Before the classes, the hospital told us,
mysteriously, to bring two pillows. This was the first
humiliation because no two of our pillowcases match and many
have beer or cranberry juice stains. It may be possible to
walk down the streets of Kuala Lumpur with stained, unmatched
pillowcases and still feel dignified, but this is not possible
in suburbia.

Anyway, we showed up for the first class, along with about 15
other couples consisting of women who were going to have babies
and men who were going to have to watch them. They all had
matching pillowcases. In fact, some couples had obviously
purchased tasteful pillowcases especially for childbirth
classes; these were the North Shore couples, wearing golf and
tennis apparel, who were planning to have wealthy babies. They
sat together through all the classes and eventually agreed to
get together for brunch.

The classes consisted of sitting in a brightly lighted room and
openly discussing, among other things, the uterus. How I can
remember a time, in high school, when I would have killed for
reliable information on the uterus. But having discussed it at
length, having seen actual full-color diagrams, I must say that
although I respect it a great deal as an organ, it has lost
much of its charm.

Our childbirth class instructor was very big on the uterus
because that's where babies generally spend their time before
birth. She also spent some time on the ovum, which is near the
ovaries. What happens is the ovum hangs around reading novels
and eating chocolates until along comes this big crowd of
spermatozoa, which are tiny, very stupid, one celled organisms.
They're looking for the ovum, but most of them wouldn't know it
if they fell over it. They swim around for days, trying to
mate with the pancreas and whatever other organs they bump
into. But eventually one stumbles into the ovum, and the happy
couple parades down the fallopian tubes to the uterus.

In the uterus, the "Miracle of Life" begins, unless you believe
the Miracle of Life doesn't begin there, and if you think I'm
going to get into that, you're crazy. Anyway, the ovum starts
growing rapidly and dividing into lots of specialized little
parts, not unlike the federal government. Within six weeks, it
has developed all the organs it needs to drool; by 10 weeks, it
has the ability to cry in restaurants. In childbirth class
they showed us actual pictures of a fetus developing inside a
uterus. They didn't tell us how these pictures were taken, but
I suspect it involved a great deal of drinking.

We saw lots of pictures. One evening, we saw a movie of a woman
we didn't even know having a baby. I am serious. Some woman
actually let some movie-makers film the whole thing. In color.
She was from California. And another time, the instructor
announced, in the tone of voice you might use to tell people
that they had just won a free trip to the Bahamas, that we were
going to see color slides of a Caesarian section. The first
slides showed a pregnant woman cheerfully entering a hospital.
The last slides showed her cheerfully holding a baby. The
middle slides showed how they got the baby out of the cheerful
woman, but I can't give you a lot of detail here because I had
to go out for 15 to 20 drinks of water. I do remember that at
one point our instructor cheerfully observed that there was
"suprisingly little blood, really". She evidently felt this
was a real selling point.

When we wern't looking at pictures or discussing the uterus, we
practiced breathing. This is where the pillows came in. What
happens is that when the baby gets ready to leave the uterus,
the woman goes through a series of what the medical community
laughingly refers to as "contractions"; if it referred to them
as "horrible pains that make you wonder why the hell you ever
decided to get pregnant", people might stop having babies and
the medical community would have to go into the major-appliance
business

In the old days, under President Eisenhower, doctors avoided
the contraction problem by giving lots of drugs to women who
were having babies. They'd knock them out during the delivery,
and the women would wake up when their kids were entering the
4th grade. But the idea with natural childbirth is to try to
avoid giving the woman a lot of drugs so she can share the
first intimate moments after birth with the baby and father and
the obstetrician and the pediatrician and the standby anesthe-
siologist and several nurses and the person who cleans the
delivery room.

The key to avoiding drugs, according to natural childbirth
people, is for the woman to breathe deeply. Really. The
theory is that if she breathes deeply, she'll get all relaxed
and won't notice that she's in a hospital delivery room wearing
a truly perverted garment and having a baby. I'm not sure who
came up with this theory. Whoever it was evidently believed
that women have very small brains.

So, in childbirth classes, we spent a lot of time sprawled on
these little mats with our pillows while the women pretended to
have contractions and the men squatted around with stopwatches
and pretended to time them. The North Shore couples didn't
care for this part. They were not into squatting. After a
couple of classes, they started to bring little backgammon
sets and playing backgammon when they were supposed to be
practicing breathing. I imagine they had a rough time in
actual childbirth, unless they got the servants to have con-
tractions for them.

Anyway, my wife and I traipsed along for months, breathing and
timing, respectively. We had no problems whatsoever. We were
a terrific team. We had a swell time. Really.

The actually delivery was slightly more difficult. I don't
want to name names, but I held up my end. I had my stopwatch
in good working order, and I told my wife to breathe. "Don't
forget to breathe", I'd say, or "You should breathe, you know".
She, on the other hand, was unusually cranky. For example, she
didn't want me to use my stopwatch. Can you imagine? All that
practice, all that squatting on the natural childbirth floor
and she suddenly gets into this big snit about stopwatches.
Also, she almost lost her sense of humor. At this point, I
made an especially amusing remark and she tried to hit me. She
usually has an excellent sense of humor.

Nonetheless, the baby came out all right, or at least all right
for newborn babies, which is actually pretty awful unless
you're a big fan of slime. I thought I had held up well for
the whole thing when the doctor, who up to then had behaved
like a perfectly rational person, said, "Would you like to see
the placenta?". Now, let's face it. That's like asking, "Would
you like me to pour hot tar into your nostrils?". Nobody would
like to see a placenta. If anything, it would be a form of
punishment.

Jury: We find the defendant guilty of stealing from
the old and crippled.
Judge: I sentence the defendant to look at three pla-
centas.

But without waiting for an answer, the doctor held up the
placenta, not unlike the way you might hold up a bowling
trophy. I bet he wouldn't have tried that with people who have
matching pillowcases.

The placenta aside, everything worked out fine. We ended up
with an extremely healthy, organic, natural baby, who
immediately demanded to be put back into the uterus.

All in all, I'd say it's not a bad way to reproduce, although I
understand that some members of the flatworm family simply
divide in two.
 

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