I asked cleaning ladies to come in for a deep cleaning of the house to prepare it for the baby’s arrival.
“When are you due?” the cleaning ladies asked the moment they saw me. “Will this be a natural birth?”
People are very obsessed with this “natural birth” crap.
“If I were planning a natural birth/home birth, wouldn’t I ask you to come in to clean after, not before?” 🙂
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🙂 🙂 🙂
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“Completely unnatural! It’s a robot, and I’m giving birth through a zippered pocket installed by the aliens!”
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Uggh! Why don’t you have a “natural” bypass procedure or a “natural” root canal?
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Exactly!! We all gladly use medical and civilizational advances in every area of life. But this single experience has to be done “naturally”. What sense does that make?
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I’m reminded of an old Lily Tomlin joke (paraphrasing): There’s nothing natural about childbirth, it’s the closest think to a freak accident I can think of.
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I don’t know who Lily Tomlin is but I like her!
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“Will this be a natural birth?”
Yes, I intend to sever the umbilical cord with my teeth and then consume the placenta for vital nutrients.
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There are people who might take this completely seriously.
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This is a good point regarding things of civilization overall. The reason with the “natural” obsession with regards to everything for so many people, in my opinion, is because there is a mindset among many people that humans living in a civilized society is “wrong.” That it isn’t “natural.” That we need to “return to nature” and so forth. To them, we are supposed to be walking around naked in the wilderness. The current craze with organic food is a spin-off of this. Such people ignore a few things:
1) Humans aren’t the only animals that manipulate their environment. Certain birds make use of tools (sticks in their beaks). Dolphins also make use of a simple tool in this sense. Non-human apes use tools and in the case of chimpanzees (our closest primate relative), make tools. Birds also make nests, bees make hives, beavers cut down trees and build dams (there was a hilarious incident where a group of environmentalists discovered multiple trees that had been cut down in a wooded area. Outraged over whoever was destroying the forest, they went and sought the park Ranger. Turned out it was beavers cutting them down, which the enviros were okay with 🙂 ). Ants also build nests. But in the case of humans, us using the natural environment to benefit ourselves is wrong to these people.
2) Humans weren’t just dropped on the Earth as we are, wondering around eating plants, and then started making tools and manipulating nature and eating animals. By the time anatomically-modern humans had evolved, what we call Homo-Sapien-Sapien, we had already been using tools for thousands of years. That is why we evolved the way we did—we didn’t evolve these huge brains and hands randomly. Since chimpanzees use and make tools isn’t hard to see that our direct ancestors used tools and because it helped them survive greatly, we evolved improvements in this (big brain and hands).
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Great comment, Kyle! I also have no patience with folks who bash civilization without realizing that they won’t survive a day without it.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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