Ever since Eve: personal reflections on childbirth

A clutch of sparkling, wonderful excerpts from essays, fiction, and life shows that the experience of launching a child into the world unites many women and certainly some men. Sharp-tongued Dorothy Parker rails against the slipshod biology that makes carrying and delivering a child so time-consuming. Kitty writhes in childbirth in a scene from Anna Karenina. Novelist Toni Cade Bambara lampoons a wanna-be revolutionary who "castigated the Sisters to throw away the pill and hop to the mattresses and breed revolutionaries." And let us not forget W.C. Fields celebrating fatherhood: "Have wired all my intimate friends but have recd. no congratulations … I suppose they will come to & send me some telegrams soon."