AFTER THREE MONTHS
Baby: fully-formed body, eyes moving, muscles growing, has fingers and toes.
Mother: gaining weight, morning sickness gradually disappearing, heart working hard, tired all the time, crying at bad films.
Father: bloated, paranoid, drinking too much, telling everyone he knows that he is going to take all his money out of the bank in used notes and fly to Bolivia.
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| Antenatal Classes Are They Necessary |
AFTER SIX MONTHS
Baby: can hear everything that is going on, muscles have developed but body is still thin, lungs now growing.
Mother: eating for two, appalling indigestion, either wants sex all the time or not at all, feeling the baby move, may be suffering from cramp, still crying at bad films.
Father: increasingly bald, knee joints swelling, staring at girls on public transport, concentration destroyed, liver now the size and constituency of a breezeblock.
AFTER EIGHT AND A HALF MONTHS
Baby: weighs six or seven pounds and is just over a foot long, lying in two pints of amniotic fluid, fat and healthy, raring to go.
Mother: huge, exhausted, tearful, furious, unable to find comfortable position to sleep or sit or do anything, blames it all on you, talking on phone to friends and relatives all the time and going quiet when you come in the room.
Father: has taken all his money out of bank in used notes in preparation for flight to Bolivia but left it on public transport while drunkenly staring at girls. Resigned to fate.
To alleviate the stress, or make it much, much worse, you might as-well go to some antenatal classes.
It's not known whether prehistoric man went to antenatal classes. Certainly the Ancient Greeks opted out, while the Ancient Romans were able to plead a prior engagement. Throughout the long majestic sweep of British history men have somehow managed to avoid anything remotely resembling an antenatal class - until the last 20 years, that is, when suddenly antenatal classes have come to occupy every Tuesday evening, or Wednesday evening, or any other evening on which you usually do something more interesting.
And we play along with it because we feel we have to; because, let's face it, we are the first generation of men in the long majestic sweep of British history for whom it is compulsory to attend the birth (in 1970 about 21 per cent of fathers attended the birth. In 1980 it was 42 per cent. Now, according to the National Childbirth Trust, it is 96 per cent). So we might as well find out what's going to happen, whether we want to or not.
Antenatal classes come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, as do antental class teachers. For prospective parents the problem is ignorance, a terrible void that needs filling now, or sooner if possible. Those who teach antenatal classes present themselves and their knowledge as the solution. They may have been through the experience themselves, or they may have presided over it many times, but one thing always applies: they will think they know what's best for you. It's a rare antenatal class teacher who approaches the task without at least a soupcon of evangelical fervour.
You want the answers, and you will get them. What you may not realize is that if you went to a different class you would probably get completely different answers. If you go to too many antenatal classes, as I fear I did, you end up with so many mutually contradictory answers you don't know what's what.
The issues at stake are how you want to have this baby, and how everyone else wants you to have this baby. Antenatal classes run by hospitals tend to promote a highly medicalised approach to childbirth, because, after all, that's what they have to offer. At the hospital we went to, hatchet-faced midwives who had trained in women's prisons advertised the joys of the epidural and the simple pleasures of the emergency Caesarean. To find out more, you can check out Antenatal Classes Are They Necessary.