Mummy, how are babies born?

Like every other child at the age of 6 or 7, I wondered how babies were born. However, unlike every other child, I never believed that a white stork carried a baby wrapped in cloth to the parents' doorstep. One day, I went up to my mother and asked, "Mummy, how are babies born?" My mother is a Cardiac Care Unit (CCU) nurse and has been working in various hospitals all over the world for years. There was no way that she couldn't know.

Rather than trying to sugarcoat the idea that babies came from a mother's tummy and leave it at that, she went ahead and suppressed any desire I had to have kids. She told me that all babies were born by C-section (although at the time I didn't know what it was called, I just thought it was birth). She not only told me that babies were born by C-section, but she went into excruciating detail, thus scaring this poor 6 or 7-year old girl into never having children.

A few years later, I was in the 4th grade and the school health teacher took it upon herself to explain to 9-year olds how babies are actually born. Most of the students in that class were shocked to find out that there was no baby-delivering bird. I was shocked to find out that a baby's birth was much more natural than my mother had led me to believe.

There was a complete shift in my thinking about birth. Originally I thought it was a horrifying experience and wondered why anyone would ever want to have children. However after my fourth grade experience, I found childbirth strange and almost fascinating. My mom wasn't lying about how babies are born. Some babies are born by C-section; however, most children aren't. Although I did gain new information, the idea was roughly the same, but my perspective about childbirth changed drastically.