Hatches, Matches and Despatches

A 1983 study showed that half of all pregnancies are mistakes.

ONE of the earliest methods of contraception, found on Egyptian papyrus dating from approximately 1850 BC, was a mixture of honey, soda, crocodile excrement, and some kind of gum, inserted into the vagina. It is uncertain whether it was supposed to kill sperm, or just destroy the man’s urge to proceed!

THE first contraceptive diaphragms were citrus rinds.

JULIUS Caesar was so worried about the falling population of Rome, that he offered rewards to Romans for producing numerous children. Conversely, he punished childless women, by forbidding them to ride in carriages or wear jewellery.

UNTIL the beginning of the twentieth century, it was customary for a Muslim peasant woman in Upper Egypt to terminate an unwanted pregnancy by lying face down between railway tracks until a train came and passed over her. Conversely, women who had difficulty conceiving would lie on their backs in the belief that as the train passed over them, they would be impregnated. Trains were also thought to represent fertility in India, where women trying to conceive would rush to the tracks as a train approached. As the train rushed past, they would lift their skirts in the hope of being made pregnant.

LOVE may be blind, but it’s not heat resistant. The lowest number of babies are born in April and May because temperatures in July and August are too hot for romance. The peak months for births are August and September. In heat wave years, the birth rate drops even more dramatically than the average April and May figures.

THE human female is the only animal capable of constant sexual arousal and is physically capable of making love every day of her adult life.

CASANOVA, one of the world’s greatest lovers, boasted that England was the most sexually wild country. He also claimed he preferred to use British condoms.

DAN Patrick, general manager of Houston radio station KSEV, broadcast his regular morning talk show while undergoing a vasectomy.

When the show’s producer said ‘Cut!’ – he really meant it!

IN the Yanomamo tribe, who live in Brazilian rain forests, a woman could kill her female babies until she gave birth to a son. Once she had borne a son, she could kill any further unwanted children.

IF music be the food of love … then why not try the singing condom? Invented by Hungarian Ferenc Kovacs, it begins to play immediately the condom is unrolled. The discerning user can choose one of two tunes: ‘You Sweet Little Dumbbell’, or ‘Arise Ye Worker’.

Legal Tales

IN 1992 Dr Cecil B. Jacobson, the head of a fertility clinic in Vienna, Virginia, was convicted of fraud and perjury. Jacobson had been found to have used his own sperm to impregnate as many as seventy-five women, while telling his clients that the sperm was from anonymous donors.

WHEN a condom manufacturer decided to call his new range ‘Stealth Condoms’, the Northrop Corporation, builder of the B-2 Stealth Bomber, filed suit, claiming that people might confuse the two products!

ONE of fourteen death row inmates in California who filed a lawsuit asking the state to allow them to father children either through conjugal visits or artificial insemination was a certain gentleman named Herbert J. Coddington. His crime? Killing his two children following a custody dispute with his wife.

Baby Facts

BABIES can breathe and swallow at the same time – adults cannot.

WHEN babies are first born they have 350 bones in their bodies. Adults have only 206 bones as some fuse together as a baby grows up.

A NEW-BORN baby’s body is only twenty per cent of its adult size, while its brain is ninety per cent of its adult volume.

WHEN a baby is born, it has many more taste buds than its mother. It will be able to distinguish its mother’s milk from that of a stranger soon after birth.

STATISTICALLY, a baby born in Singapore or Hong Kong is more likely to survive its first year than a baby born in the USA.

A three-month-old foetus already has the fingerprints it will have for the rest of its life.

AT four months, a foetus can frown.

100,000 nerve cells sprout every minute after conception until, by birth, there are one billion.

Womb for Improvement

WHEN the Japanese obstetrician, Dr Hajime Murooka, investigated the reasons why babies cry, he came to the conclusion that some are just homesick for the womb they have recently left. He implanted a tiny microphone in the uterus of a pregnant woman and recorded the sounds within. When these amplified sounds were played to crying babies, in almost all cases, the crying stopped. One Florida hospital was so impressed with the results that the sounds were piped into a maternity ward. Not only did the babies seem quieter, but the mothers and staff felt calm and drowsy.

SCIENTISTS have found hints of consciousness in seven-month-old foetuses still in the uterus, and have measured brain wave patterns like those during dreaming in eight-month-olds. After twenty-eight weeks in utero, the foetus can hear. By the third trimester, the foetus can respond to sound. Car horns make the foetus jump. Research in Belfast found that the theme song from a popular soap opera, played repeatedly to thirty-week foetuses, made them relaxed. When the same music was played after birth, the babies became more alert.

THERE are a number of electronic devices available in the United States which ensure that pre-school learning begins pre-birth. The Uterine University offers ‘Foetal Teaching Systems’ – cassettes to be worn by the pregnant woman on a body belt, available from a Mr Shannon Thomas of Orlando, Florida. Also available is the ‘Listen Baby’ fabric belt with two speakers and a little microphone, from Roger Hurst of Infant Technology in Denver, and the ‘Pregaphone’, invented by Dr Rene Van de Carr of Santa Barbara, California.

Birthdays

KING John III of Poland was born on 17 June – he was married on 17 June, crowned on 17 June, and died on 17 June. In short 17 June was the day on which he was hatched, matched, dispatched.

What’s in a Name?

UNTIL the 1970s, French families were not free to choose just any name for their children – they had to pick names from an official list kept by the Ministry of the Interior.

IN ancient Rome, naming children was pretty difficult too – there were only twenty first names ever used for males.

MUHAMMAD is the most common first name in the world, Chang is the most common surname. We have yet to find a Muhammad Chang though!

BRIAN Brown of Wolverhampton was such a big boxing fan that when his daughter was born in 1974, he named her after twenty-five world heavyweight champions – Maria Sullivan Corbett Fitzsimmons Jeffries Hart Burns Johnson Willard Dempsey Tunney Schmeling Sharkey Carnera Baer Braddock Louis Charles Walcott Marciano Patterson Johanssen Liston Clay Frazier Foreman Brown.

EQUALLY unfortunate was the daughter of Peter O’Sullivan, a fan of the Liverpool football team of the sixties. When she was born, her proud dad named her after the entire team: Paula St John Lawrence Lawler Byrne Strong Yeats Stevenson Callaghan Hunt Milne Smith Thompson Shankly Bennett Paisley O’Sullivan. On official documents, she used the name Paula St John etc O’Sullivan.

A Japanese couple who won a free honeymoon courtesy of the German airline Lufthansa were so grateful for their wonderful trip to Germany and their romantic stay in the Black Forest that when their son was born nine months later, they named him ‘Lufthansa’.

ARTHUR Pepper had his daughter christened in 1883, with the name Anna Bertha Cecilia Diana Emily Fanny Gertrude Hypatia Inez Jane Kate Louisa Maud Nora Ophelia Quince Rebecca Sarah Teresa Ulysses Venus Winifred Xenophon Yetty Zeus Pepper – one name for every letter of the alphabet.

MR and Mrs James Williams felt that their own names were pretty uninspired, so when their daughter was born on 12 September 1984 in Beaumont, Texas, they named her: Roshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenkkoyaanfsquatsiuty.

ON 8 November 1847, Dr James Young Simpson, professor of midwifery at Edinburgh University, first used chloroform as an anaesthetic in the delivery of the wife of a fellow surgeon. She was so delighted with the painless delivery that she named her daughter Anaesthesia.

IN 1971 Grace Slick officially named her daughter ‘god’. When she was asked why she registered the name with a small g, she replied, ‘Because we’ve got to be humble about this.’

Bottoms Up

IN the UK, 2,191,781 pounds of paper are used in non-recyclable disposable nappies every year. 48,835,616 disposable nappies are thrown away.

JAPANESE mothers change their babies’ nappies an average of fourteen times a day – twice as much as European and American mothers.

SAINSBURY’S once promised a year’s supply of free nappies for pregnant mums whose waters break in one of their stores.

SOME professions pose problems that we lesser mortals thankfully never have to worry about. Take, for instance, nappy manufacturers. How do they test their products? It seems that babies can be unreliable when it comes to delivering waste on time, so scientists at the Kimberley Clark Corporation have come up with synthetic faeces. Apparently testers, reluctant to use the real thing, had tried mashed potatoes, peanut butter, and even tinned pumpkin pie mix – but none of them was chemically accurate enough.

Delighted testers can now use a compound which comes in a dry mix to which water is added for the desired consistency. It can be any colour, but they usually use brown. At the request of the testers, it is odourless. For anyone interested in the recipe, the US patent number is 5,356,626.

A MERICAN parents can make potty training fun by purchasing an audio book entitled ‘I’m on the Potty’. Set to familiar nursery rhyme tunes, they can sing along with ‘Diapers Falling on the Ground’ (Instead of ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’), and ‘I’m on the Potty’. Presumably, ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’ is not included, although we thought we might suggest ‘Spending Pennies From Heaven’ for the next edition.

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