It is an almost pathological compulsion to chime in on it, and I completely get how ridiculous it seems. But for all the divide between the experience of birth and the experience of partnering someone giving birth, it still remains one of the most affecting events of my life. It is very hard to just zip it up and say nothing about it when the topic arises. And the topic has arisen.
I wouldn’t offer any advice to expectant mothers (beyond “don’t suck down whippets”), partly because I don’t have the plumbing, but largely because they are already getting more advice than they can possibly assimilate and much of it is conflicting. They’ll need to settle on a few sources of information they can trust to guide them, and if one of them turns out to be Robulus on Boing Boing they are in deep shit.
