in the swimming pool water.
ACCORDING to the World Health Organization, the sex act takes place at least 100 million times a day. This figure was computed by multiplying the world birth rate by the accepted estimate of the number of times sex does not result in conception.
THE largest cell in the human body is the female ovum, and the smallest is the male sperm. One egg cell weighs the same as 175,000 sperm.
To Be or Not To Be
THERE are 75 million volunteer workers on the China Family Planning Association.
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
