I looked at it another way: if the baby slept except when being fed, when did it get the baths, orange juice, vitamins, cereal, and everything else the pediatricians prescribed?
Hoist by their own petards!
The fifth type of mis-statement was the impossible ideal. I tried this one for logic: "Babies should not be allowed to cry before feeding."[2]
Had those doctors ever tried to keep a hungry child from crying?
Hungry children cried. It was their nature. Some of them—my kind for instance—cried very hard. And children—even pipe-dream children—woke up hungry.
Warming a bottle to drinkable temperature took time, at least five minutes and sometimes ten. Meanwhile, in spite of everything that anyone could do, the baby was crying. He would not he cajoled, walked, teased, patted, jollied, scolded, or argued into accepting any substitute for his formula. With him, it was food or nothing.
For horror, I had a favorite scene: the mother alone, rushing from baby to bottle, from bottle to baby, one screaming, the other cold, frantic with the pediatrician's admonitions, and then both too hot....
I would not have had it on my conscience for all the royalties in America! At least I have saved the world that.
There were more mis-statements, but those were enough. I did what any man, any scientist, would have done. I gave my findings to the world. They were published under the title: "What the Baby Books Won't Tell You." The article stirred up immediate controversy.
It is not enough to uncover a conspiracy; you must find a motive. I had discovered the motive behind the Great Conspiracy.
Baby books were not written to teach parents how to care for their children; baby books were written to sell baby books. And magazines published articles about babies to sell magazines to mothers.
Valid reasons. If they had not existed, there would have been no baby books, no women's magazines. But this had far-reaching consequences: the market for baby books and women's magazines was the great, proliferating population of new parents. If the awful truth about parenthood were published, if these hardy, ingenuous souls were discouraged, something quite startling would happen to the market: it would disappear.
There were attempts at suppression on all levels, but the truth was out and nothing could stop its spread. Secret printing presses turned out reprints by the millions; they were passed from hand to hand. Fathers whispered the word to husbands; husbands passed it on to bachelor friends.
The word raced around the world.
It would not have been so disastrous if Lindsay McPherson had not simultaneously perfected his contraceptive pill out of a Southwestern plant named Lithospermum ruderale. For the first time, a contraceptive was safe, cheap, and convenient—and 100% effective in reducing male fertility.
Birth control was in the hands of the men.
Billions of the tiny pills were turned out. Enemy nations sowed them over each other's territory in boxes containing translations of my article. Men cached them away, carried them in money belts, hollowed out hiding places in the heels of shoes....
Births dropped suddenly. Almost overnight, the maternity wards were depopulated. Hospitals went broke, or began advertising for patrons, sick or well.
The makers of baby foods, baby apparel, and baby accessories went next, then the women's magazines when they lost their advertising. In a few years, the condition hit the schools; one by one they closed their doors.
It was a creeping paralysis. The toy makers and sellers collapsed. The clothing industry couldn't survive longer. The shoe-makers were hardest hit. Food consumption dropped. All over the country, farmers went broke....
By comparison, the Great Depression seemed like a boom.
By 1965 the end was in sight. Society disintegrated. The cities were deserted; they burned for years. From a mechanical-agricultural civilization, the world returned to the stone age in one decade.
People went in packs for protection. There were two kinds of them: packs of men hunting for food and packs of women hunting for men.
Soon, as the women grow too old for child-bearing, the race of Man will be doomed.
I did it. I am guilty. Lindsay helped, but I am the one. But how was I to know that society—that human life itself—was founded on a basic deception?
I wonder what is keeping Lindsay. He should be back by now.
Editor's note: This manuscript was found in a cellar of a house in a Midwestern city; it is presented here partly for its historical interest, but chiefly for your amusement.
Mr. Wilma Masters (the former Andrew Jones) was found in the same cellar. Our hunting party had taken Lindsay McPherson some time before, and he had directed us promptly to the cellar. Men are like that.
As is the custom, the men were stripped, carefully searched, and sent to the premarital barracks to wait for some girl's proposal. Our readers will be happy to learn that they are both back in service.
Never underestimate the power of a woman.
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