birth

Last week, novelist Benjamin Percy was interviewed on the TODAY show about his experience of being "man pregnant." Percy wore a Japanese-engineered pregnancy suit for nine weeks in an effort to be a better father by gaining an understanding of what women go through when they're pregnant.  When I saw the story (and the smug interview), I was uneasy. Not only was the interview tediously unfunnny, Percy's pregnancy suit struck me as a rude, half-baked attempt to figure out what the hell women have been complaining about since the beginning of time. But Percy's story, originally written for GQ's humor section, isn't the first "dude tries to approximate pregnancy" experiment we've seen lately.

A few months ago, Dutch TV hosts Dennis Storm and Valerio Zeno made news when they hooked themselves up to electrodes in an effort to experience "the worst pain there is": giving birth. Their two-hour simulation left them cursing, screaming, and saying it was "torture."

ABC News has uncovered an as-yet-unreleased report from the California Department of Health that shows that the number of maternal deaths in the US has tripled in the last decade.