Why Girls Should Never Have Babies

Photo by flequi

The royal baby is coming, people, so you better start your parody Twitter accounts, come up your with snappy nicknames for the foetus and pitch articles to women's weeklies with names like "Maternity Wear Fit for a Princess" as soon as humanly possible. That's if you want any chance of sticking your flagpole in The Most Important Cultural Event of the 21st Century.

Kate's apparently being a real trooper about the whole thing – barfing her guts into a regal sick bucket while Will sits dutifully next to her, covered in vomit and wiping the carrots off her chin – but it's still early days. After all the madness when a shit-ton of people rushed out to buy Kate's wedding dress, there is – of course – the worry that there's going to be a string of horrifying copycat pregnancies for people who want to Gestate-with-Kate™.

Pregnancy sounds like the worst deal in the world.The thought of it makes me want to wrap myself in a full-body condom and never make eye contact with a virile man again. I do not want a baby. They puke everywhere and make a lot of noise and you have to look after them, which is already my job on Fridays, Saturdays and the occasional Thursday, so why would I want the extra hassle? There are plenty more reasons why you should never do sex commando. Here are a few of my favourites.

NIPPLE HAIR AND SKIN TAGS
The thing about pregnancy is that your body goes from being your body to a woman-shaped minicab for a cluster of cells that slowly develop enough to completely ruin your 'gine, before forcing you to wipe its ass for four years. The transformation from autonomous woman to baby-slave involves a lot of physical changes and some of them are very gross. Weird rashes, hair where there wasn’t hair before and skin tags – weird bits of epidermis that make you look like a doll that's been attacked by the family dog – are all possibilities.

PREGNANCY NIGHTMARES
Very real and very scary. Friends waiting for abortions have explained their insane, home-invasion night-terrors as what must be their subconscious ditching any semblance of imagination and resorting to base-level freak-outs, which is a really distressing prospect. Another girl I know had a recurring hallucination where she'd abruptly wake up and see her cat replicated all over the room, watching her from eight places at once.

Plus, if you're in it for the long haul, you'll be puking up all your food for the first three months (and possibly a great deal of the last) while constantly getting fatter. And if involuntary bulimia that doesn't make you thinner isn't a living nightmare, I don't know what is.

YOU'RE GOING TO MESS IT UP
Look at you; you're an idiot. You might call it Decklyn or Tim or Salad, and it will hate you forever. It could catch you having weird sex and become a pervert who hates you forever. You could hold it funny and its brain will turn to mush and it will be an idiot who hates you forever. It could figure out that you didn’t want it in the first place and both resent and hate you forever.

There are so many ways to ruin a kid’s life that it's statistically very improbable you’ll raise a normal one, and then you’ll have to deal with a gross person that you know you're responsible for. It’s the human version of making a craft as a kid and having to show it to people, even though you’re not proud of it and it’s bad. And it’s all your fault.

EVERYONE WILL WANT TO TALK ABOUT AND/OR TOUCH YOUR BODY ALL THE TIME
If you aren't keeping the little sprout, people will just ask you why your boobs got so big, which is never not the most awkward thing in the world. If you're going the whole hog and your belly starts to swell, complete strangers will start asking you really intimate questions, like, "So, do your breasts hurt?" and, "Is the little fella kicking yet? Can I cup your stomach to feel?" People will also begin to use the phrase "baby bump" whenever they're around you, and you're not technically allowed to punch them in the face afterwards.

B-U-S-T-E-D
What if you were runnin’ around on your man? What if you lied to your family about waiting until marriage and for some creepy reason that really matters to them? What if you are a teenager who doesn’t know any better because abstinence-only education is a real, disastrous thing some people are inflicting on children these days? Try talking your way out of any of those when you've got a big ol’ belly full of proof appearing in doorways five seconds before the rest of your body.

(BABY) DADDY ISSUES
Dudes, when you get a lady pregnant, you’re pregnant too. It is exactly 50 percent your fault, or 100 percent if you’re one of those jerks who pressures chicks to let you go bareback because you “don’t like how condoms feel”. Maybe you guys were just friends, maybe you were 2gether4ever, maybe neither of you knows each other’s name or what the other person’s house looks like during the day. None of that shit matters at all, because you're together for the long haul now.

Whatever your relationship dynamic was before, everything will now revolve around birthing canals and prenatal vitamins, and if you reckon you can text a girl "Sup?" at 2AM and get any kind of response other than: "Worried my water is going to break :(", you're living in a Courtney Stodden-sized swimming pool of delusion.

GOSSIP (FEAR OF), GUNTS (FEAR OF) AND GOOGLE (HATRED OF)
You don’t want people gossiping about your bastard child, but you also don’t want people thinking you just got fat. And I think we can all agree that you could search “headache + drank too much” and Google would still be like: “Stage five pregnant, seek a pregnancy doctor immediately, you are probably crowning.”

In conclusion: Wrap it up.

Follow Monica on Twitter: @monicaheisey

More things girls should and shouldn't do:

Why Girls Should Never Have Anal Sex

How Girls Can Preserve Their Modesty

Ten Important and Obvious Things You Should Already Know if You're a Girl