Body Politic

The doctor who arrived in my wife’s recovery room to perform our son Sebastian’s circumcision was a mix of Foghorn Leghorn and Huey P. Long, a gentleman from another age. A pale, portly man in a white dress shirt and black suspenders, he introduced himself formally as the “attending physician who would perform the procedure” and walked me down the hospital’s hallway toward the room where my two-day-old son lay, oblivious.

“If I may, young man,” the doctor asked me, “were you present yesterday for your wife’s cesarean section?”

Darcy’s first pregnancy had been mostly smooth until we found out that the baby was breech. While it isn’t unheard of for OBGYNs to attempt breech deliveries, the likelihood of dangerous complications for both mother and child can be heightened considerably under such circumstances, and a C-section is often recommended unless the baby flips in time. And so came a tragicomic parade of techniques we undertook together to turn the baby right-side down, including the two of us visiting an acupuncturist with a stoned assistant; Darcy doing headstands in a pool; and, as a last resort, me singing and humming through a paper towel roll into her groin to coax the baby down through some sad human proxy of echolocation. In the end, though, he stayed just where he was. A C-section was scheduled for a week before Darcy’s due date, but she went into labor three hours before the surgery. As she tested Darcy’s dilation ahead of her now-emergency C-section, the maternity nurse, “Baby — you got feet dangling