Out they all set, then, on this exciting journey, full of vigour and overwhelmingly inspired by their sense of purpose, dedicated to one object only. Between thirty million and five hundred million of them, if one is to believe the educated guesses.

But only one penetrated the pellucid zone to reach the nucleus.

Why only one, since they were all equipped with the same determination and attributes, the lashing force of the tail and the nose tipped with corrosive enzyme? As ever, it is the first home who defeats the others. Perhaps that is why it is called the human race. How many others have had that thought? I know of none.

Then the primary tragedy occurs, the unity becomes the dyad, already it is beginning to divide, the cell, to split, for it is natural and destructive, the division of cells, basic.

…

But the cells are already specialized, some bent on a career in the spinal cord, others certain of a vocation in the spleen, the cornea, the coccyx. One or two brave cells have it in mind to aspire to becoming sperm themselves, one day, in the fullness of what needs to be termed time.

Stills from a film by Stan Brackhage

“Fortunately, women have been having babies without the help of the medical profession for many millions of years, so the chances of complications or of your doing anything to assist are relatively few. In order to justify your presence at the sacred moment at all, therefore, you should have seen to it that you had the appropriate period instruments at the ready, to wit: umpteen pairs of Waugh’s Long Fine Dissecting Forceps, one Urethral Bougie to be used in the unlikely event of your needing to examine the common bile duct, four of Moynihan’s Gall-Bladder forceps, Geig’s Myoma Screw, Westheim’s Angled Scissors, three Vulsellum Forceps, one Wrigley’s Short Midwifery Forceps, five Payr’s Crushing Clamps, one Doyen’s Retractor, four Willett’s Scalp Forceps, Bonney’s Uterine Depressors, and Clover’s Crutch for trussing up the patient like a fowl if necessary; which latter is not necessarily uncomfortable, either.”

And he was not finished yet:

“So away you would have gone, then, learning from your midwife, hoping for the best, leaning ever so hard on dear old Mother Nature.”

He had done.

Were any of these fearsome instruments needed? Did they notice her blood group was rhesus negative? Did the bag burst or leak, was Me heralded by a torrent or a trickle? Who remembers? Does it matter, again, now?