There were about thirty couples altogether. A good general mix, but a surprising amount of young people.

“I’m starting a family about ten years later than most people here,” I thought as we walked in, looking at the young faces.

Tonight, we went for our first of eight two-hour birthing classes.

What an odd thing — classes on how to give birth. Our great-grandparents would have laughed at us. “You might as well be going to a class on how to peel potatoes,” they might say.

Still, there we sat, listening to the symptoms of premature labor and discussing what to do about it should it happen to us.

“The rate of premature births in less industrialized nations is much lower,” our instructor pointed out. “We have amazing technology, and we do a great job of keeping premature babies alive,” she continued, “But we’re relatively lousy at preventing them.”

Push-button ease has put our babies at some degree of risk. We don’t move as much as people in the non-industrialized world. We wash our clothes by pushing a button and take our trash by car two hundred meters to the apartment-complex dumpster.

Ironic: technology has both helped cause the problem and effectively dealt with the result.