Bionic Uterus

and vagina, and cervix and everything else.....I've been patiently waiting for Rachel to pick this up, but she hasn't yet. So I'm going to talk about it.

When I was getting my Junior Lifesaving Certification, I became intimately familiar with Resusci Annie. Okay, not that intimate, but I did save her from drowning several times, in the parallell universe where she was real and I was a lifeguard in a lake, not the shallow end of the community pool. It was fantastic, because not only did I learn true CPR technique, I was able to do so without kissing Scott, the skeevy guy in my JLC class.

It appears that medical science has taken the concept of robotic patientry to a whole new level. The $20,000 robotic birth dummy does everything a pregnant woman can do--except threaten to cut off her husband's Charlie Browns.

She can be programmed for a variety of complications and for cervix dilation. She can labor for hours and produce a breach baby or unexpectedly give birth in a matter of minutes. She ultimately delivers a plastic doll that can change colors, from a healthy pink glow to the deadly blue of oxygen deficiency. The baby mannequin is wired to flash vital signs when hooked up to monitors. The computerized mannequins emit realistic pulse rates and can urinate and breathe.

Nature mocks me. I've been saying for years that everyone I know is getting pregnant except me. Girls I used to babysit for are getting pregnant. But now even the creepy self-peeing Baby Tender Love dolls of my childhood have grown up and are giving birth.

The good thing is that all the little Merediths and Izzies and Georges and Cristinas can now have actual Kobyashi Maru delivery practice without costing a human life. I think it's worth the twenty grand.