Of course no-one in their right mind would suggest to women that they should do without anaesthesia during childbirth even if it was a strong possibility that their young may be imprinted with a desire to become drug addicts in later life. (See accompanying literature.) There is no doubt that childbirth is one of the most painful experiences a woman can face.

      I want to tell you how I discovered this very benign manner of birthing and was able to test it on several hundred women. I had invented the first two ringed baby sling. We lived in Hawaii and after our infant was born we wanted to carry her with us. It seemed to us to be the ideal way at least for the first few months of rearing a child.

      We had bought one of the baby carriers and found it to be very unsatisfactory. The shoulder straps were very inadequate, she was squashed up against my wife without her being able to breast feed. The fabric was synthetic and hot and she got a heat rash very quickly. This was Hawaii in the early eighties. So I got a woolen scarf I had bought with me from Scotland, knotted all four corners and when I put her in it, she gave a sigh and nestled down in it to sleep. Perfect.

      Except as time went on we found that we had to keep untying the knots and tying them up again. My wife and I were different heights. So I bought a piece of cotton, laid it down on the floor and spent the next three days folding and unfolding one end like a paper airplane. At last I had managed to fold the 36 inches into 2 inches across and also looped two curtain rings round the other end. Putting the folded end through the rings worked just fine as it jammed securely. We were off.

      We had no intention at first of making a business out of this discovery, but as time went on, and lots of people would stop us and ask where we had got his wonderful and practical sling we realised that we had to do something.