CHICAGO, Illinois - When Howard Duffman asked for more researchers for his project, his manager unintentionally provided him with his life's work. "A woman can have a baby in nine months," he told Duffman, "But nine women can't have a baby in one month." The resource-allocation truism was meant to show why more researchers wouldn't solve the problem, but as Duffman now says, "It actually defined a whole new one. Why can't they do it in one month?" Fifteen years of research later, it has been proven that they can.

"It's all about delegation," explained Duffman, "Naturally, if one woman tries to do the whole baby herself, it's going to take some time. So we split it up into individual tasks. One woman grows the left limbs, another the right. The heart, liver, kidneys, and spleen are all raised in one womb. The brain grows alone. After thirty days or so, we take all the parts, stitch them together, spank the result, and voila!" The first test subject -- for privacy, unnamed -- is said to be recovering from the merging process as expected.

Fertility experts are divided on the value and safety of Duffman's work. "I've been pregnant," said Dr. Danielle Poul, "And I can tell you that nine months has never seemed longer. The idea of getting it over with in one month with the help of some friends -- none of whom would get big enough to need maternity clothes -- is highly attractive. I just wonder about the safety of bringing all those tiny limbs and organs together into a full baby. Not to mention the potential embarrassment of stitching something on backwards. I did that with a teddy bear pattern once!"

"I just can't see the need to take the risk," countered Dr. Dirwin Gates, "Women have been carrying full-term babies for millennia. Will the time and discomfort saved by this procedure be worth the problems it will most assuredly cause? What will he do if he's twenty-nine days into a 'pregnancy' and one of the women has an accident? Will he keep a freezer of spare parts stocked?"

Dr. Duffman is nonplussed at the concerns. "How can anyone not see the breakthrough here? All the money spent on maternity clothes, comfort devices for mothers-to-be, medicines and herbal remedies for morning sickness, all freed up for use in caring for the new baby, now only a month away! What could possibly be wrong with that?"

The Duffman Procedure is expected to cost $275,000 per pregnancy, using volunteer partial-surrogates. "The cost will no doubt come down over time," added Duffman.
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