A Fetus Can Turn to Stone in Its Mother’s Body and Go Undiscovered for Decades

plenty of people are not so lucky, modern medicine notwithstanding. its not god im thanking.

There are two sides to this medal, modern medicine also brought us hyper procedural deliveries in hospitals that can result in a terrible experience for healthy women. My 1st child was born in a hospital in north America. When the contractions were not happening close enough fast enough we were strongly advise to start chemical induction - stress of the mother increases - something is not going as excepted - chemical induction is a lot more painful, lead my wife to ask for an epidural 3 hours later. More stress, pushing becomes very hard and ineffective. Once the contractions are close enough, the mother is asked to lay on her back, which drastically limit the movement of the pelvic bone - making delivery harder. At that point she slowly ends up in the zone where the delivery has to happen NOW, leading to episiotomy and use of forceps. For our 2 other children my wife went with a midwife in a Home Birth, the midwife provided everything modern medicine has to offer, if at some point she detects something risky the hospital takes over and she will accompany the mother to the hospital, if not the mother can decide to deliver in the Home Birth at home or at the hospital. In UK I read that hospitals are very much closer to Home Birth in the way they treat patients, I wish more hospitals start following that path and that Home Birth was accessible to more people. I don't believe the vast majority of deliveries should be treated like high risk from the start. We also need to recognize and address that a lot of misinformation is happening around birth.

You may overestimate the demand for taking the pregnancy completely outside the body. I offered to pay for a high quality surrogate for our kids, but my wife didn’t want to. She went through a brutally complicated delivery and then a more regular but still, to my eye, horrible experience because she wanted her children to grow inside her.

It's the natural result of becoming a biped. I'm a healthy, fertile female, and the thought of having my baby grown inside a surrogate or outside of my body scares me. I don't have kids atm and may never do, but if I did I'd carry my children myself (assuming it's possible for my body to do so at the time).

I've heard all the horror stories, I've watched every video, and birth is completely terrifying-- but every mother describes it with an additional sense of gratitude. They're thankful their bodies can do it, that they have now a child they love, and also they feel so much stronger for it. There's a certain spiritual sense about going through so much pain and taking so much risk to give life to another human being. That feeling must be powerful.

In a way, there is already however it is not very popular in society at the moment.

The answer is for the woman to have kids, or at least 1 kid, when the woman is younger. Varies by woman, but late teens or 20-22 years of age, greatly reduces risks both in that first pregnancy and in later pregnancies.

My personal view is that the high school--> college --> job track should be allowed to be interrupted or otherwise modified, so that people don't have to wait until they are almost 30 to start thinking about kids. But I don't have a fully fleshed out theory as to how to do that.

fantastical speculation inbound..

dragon ball super(o) recently made me think that in a world where teleportation is possible we could just teleport the baby out of the womb, avoiding the pain of labor

of course there is still the hardships of carrying the child, and who knows what kind of havoc such a sudden event would cause to the mother's hormones

how much of the bodily functions associated with labor are evolutionarily built in necessities of human reproduction? do cesarean births have any hormonal consequences differing from vaginal birth?

(o) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6wMALl9tJQ

Come on, we're fine these days. It's monitored and you have epidural pain killers. I'm not diminishing the burden, but we shouldn't make everything free.

There are some things that can help mitigate it, but they sound like one is advocating for women to remain "barefoot and pregnant," such as adequate rest, eating right, etc.

On the flip side, carrying a baby makes the mother a chimera and puts her through a whole host of changes that, in some cases, have profound positive impact on her health. You hear a lot less about this than about the horror stories, but it does exist.

apparently nip/tuck did mention it too

anyway, that still surprises me when I read about it

'Ectopic Pregnancy' is the more general term for pregnancy outside the uterus.

Found this, hope it helps. 'Typically an abdominal pregnancy is a secondary implantation which means that it originated from a tubal (less common an ovarian) pregnancy and re-implanted.' https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Insi...

"An ectopic pregnancy occasionally aborts backwards down a tube, or bursts out of it without killing the patient, and embeds itself elsewhere in her abdominal cavity. Sometimes, an ovum is fertilized outside a tube on the surface of an ovary, and then implants itself in the abdominal cavity. ... An abdominal pregnancy is thus a rare complication of an ordinary ectopic pregnancy"

https://web.archive.org/web/20170814131930/https://www.meb.u...

IANAD but I know the fallopian tube doesn't connect to the ovaries but instead opens into the abdomen. An already ectopic embryo could continue up the tube until it exits into the abdomen. That sounds crazy which is probably why it's so rare. Also, during ovulation, a fringe called the fimbra is deployed to essentially sweep the egg into the tube.