Perhaps a dumb question, but how exactly does an abdominal pregnancy occur? The Wikipedia page is really unclear. The text sounds as if this can happen without a rupture to the uterus or a fallopian tube.
"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"
Thanks. The missing piece for me was that the Fallopian tubes are not directly connected to the ovaries, which makes “an ovum is fertilized outside a tube” an understandable scenario.
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.
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.
I agree that "Soylent pregnancy" is unlikely to catch on. Furthermore, we have virtually no idea what all the longterm impacts of that connection are, and what the longterm impacts of severing that connection could be.
P.S. I think HN will tend to have a more mechanistic view of this process than the broad public.
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.
Certainly, I appreciate my mom and mothers deeply. This is such a stretch its not comparable but it’s the best I’ve got: Every gift a girlfriends given me just made me feel so grateful (not sure how to describe it). I had a girlfriend once crotchet a hat for me. The whole time she was making it for me I felt such deep care for me. I can’t begin to imagine how I’d feel taking care of my soon to be mother of my child.
It’s possibly the most human experience. Doesn’t keep me from wishing there was more we could do.
There's something wrong with your sample. I personally know multiple mothers who deeply regret the physical damage done by pregnancy and birth, and don't feel even a little bit stronger for having spent a month on hospital bed rest with pre-eclampsia, or tearing their vaginas during birth and being unable to lift their own newborn baby, or weakened abdominal muscles from pregnancy so she still isn't allowed to run with her baby now five months old, or spending six months unable to keep down water and losing weight due to morning sickness. They're grateful to have the kid, yes, but they don't delude themselves that it was a wonderful spiritual experience.
I mean, if you have a kid because society tells you to have a kid, I'd say the kid is the victim and that the adult made a poor decision under pressure. That's not victimhood, that's a mistake.
Well, people don't usually consider themselves to be coerced by themselves, so it makes sense that anyone who feels they were coerced into it is blaming someone else.
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.
I wonder when "wait to have kids" starts to become bad advice. It was one thing to wait until high school, then college, but it seems like a _lot_ of people I know are waiting until they're financially stable and then discovering they're not there at 35 years old and looking at a hockey stick curve for likelihood of autism, etc. It's part of why my wife and I had a kid at 34.
Not to mention that if having kids is so great (and so far I do quite like it) we should logically want to maximize the time we have our kids in our lives, not minimize it.
More generally, though, I think this is a problem of how in an age of plenty we demand a huge chunk of your waking hours just to produce enough income to live whatever we've decided is a decent life, though a lot of this time is spent making other people - be they landlords or people who bought a house in the 80's or 90's, rich. Working half the hours generally means far less than half the pay, and many women see that their careers are destroyed if they take time out to raise a kid (perhaps some men do too, but it usually falls to the mom).
At least people should be educated about the possible effects of having children late in life as part of high school sex education.
I have quite a lot of coworker women that are in their mid to late 30s who are astonished to learn that there are potential complications associated with having children at that age. Without exception they have expressed the desire that these potential complications had been communicated to them earlier in life.
>>I wonder when "wait to have kids" starts to become bad advice.
It already is, but people try to balance to the best they could--given today's reality (Congrats! You're 22 but no money and no "good father material" so...wait).
Our genes weren't developed in the last 4 decades where women work and seek careers and then think of having children. It's not sexist or misogynistic, it's the reality of our genes. 22 is a woman's best age to have kids. The more you postpone, greater are the problems, even for the children. Pregnant women over 35 have/had to do the Down Syndrome echo. Why? Because women over a certain age are more likely to have children with issues. This may apply to men as sperm cells have had, say 50 years, to screw up the copying or to get damaged.
The “quote” from someone is along the lines of “The most valuable person to society is a young woman. The least valuable person to society is a young man.” As a man, I experienced that quite acutely. Still do though now I “have more to offer” and I sometimes feel like I’m being valued more than I was in the past. It’s hard to tell through the years of abuse and bullying.
Having kids in your early twenties helps with a lot of physical aspects, but a lot of people aren't ready to be in a long term committed relationship at that point, so it would seem that it's sacrificing emotional well-being for physical well-being. Certainly both factors feed into the other.
I think a lot of what's pushing people to have kids later is the desire to have a stable home, and that feels harder to acheive when costs of living seem to demand, for many, dual incomes and living paycheck to paycheck.
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?
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.
We have four children. Without modern medicine I have one child and no wife, most likely. I’m not sure i believe in God, but modern medicine and the ability to afford it is a godsend. Pregnancy is truly terrifying for all involved.
still much, much luckier than other generations. You could've been the King of England or Persia and you would have died from a simple infection that today is cured with pennies.
Ummm...if you believe in God, the idea is that he is to be thanked because thanks to him the scientists etc...
But in reality, the phrase has lost a lot of its original meaning. Still we need to be thankful, while we may nt get the Saudi Prince medical care, we still get a lot better care than Kings got 100 or so years ago. If I had a time machine and a few neosporins I'd be the richest man in the world. Plots of land in the middle of London and Paris for saving the King's life.
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.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadanyway, that still surprises me when I read about it
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...
This makes abdominal pregnancy without something rupturing seem a lot more plausible.
P.S. I think HN will tend to have a more mechanistic view of this process than the broad public.
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.
It’s possibly the most human experience. Doesn’t keep me from wishing there was more we could do.
Got it. Anyone but themselves.
For some it is. For some it's not. I was providing a counter-example to the OP's lament.
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.
Not to mention that if having kids is so great (and so far I do quite like it) we should logically want to maximize the time we have our kids in our lives, not minimize it.
More generally, though, I think this is a problem of how in an age of plenty we demand a huge chunk of your waking hours just to produce enough income to live whatever we've decided is a decent life, though a lot of this time is spent making other people - be they landlords or people who bought a house in the 80's or 90's, rich. Working half the hours generally means far less than half the pay, and many women see that their careers are destroyed if they take time out to raise a kid (perhaps some men do too, but it usually falls to the mom).
I have quite a lot of coworker women that are in their mid to late 30s who are astonished to learn that there are potential complications associated with having children at that age. Without exception they have expressed the desire that these potential complications had been communicated to them earlier in life.
It already is, but people try to balance to the best they could--given today's reality (Congrats! You're 22 but no money and no "good father material" so...wait).
Our genes weren't developed in the last 4 decades where women work and seek careers and then think of having children. It's not sexist or misogynistic, it's the reality of our genes. 22 is a woman's best age to have kids. The more you postpone, greater are the problems, even for the children. Pregnant women over 35 have/had to do the Down Syndrome echo. Why? Because women over a certain age are more likely to have children with issues. This may apply to men as sperm cells have had, say 50 years, to screw up the copying or to get damaged.
We live in a dysfunctionally sick culture.
I think a lot of what's pushing people to have kids later is the desire to have a stable home, and that feels harder to acheive when costs of living seem to demand, for many, dual incomes and living paycheck to paycheck.
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
why?
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.
But in reality, the phrase has lost a lot of its original meaning. Still we need to be thankful, while we may nt get the Saudi Prince medical care, we still get a lot better care than Kings got 100 or so years ago. If I had a time machine and a few neosporins I'd be the richest man in the world. Plots of land in the middle of London and Paris for saving the King's life.
I understand the reasoning, and it's still insulting. The people don't work any less hard if God exists.