Pregnancy Revealed, OR If It's So @#$%! 'Beautiful,' YOU @#$%! Do It!

Adrienne Rich said "The child I carry for nine months can be defined neither as me or as not-me" and now science finally has started to understand what pro-lifers cannot conceptualize (for sociopolitical-religious reasons)--that pregnancy is about 2 individuals, one incomplete, one at risk as the incomplete individual feeds upon her. It is a "Silent Struggle," with the fetus wanting all it can get and the mother's body trying to place limits (sorry for the long quote but it is fascinating):

As a biologist fresh out of graduate school in the late 1980's, Dr. Haig decided to look at pregnancy from an evolutionary point of view. As his guide, he used the work of Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University.

In the 1970's, Dr. Trivers argued that families create an evolutionary conflict. Natural selection should favor parents who can successfully raise the most offspring. For that strategy to work, they can't put too many resources into any one child. But the child's chances for reproductive success will increase as its care and feeding increase. Theoretically, Dr. Trivers argued, natural selection could favor genes that help children get more resources from their parents than the parents want to give.

As Dr. Haig considered the case of pregnancy, it seemed like the perfect arena for this sort of conflict. A child develops in intimate contact with its mother. Its development in the womb is crucial to its long-term health. So it was plausible that nature would favor genes that allowed fetuses to draw more resources from their mothers.

A fetus does not sit passively in its mother's womb and wait to be fed. Its placenta aggressively sprouts blood vessels that invade its mother's tissues to extract nutrients.

Meanwhile, Dr. Haig argued, natural selection should favor mothers who could restrain these incursions, and manage to have several surviving offspring carrying on their genes. He envisioned pregnancy as a tug of war. Each side pulls hard, and yet a flag tied to the middle of the rope barely moves.

...

In a 1993 paper, Dr. Haig first predicted that many complications of pregnancy would turn out to be produced by this conflict. ...

Dr. Haig proposed that pre-eclampsia was just an extreme form of a strategy used by all fetuses. The fetuses somehow raised the blood pressure of their mothers so as to drive more blood into the relatively low-pressure placenta. Dr. Haig suggested that pre-eclampsia would be associated with some substance that fetuses injected into their mothers' bloodstreams. Pre-eclampsia happened when fetuses injected too much of the stuff, perhaps if they were having trouble getting enough nourishment.

Subsequent studies seem to bear out his hypothesis.

So what Mexico had to do makes a whole lot of sense. "Carrying to term" is not like insisting someone wear a raincoat on a sunny day, an inconvenience, a trifle. There is no equivalent for men so pro-life men argue their belief from a tenuous position. Like me mandating what kind of underwear men should wear never having had a dick of my own.

tag: pregnancy, abortion rights