Even More Sure

I saw it first on Facebook, but it was originally posted to Women's Voices Media in October 2021: a short essay called The Function of the Uterus. It starts out with this:

[The uterus is] not a nurturing organ, it doesn't need to be; a fetus is frighteningly good at getting the resources it needs to nurture itself; if they are implanted anywhere other than the womb, (most often the fallopian tube, but also sometimes the bladder, the intestine, the pelvic muscles and connective tissue, and the liver) placental cells will rip through a body, slaughtering everything in their path as they seek out arteries to slake their hunger for nutrients.

If it's not nurturing — not the "womb" we've all metaphorically been referring to forever — what is it?

[It's] a fortress designed to protect the person from the developing cells inside them. Because of our huge and (metabolically speaking) expensive brains, human fetal development requires unrestricted access to a parent's blood supply, which makes pregnancy (and miscarriage too btw) incredibly dangerous for the carrier. The uterus has evolved to control and restrict whether placental cells can get that access, and to eject it before it develops enough to kill the host. The function of the womb is to protect the parent's life.

Like a good skeptic, as well as someone who hasn't had a biology class in a long time, I wondered if this was true. In searching for the source of the Facebook post I first saw, I found a Reddit forum discussing the Women's Voices article. One commenter there said this:

Around 30% of fertilized eggs end up getting expelled from the uterus in involuntary miscarriages. It totally has evolved to, in some cases, empty itself to preserve the health of the body it lives in. And the host body should also be able to make that same choice using its brain and consciousness. Not every fertilized egg gets born.
Lilith_Faerie

In that thread, I also found a link to a much lengthier Aeon article by an evolutionary biologist named Suzanne Sadedin, called War in the Womb.

Aside from verifying the assertions of the Women's Voices post, Sadedin's Aeon article verified the assertion from the Reddit commenter that 30% of fertilized eggs are expelled. Which (in my opinion) effectively ends any idea that life begins at conception, if that was even needed in the context of a born person's bodily autonomy. She also said this:

A list of the reproductive ills that afflict our species might start with placental abruption, hyperemesis gravidarum, gestational diabetes, cholestasis and miscarriage, and carry on from there. In all, about 15 per cent of women suffer life-threatening complications during each pregnancy.

Sadedin's article also appears to be the inspiration of the Women's Voices post, and other pieces that were linked from the Reddit thread (some of which directly quoted it without attribution). Sadedin gives a detailed description of how the placenta works, and the hormonal interchange (or, if so construed, attack) of a fetus upon the host uterus, showing our differences with other mammals, even the most similar mammals, the great apes.

One of the closing sentences of the Women's Voices essay was this:

The "miracle" of birth is that we have a protective organ designed to, if all goes well, let us survive it.

So Barbara Kruger was more right than she probably realized when she made this piece in 1989:



Forcing anyone to carry a pregnancy to term against their will is illegal seizure of the person's body. 

They are being forced to put their lives at risk, and that's not acknowledged because of the trivialization of pregnancy (which is directly related to sexism and misogyny).