Pregnancy Alternatives

On this season of one of my favorite TV shows, CALL THE MIDWIFE, a recently married character just suffered a miscarriage. This episode and the overall premise of the series reminded me of the ways some animals seem to have an easier time with reproduction than we do. Suppose women could resorb embryos to terminate an early pregnancy, like rats and rabbits, but consciously and at will? Or wouldn't it be more convenient if we were marsupials? Imagine giving birth painlessly to tiny, underdeveloped offspring and completing gestation in a pouch, which doubles as a cradle and food source for the growing infant. Moreover, performing mundane tasks and working at a career would be facilitated by the ability to carry babies around with us, hands-free, twenty-four-seven.

Better yet, wouldn't it be nice if fathers shared the burdens of gestation? Seahorses, of course, fertilize their mates' eggs in a pouch on the male's body where the eggs are sheltered until they hatch. TV Tropes has a page about this phenomenon in various media:

Mister Seahorse

Remember the TV series ALIEN NATION? The Tenctonese (who have three sexes, female and two types of males, but that's a different topic) transfer the pod holding the fetus from mother to father partway through gestation. The father undergoes all the typical experiences of pregnancy, including birth. If human beings had evolved this system, imagine the radical differences that might have historically existed in women's political rights and career opportunities.

Laying eggs like Dejah Thoris (John Carter's wife in Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars series) would be a less attractive alternative. Even with high-tech incubators, parental care after hatching would be intensive and prolonged. The babies would be small and helpless, probably more so than real-life human newborns because of the limitations of an egg rather than a womb. The only advantage of oviparous over viviparous reproduction would be that both parents could share the work equally.

How about artificial wombs? In my opinion, they're never likely to become universal and replace natural reproduction as in BRAVE NEW WORLD, in the absence of some catastrophic fertility crisis. As long as the natural method remains viable, the expense and technical complications of in vitro gestation would surely far outweigh the potential convenience, except maybe for the very wealthy. Robert Heinlein's PODKAYNE OF MARS includes a less drastic technological modification of the human reproductive cycle. Some couples (those who can afford the cost, I assume) choose to go through pregnancy and birth at the optimal physiological age for healthy reproduction but bring up the children at the optimal economic stage of the parents' life. They achieve this goal by having newborn infants placed into cryogenic suspended animation until parental career and income factors reach the desired point.

Would I want to have done this, if possible? I'm not sure. Getting through college and graduate school would have been easier without babies and toddlers. On the other hand, young parents probably have more energy for chasing after kids than they would in their thirties or forties, and there's something to be said for "growing up with" one's children. Having given birth four times over the span from age nineteen to age thirty-four, I've experienced both ends of that range.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Self-Improvement

Suppose you could wave a magic wand and make changes in the design of the human body? What would you fix? Some items on my wish list:

Alter the muscle connections in the torso to accommodate our bipedal posture, thereby alleviating or preventing backaches, organ prolapses, and hernias. (This one isn't original with me.)

Put an upper limit on the intensity of pain. Make it just annoying enough to draw attention to sickness or damage, not enough to really hurt, about the level of a mild cramp. (Assuming people will have the sense not to ignore the signals.)

Synchronize the onset of puberty between the sexes, so the girls don't become young adults while the boys are still kids. If you're worried about increased premarital sex and teen pregnancy, adjust the females upward instead of the males downward.

Turn us into marsupials. Seriously, wouldn't it be easier to give birth to a half-formed fetus and carry it in a secure pouch, like an advanced version of a kangaroo?

Failing that, reduce labor to mild cramps (like pain in general, see above) and painless pushing. Also in the area of reproduction, it would be nice if human females in the first trimester of pregnancy could re-absorb the fetus at will, like rabbits.

And can't we arrange for women to reach orgasm as easily and automatically as the typical young man?

For men, move the prostate gland so it doesn't wrap around the urethra, an arrangement that causes much inconvenience in later years.

Hack the brains of newborn babies so they sleep through the hours of darkness instead of needing to be fed every couple of hours by night as well as by day. Also, how about making human toddlers as easy to toilet-train as kittens? Those two changes would go a long way toward relieving the exhaustion and stress of infant care.

Repair the immune-system glitches that cause allergies and autoimmune diseases in many people.

Currently, the average person's metabolism works the opposite of the way most of us would prefer. Let's have any excess calories not required for daily energy needs excreted instead of stored as fat. That would be a radical change. From an evolutionary viewpoint, the tendency to hang onto fat is a feature, not a bug; it increases our chance of surviving a famine—not a typical hazard in contemporary North America.

If we aspire to superpowers, we could request vision like that of eagles, hearing like that of bats, the speed of cheetahs, and the proportional strength of ants. I'm thinking more of fixes that would make life as we currently live it easier, though. Each of those alterations would involve related changes we might not like, unless we switch from the realm of evolution to outright magic.

Any other suggestions to improve the human blueprint?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Human Redesign

In Heinlein's METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN, well-meaning, godlike aliens on a colony planet redesign the DNA of a human embryo to produce what they consider improvements, such as replacing fingers with tentacles; Lazarus Long's people react with horror instead of gratitude and hastily leave that world. Recently on Quora, someone posted a question about what changes you would make to improve the human reproductive process, if you had that power. Some suggestions offered were: give women the ability to end a pregnancy at will (maybe by resorbing the embryo, like rabbits) or pause a pregnancy in suspended animation until convenient, like kangaroos; separate the sexual function from the excretory function (presumably referring to males—the idea of placing those organs in completely different parts of the body goes way beyond tweaking with the human blueprint to making our anatomy downright alien); getting rid of menstrual periods (only a few mammals menstruate, so why can't we simply absorb the excess uterine lining the way other females apparently do?); allow people to transfer the embryo to the father, like seahorses.

Some changes I would wish for in an ideal world: Not only for pregnancy, but for human comfort in general, it would be nice if evolution had done a more efficient job of transforming us from quadrupeds to bipeds. Imperfect adaptation to walking upright leaves us subject to many uncomfortable conditions such as back, joint, and foot pains, hernias, and organ prolapse. For reproduction in particular, voluntary control of the process would solve many problems. Suppose women could ovulate or suppress ovulation at will? And if conditions of the pregnancy or the environment turned unfavorable, in this scenario they could resorb the embryo by an act of will, as mentioned above. It would also be convenient if men could produce erections, or suppress them, at will. For both sexes, a lot of anxiety would disappear if we could simply decide to have orgasms when desired. I'd like to have labor pains reduced to mild cramps, just enough discomfort to alert the woman that she's in labor. Why does dilation of the cervix have to hurt so much? At the actual delivery phase, a sensation of slight pressure would be enough to tell her to start pushing.

That last request might be impossible without a total restructuring of the human body, because of the compromises we already make between the sizes of the baby's head and the mother's pelvis. But, again, in an ideal world where we have voluntary control over physical processes and sensations, we could mentally suppress most of the discomfort associated with pushing out a full-term infant. Those compromises make another possible wish, that babies not be born so helpless, out of the question. Human intelligence means our offspring have large brains and large skulls, and the human female's pelvis can't grow much bigger while still allowing her to walk upright. That's why human babies are born so undeveloped; the size and lifespan of our species would lead us to expect our infants to stay in utero about twice as long as they do. In effect, a newborn baby is an extra-uterine fetus.

Given absolute power to alter human anatomy and physiology, what improvements would you make to the reproductive process? Or any of our physical attributes?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt