this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
173 points (95.3% liked)
Not The Onion
17456 readers
1638 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Frozen embryo. Meh.
I thought this was about extended gestation at first, which is something I've always wondered about: is the whole 9-months thing driven by the baby or the mother? Or more specifically, is 9 months the optimal amount of time for a baby to be in the womb?
Like if we manipulated the hormones / blocked the whole pressure-oxytocin feedback loop on the maternal side to just keep the mother gestating for... 12 months? 15? 3 years?? Would the 'newborn toddler' have a hyper-developed brain? Or just a normal brain that lost out on the first 3 years of critical life experience?
If our incubation tech was good enough to fully replace a biological mother... 20 years? ...there's a dystopian sci-fi writing prompt for ya. ...or like, the key to super humans.
Or, would shit like the foramen ovale on the fetal side of things just close off anyway and put it into a birth-now-or-die situation?
The limiting factor in utero is the health of the placenta. Past a certain point, the organ no longer functions and the baby does not survive. This is why (at least in the US) inductions are required past a certain point.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9320537/
Hadn't even considered that - I figured it came down to size constraints or the anatomic changes of the fetus.
Crazy. I wonder if that's something we could influence.