What I always find irresistibly mystifying in these wingnut stories is trying to figure out what particular grain of actual information the wingnuts latched onto and unrecognizably distorted with their clueless speculation. And I think I’ve got it!
Emphasis added. I think that must have been the ultimate source of this bizarre idea. You can easily see how “occasionally occurring fertilized ova are prevented by oral-contraceptive hormones from developing in the uterus” could be interpreted as “women on birth control have lots and lots of little tiny dead-baby fetuses embedded in their wombs”. If you’re a clueless moron ignorant of reproductive biology, that is.
Kimstu: good work identifying the likely origin of the (grotesque and stupid!) misconception (pun intended.) This kind of analysis is fascinating!
(It reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould tracking down the origin of the VERY commonplace description of Eohippus as “about the size of a small fox terrier.”)
Hey, waitaminnit! This is the Pit! You left out the cuss-words!
Exactly. Something which says that fetuses are hardly ever made and can’t stay in the uterus if they are is easily interpreted to mean women make dozens of dead baby fetuses which get stuck in their uteruses…if you’re a total moron living in Backwardsville. :smack:
A long time ago I heard (where? I don’t know) that if a woman has a hysterectomy the doctor can somehow “see” how many zygotes have implanted in a woman’s uterus. The surprising thing about this (I heard, again) was that most women have the marks of several more implantations than they thought they ought to; in other words, women spontaneously abort many pregnancies before they even realize they are pregnant. Of course, that’s something I’ve heard repeatedly from reliable sources.
I have no idea if any of that is true.
But if it is, or if someone else heard the same thing and was a moron, they could probably twist it into the baloney from the OP.
That part is mostly true. It’s also given root to the notion that abortions make you infertile. The truth is that zygotes can’t implant where there’s scar tissue, and the placenta detaching does tend to create a scar. So if you’ve had lots of pregnancies (whether they ended in miscarriage, abortion or birth), your risk of future miscarriages does go up, because there are just fewer spots left for good implantation and a strong placenta.
miss elizabeth, you’re brilliant. This is undoubtedly the issue that forms the microscopic factual core of Swanson’s utterly bizarre claim.
As WhyNot noted, all Swanson did was mistake “menstruation flushing a rejected zygote out of the womb” for “rejected zygotes becoming embedded as tiny dead babies inside the womb”, and “women on oral contraceptives produce far fewer dead-baby rejected zygotes than women not on them” for “only women on oral contraceptives accumulate these dead-baby rejected zygotes”.
Heck, those are pretty trivial errors, aren’t they? I say we give the poor guy a pass. Preferably a pass for a first-class aisle seat on the next outbound Mars rover.
that makes sense, unless that jackass actually believes that an egg needs to implant and grow into a full baby to get out of the body, though I wonder what he thinks the menses are in that case. :dubious:
