• palordrolap@fedia.io
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    3 days ago

    New fear unlocked: What if babies are only born as babies because the people delivering them expect to be delivering a baby?

    Someone with sufficiently strong will (or magic) or who has been completely convinced otherwise could change the outcome. Like this.

    … wait. Maybe it only applies to placentas. Let’s hope it’s only placentas.

    • toynbee@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      I can’t remember any details on this, so I’m probably going to butcher it, but I once heard a comedian talk about this. Roughly, he said:

      I love it when couples say “we’re expecting.” Like “we’re expecting a baby… But it could be an orangutan!”

    • ObsidianZed@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      I can’t guarantee the authenticity but a friend of a friend’s wife ended up pregnant. She very clearly wanted to be a mother more than anything.

      She ended up kind of having a miscarriage because the placenta was just straight up empty. Like her brain just convinced her body that she was pregnant and began the process.

      • palordrolap@fedia.io
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        3 days ago

        Silliness aside, phantom pregnancies are a thing, but you generally don’t get a placenta without something else besides. If there didn’t seem to be anything, it was probably so non-viable that it dissolved or was reabsorbed, kicking off the rejection process.

        Most don’t even get to that stage though. Super early miscarriages are said to happen incredibly often and the carrier doesn’t necessarily even know that they’d conceived in the first place. A big hint is a delayed, heavy period, but most people who get periods won’t bat an eye at things like that happening. That’ll happen for a number of - occasionally hard to explain - reasons even without being sexually active.