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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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Notably, there is no reason for including men.

You can make an argument regarding "mother is unable to breastfeed because dead/mastectomy following breast cancer; father can't arrange a wet-nurse and thus tries to do it himself". It's a shaky argument, but it's an argument.

It is impossible for a man to give birth.

The consensus IIRC is that:

  • you can implant an IVF embryo in a man's abdomen and it's capable of attaching to something (abdominal pregnancy - in women - and placenta percreta prove this);
  • you can presumably take it out again via surgery, as with an abdominal pregnancy in a woman (and live babies from the latter are known).

The reasons nobody's done it are:

  • nobody knows what the different blood chemistry of a man would do to the fetus;
  • Placenta percreta and abdominal pregnancy are extremely dangerous due to massive bleeding and/or organ damage, and here you're talking about causing them on purpose
  • post-WWII medical ethics are too restrictive to allow something with such extreme risks as this without medical necessity, and I don't see how this could plausibly be medically-necessary
  • Mengele and Unit 731, who would totally have tried it anyway on Jews/Chinese, were out of the picture by the time IVF was actually achieved.