Hacker News

I’m not quite sure what the point is here.

My term was “compromised dead end” and I feel like your post basically goes through the details of this compromise, which is great, I’m just not clear on whether you have a broader point. And to be clear, I didn’t mean to suggest that there is no purpose to the difficulties of pregnancy. Just that a certain evolutionary path has been pursued that has arrived at a compromised state for the welfare of women.

As to whether it’s a “dead end”, as I speculated, is harder to address.

One could compare with the reproductive physiology of other animals. From what I’ve gathered, which could be incorrect, the menstrual cycle is odd and problematic in the case of humans compared to other mammals. I’d be interested in how true/false that is. Generally the menstrual cycle and its effects can be easily forgotten in conversations on this.

As for all of the details of pregnancy, human bipedalism seems to necessitate at least some of these compromises, which suggests that the female reproductive experience is essentially human. Still it’d be interesting to imagine whether other forms of anatomy are possible that both free up our hands for craft and technology without constraining the hips, however unfavourable it would have been for our evolution it may have been.