Dandelyon's Worlds

One of my favorite podcasts decided to do a series on pregnancy. The first episode is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx0ewmmMjnQ

They spend almost 50 minutes talking about how you know you're pregnant, and the history of pregnancy tests. Then they turn to the definition of pregnancy, which most of us think of as "the period of time starting when a fertilized egg implants in the uterus".

Except, for historical reasons, the medical definition is "the period of time starting with the first day of the pregnant person's last period." After all, that's a clear reportable date, unlike ovulation and conception, which have no obvious physical markers.

For most women, that's two weeks before ovulation. Two weeks before there's even an egg to be fertilized. But that's not true for everybody. My cycle was nearly always 30-32 days, though for part of my perimenopause it was 21, except when I skipped a month and it was 42-60 days. One of the hosts said that her cycle had always been 36 days, so the docs always had to adjust her due date.

But anyway, for the average pregnant person, the implantation of the sperm into the egg doesn't happen until "Week 2" of the pregnancy.

Then they looked at the cycle of implantation. That fertilized egg takes time to grow and change, developing an outer membrane that will eventually become the placenta, and implant into the uterus. That takes more than a week. So, for most pregnant people, they are nearly "four weeks pregnant" according to the medical definition, before even the most modern pregnancy test can detect the hormone that they test for.

So, it's not just that "at six weeks most women don't know they're pregnant", it's "at two weeks the egg is still an unfertilized egg" and "at three weeks, the urine won't have any pregnancy hormone to detect".

And then I remember all those right-wing men saying that six weeks is plenty of time to decide if you want to continue a pregnancy". For someone whose cycle is 36 or more days long, instead of 28, they might have a day or two before the six-week mark from the first day of their last period where they could even detect a pregnancy, if they spent money on a test and took it. I will note that most women don't have symptoms indicating they might be pregnant at this point, or if they do, the symptoms are milder than eating something that didn't agree with you.

I have always thought it's wrong to say a person is "four weeks pregnant" at a point in time that's only two weeks past the date of fertilization. How can you be "pregnant" before you even introduce sperm to your body? It's logically and semantically incorrect.

But legally, with our reproductive health care under attack, it's horrible and unfair.

And having the medical definition of pregnancy start two weeks (or more) before conception and almost four weeks before implantation (and the chance to detect a pregnancy) just increases the confusion about what's really happening. To say nothing of when it's reasonable to expect a person to even know they're pregnant.

So, this rant was brought to you by the belief that science should change its terminology when they learn something that proves the words they've been using don't reflect reality.

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who read the Sunday comics, and laughed at Dick Tracy's two-way video communicator watch. Heck, he got better reception than the TV, and never needed to whack the thing to clear up the picture. It was quite obviously fantasy.

On the other hand, she lived in the aftermath of a very robust civil rights movement. She knew that women weren't making as much money as men yet--but that was changing, and certainly by the time she was grown up, or at least by the time her daughters might be looking for jobs, we'd have had a female President and roughly half of the CEOs in the country would be women.

Fast-forward to the present.

Last year, I got a Skype-tour of my daughter's dorm room. I chat with people on the other side of the world almost daily and have collaborated on stories with people I've never met in person. The only thing that has kept us from video-conferencing on cell phones is that we (or at least I) have, when I've had it for technology, spent my money on a working computer rather than an up-to-date fancy cell phones.

But we have the technology!

On the other hand, equal pay for equal work is still a dream. Equal _recognition_ for equal work is also just a daydream--during #feministsf chat today on Twitter, we were given a link to yet another study showing that speculative fiction by women get fewer reviews than fiction by men.

Why do I still live in a world where women always, always face challenges that men don't?

I heard an interview on NPR, a man who looked into what we--the human race--is capable of doing. He came to the conclusion that most of the things that were just dreams when I was a little girl are possible today. Why aren't they real?

All we need to make these dreams reality, he said, is money and political will.

Of course, he was talking about scientific progress. But how much of our social progress is fostered--or hindered--by money and political will?

After all, geek-toys were, when I was young, guy-toys. It wasn't Brenda Starr who had the wrist-communicator, after all.

Is it really a coincidence that the techie dreams became real, and equality for women didn't?