Impregnation Under Stress
by Jonathan Quince
Monday, November 17, 2003 17:18:34
This occurred to me while having a recent belated Ahhhnold Election Party. The agenda naturally included an obligatory viewing of Terminator, during which I paid special attention to Sarah Connor. (Warning: Spoilers ahead for those of you who have been under a rock for 20 years.)
Sarah goes through the life-alteringcatastrophe of having a cyborg travel from the future with the express purpose of terminating her life. Leaving aside the moments when she must have felt unsure as to whether or not she herself was psychotic, the ensuing series of events include car chases, near-death experiences, and the death of her lover. In the midst of this, she gets fucked. By the end, while she was enduring rollover crashes, running from exploding gasoline trucks, and getting shrapnel buried in her outer left thigh, ![[Sarah Connor Pulls Shrapnel From Her Leg]](http://www.sopef.org/Log/2003/11/terminator_sarah.jpeg)
I could imagine the cum dripping down her leg. This mental juxtaposition of imagery made me wonder about the biological reactions to stress.
On one hand, there would be an evolutionary pressure for a woman in near-death situations to conceive: She may, after all, have the entire future of the species resting in her uterus. On the other, I’d think that the chemical cocktail of adrenaline and other endocrinal responses to "fight-or-flight" stimuli might be inimical to successful impregnation; a pressure to survive implies a pressure to conceive energy. This might translate into a pressure for the uterine lining to reject the embryo so the female can live to conceive another day.
I recall hearing something about a statistical bias towards conceiving female children in the wake of catastrophes such as the September 11 attacks. (Links are welcome; Google wouldn’t cough anything up.) This implies that females do have biological mechanisms for altering the rules of conception in response to stress. But this (obviously) drew on a pool of females not directly subject to survival scenarios; the stress was secondary over most or all involved in these statistics. And that doesn’t say anything directly about the overall likelihood of conception under stressful circumstances.
So is a damsel in distress more or less likely to conceive? Any scientists care to answer? (No game theory or other pie-in-the-sky stuff, please; I can do that easily enough by myself. I only want practical biology here.)