Foetus Quotes

Just as the unwanted pregnancy, there are unwanted people in your life you should strive to abort, and such abortion is not sin, nor harm, but the eradication of a destructive foetus.

There was no one to be seen so she gave in freely to her sobs as she made her way home, pressed her arms against her stomach; the pain lodged in there like an ill-tempered foetus. Let a person in and he hurts you. There was a reason why she kept her relationships brief. Don't let them in. Once they're inside they have more potential to hurt you. Comfort yourself. You can live with the anguish as long as it only involves yourself. As long as there is no hope.

Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the “physical pleasure of turning actual pages” and how ebook will “never replace the real thing”. Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They’re only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.

Many of us shrink from judicial execution of even the most horrible human criminals, while we cheerfully countenance the shooting without trial of fairly mild animal pests. Indeed we kill members of other harmless species as a means of recreation and amusement. A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thinks and — according to recent experimental evidence — may even be capable of learning a form of human language.

The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time.

All the eggs a woman will every carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old foetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as en egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother's womb, and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born, and this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother.

As for the new world war that's waiting in the womb of time, a healthily developed foetus, who can say what will spark it, how destructive it will be? We've already played at this war in film and fiction, indicating that there's a part of us that desperately wants it. What nonsense writers and filmmakers talk when they say that their terrible visions are meant as a warning. [...] It's sheer wish fulfillment. War... is a culture pattern. It's a legitimate mode of cultural transmission....

Babies cry at birth because it is the first time they experience separation from love.

Mother was a falconer. The one who stood on the hills and watched, trying to stave off whatever ill she perceived was coming to her children. She owned copies of our minds in the pockets of her own mind and so could easily sniff troubles early in their forming, the same way sailors discern the forming foetus of a coming storm.

What on earth did you want with an early Christian sarcophagus, Elliot?" "To put myself in it, my dear fellow. It was of very good design, and I thought it would balance the font on the other side of the entrance, but those early Christians were stumpy little fellows and I shouldn't have fitted in. I wasn't going to lie there till the Last Trump with my knees doubled up to my chin like a foetus. Most uncomfortable.

Today smugglers are vilified and pursued like abortionists were thirty years ago. No one questions the laws and world order that condone their existence. Yet surely, among those who trade in refugees, as among those who once traded in foetuses, there must be some sense of honor.

Abort the thought, save the baby

For quite some time now, like the foetus inside a womb, a terrible knowledge had been ripening within me and filling my soul with frightened foreboding: that the Infinite Universe is inflating at incredible speed, like some ridiculous soap bubble. I become obsessed with a miser's piercing anxiety whenever I allow myself to think that the Universe may be slipping out into space, like water through cupped hands, and that, ultimately—perhaps even today, perhaps not till tomorrow or for several light years—it will dissolve for ever into emptiness, as though it were made not of solid matter but only of fleeting sound.

The foetus is the property of the entire society.Anyone having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity.

No child, still less a foetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It’s an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit.

Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of "instinctual wisdom." Thus it should work like the homing instinct of pigeons and the formation of the foetus in the womb - without verbalizing the process of knowing "how" it does it. The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between "I" and my experience.

If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even learn to toddle.

This was a time when the government had implemented birth control policies called ‘family planning’ to keep population growth under control. Abortion due to medical problems had been legal for ten years at that point, and checking the sex of the foetus and aborting females was common practice, as if ‘daughter’ was a medical problem.1 This went on throughout the 1980s, and in the early 1990s, the very height of the male-to-female ratio

Her eyes bled from venomous anger... Her flower had been gruesomely deflowered... Her life had slowly turned into a blunder... There was no more thinking further.... She would rather become a Foetus murderer Than end up a "hopeless" mother.... Of course, she found peace in the former Until later years of emotional trauma Oh, the foetus hunt was forever! The only thing you should abort is the thought of aborting your baby. Stop the hate and violence against innocent children.

Science cannot tell you whether abortion is wrong, but it can point out that the (embryological) continuum that seamlessly joins a non-sentient foetus to a sentient adult is analogous to the (evolutionary) continuum that joins humans to other species. If the embryological continuum appears to be more seamless, this is only because the evolutionary continuum is divided by the accident of extinction. Fundamental principles of ethics should not depend on the accidental contingencies of extinction.* To repeat, science cannot tell you whether abortion is murder, but it can warn you that you may be being inconsistent if you think abortion is murder but killing chimpanzees is not. You cannot have it both ways.

A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet

The face of Eisenhower beamed up at me, bald and blank as the face of a foetus in a bottle.

Puppetry of the Foetus Dr Gunther von Hagens uses latest scientific mini-stick techniques to poke foetuses inside the womb into performing children’s tales with a bloody twist.

No child, still less a foetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It's an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit.

Just like a human foetus, while in the uterus, retrieves and assimilates the components that allow its physical body to become whole and fit to emerge into the outer reality, the third dimension serves the purpose of shamanic pregnancy, which is about retrieving and integrating the fragmented pieces of the soul, finally giving birth to the multidimensional self.

But canst thou only die, withered embryo, foetus steeped in gall and scalding tears? Miserable abortion, dost thou think thou canst taste death, thou who hast never known life? If only God exists, that he may damn me. I hope for it. I wish it. God, I hate Thee! dost Thou hear? Overwhelm me with Thy damnation. To compel Thee to, I spit in Thy face. I must find an eternal hell, to exhaust the eternity of rage which consumes me.

Er kleeft verdriet in me, als drabberige stroop, de hele dag al, eigenlijk al jaren, eigenlijk sedert mijn conceptie. Vandaar dat ik zo moeilijk adem. Als mensconcept voelde ik me al ongemakkelijk in de uit angst bestaande donkerte, die in donkerte en angst toenam naarmate ik van zaadcel uitdijde tot embryo, foetus, vachtloze rat zonder tanden om de kabel door te knagen en een mes had ik ook al niet. In mijn achterhoofd is met een bijl een kloof geslagen waar ik met mijn vingertoppen in kan en dan mijn hersens met tikjes voel bewegen, dat zijn mijn gedachten, ik denk veel.

A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thinks and — according to recent experimental evidence — may even be capable of learning a form of human language.

It is strange that God, who is beyond the limits of time, manifests Himself within time and its transformations. If you don’t know “where” God is – and people sometimes ask such questions – you have to look at everything that changes and moves, that doesn’t fit into a shape, that fluctuates and disappears: the surface of the sea, the dances of the sun’s corona, earthquakes, the continental drift, snows melting and glaciers moving, rivers flowing to the sea, seeds germinating, the wind that sculpts mountains, a foetus developing in its mother’s belly, wrinkles near the eyes, a body decaying in the grave, wines maturing, or mushrooms growing after a rain. God is present in every process. God is vibrating in every transformation. Now He is there, now there is less of Him, but sometimes He is not there at all, because God manifests Himself even in the fact that He is not there. People – who themselves are in fact a process – are afraid of whatever is impermanent and always changing, which is why they have invented something that doesn’t exist – invariability, and recognised that whatever is eternal and unchanging is perfect. So they have ascribed invariability to God, and that was how they lost the ability to understand Him.

The human seed, this mass from which I was formed, is totally corrupt with faults and sins. The material itself is faulty. The clay, so to speak, out of which this vessel began to be formed is damnable. What more do you want? This is how I am; this is how all men are. Our very conception, the very growth of the foetus in the womb, is sin, even before we are born and begin to be human beings.

Consider again the mated pair with which we began the chapter. Both partners, as selfish machines, ‘want’ sons and daughters in equal numbers. To this extent they agree. Where they disagree is in who is going to bear the brunt of the cost of rearing each one of those children. Each individual wants as many surviving children as possible. The less he or she is obliged to invest in any one of those children, the more children he or she can have. The obvious way to achieve this desirable state of affairs is to induce your sexual partner to invest more than his or her fair share of resources in each child, leaving you free to have other children with other partners. This would be a desirable strategy for either sex, but it is more difficult for the female to achieve. Since she starts by investing more than the male, in the form of her large, food-rich egg, a mother is already at the moment of conception ‘committed’ to each child more deeply than the father is. She stands to lose more if the child dies than the father does. More to the point, she would have to invest more than the father in the future in order to bring a new substitute child up to the same level of development. If she tried the tactic of leaving the father holding the baby, while she went off with another male, the father might, at relatively small cost to himself, retaliate by abandoning the baby too. Therefore, at least in the early stages of child development, if any abandoning is going to be done, it is likely to be the father who abandons the mother rather than the other way around. Similarly, females can be expected to invest more in children than males, not only at the outset, but throughout development. So, in mammals for example, it is the female who incubates the foetus in her own body, the female who makes the milk to suckle it when it is born, the female who bears the brunt of the load of bringing it up and protecting it. The female sex is exploited, and the fundamental evolutionary basis for the exploitation is the fact that eggs are larger than sperms.

from Wilhelm Reich, the esoteric teachings of Secret Orders and Tantric practices. We believed that this "mixture" of ancient and modern wisdom would lead to the creation of the Magickal Child and Enlightenment. The idea of creating a homunculus or a Magickal Child is ancient. The alchemists experimented with the homunculus idea for centuries. Even as late as the 1970's reports were circulated that some students of the late Frater Albertus had created life using alchemical means. I am not qualified to comment on the accuracy or validity of these reports; however, the idea of using Sexual practices for the purpose of Enlightenment and incarnating "souls" or psychic energies has been a goal of most magical orders. The idea of creating or generating a race to heal the planet and help man to evolve is a desire as old as history itself. In fact, influencing the characteristics of the foetus by incantations, prayer and other means is common. Some parents today for example use various means from

In the winter of 1987 India was full of iskeems that had gone awry. Agricultural iskeems, political iskeems, economic iskeems, educational iskeems, stop black money iskeems, attract white tourists iskeems, drinkable water iskeems, animal protection iskeems, women's welfare iskeems, nurture children iskeems, don't scan female foetus iskeems, privatization iskeems, medical iskeems, entertainment iskeems, old India iskeems and new India iskeems. We had mastered the art of nomenclature from the white man. Grand labels could disguise unforgivable things.

The issue of the mysterious power of transmission arises here. What do you transmit to your child? Blonde hair, blue eyes, very small feet? But also a taste for cigarettes, panettone, boys with guitars? Is this foetus’s life destined to be filled with suitcases packed in the middle of the night, suitcases that will always return to their point of departure some weeks later? In other words, is this foetus destined to relive, again and again, emotions encoded in a fossilized region of its brain and thus, almost simultaneously, experience love and the end of the world, hope and lightning, a romantic comedy and a horror film?

The first music I ever heard was only one hundred and sixty days after I was conceived. Da dum Da dum Da dum Have you ever heard the sound a blessing makes? This is it. The first thing I ever saw was only one hundred and eighty days after I was conceived. It was a bright light soft like clouds warm like candles. Have you ever seen the colour of a blessing? This is it. The first time I ever suffered was in the three thousand and sixty seconds after I was born. I listened for her heartbeat. I searched for her light. I cried for the first time until she was born. Have you ever known a blessing? A twin is it.

For all the drama, romance and seeming magic of childbearing, what happy expectant parents are really celebrating is nothing more than a parasite-host relationship. At the moment of conception, an effectively alien creature commandeers the mother's womb and uses it as a sort of beachhead from which to seize control of her entire body.

when a woman herself becomes pregnant, it is as if she links directly back into an intact matrilineal network where all the mothers, all the wombs, all the foetuses and infants are connected. This does something peculiar to maternal temporality: it has the ability to stretch time out in linear directions to the distant past and future, and equally to concertina in upon itself to a point that is always in the present. Folding out, folding in, the past and the future, hinged together like delicate butterfly wings. In the way that matryoshka dolls can be opened out and displayed in a long line from smallest to biggest, or packed one inside the other, becoming one body, one space, one time.

But it’s hard to make the case that the one-child policy advanced Chinese women’s rights when, balanced against urban women’s advancements, one considers the huge numbers of females killed at birth or abandoned, as well as aborted female foetuses. Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen estimates that infanticide and gendercide have contributed to a missing 100 million women in Asia. Roughly half of those would have been Chinese. With the current gender imbalance, women are certainly more valuable, but not necessarily more valued. In addition to a rising anti-feminist backlash, the female shortage has resulted in increasing commodification of women. Prostitution and sex trafficking in China have been on the rise for the past decade, though nobody has precise figures, for enforcement is lax and transparency low. In 2007, the US State Department estimated that a minimum of ten to twenty thousand victims are trafficked domestically within China yearly, earning traffickers more than $7 billion annually, more than selling drugs or weapons.

The expression "fee thulumaatin thalaathin," translated into English as "a threefold darkness," indicates three dark regions involved during the development of the embryo. These are: a) The darkness of the abdomen b) The darkness of the womb c) The darkness of the placenta As we have seen, modern biology has revealed that the embryological development of the baby takes place in the manner revealed in the verse, in three dark regions. Moreover, advances in the science of embryology show that these regions consist of three layers each. The lateral abdominal wall comprises three layers: the external oblique, the internal oblique, and transverses abdominis muscles.91 Similarly, the wall of the womb also consists of three layers: the epimetrium, the myometrium and the endometrium.92 Similarly again, the placenta surrounding the embryo also consists of three layers: the amnion (the internal membrane around the foetus), the chorion (the middle amnion layer) and the decidua (outer amnion layer.)93 It is also pointed out in this verse that a human being is created in the mother's womb in three distinct stages. Indeed, modern biology has also revealed that the baby's embryological development takes place in three distinct regions in the mother's womb. Today, in all the embryology textbooks studied in departments of medicine, this subject is taken as an element of basic knowledge. For instance, in Basic Human Embryology, a fundamental reference text in the field of embryology, this fact is stated as follows: The life in the uterus has three stages: pre-embryonic; first two and a half weeks, embryonic; until the end of the eight week, and fetal; from the eight week to labor.

Harvard University biologist David Haig has spent the last few years systematically debunking the notion that the relationship between a mother and her unborn child is anything like the rose-tinted idyll that one usually finds on the glossy covers of maternity magazines. In fact, it is anything but. Pre-eclampsia, a condition of dangerously high blood pressure in pregnant women, is brutally kick-started by nothing short of a foetal coup d’état. It begins with the placenta invading the maternal bloodstream and initiating what, in anyone’s book, is a ruthless biological heist – an in utero sting operation to draw out vital nutrients. And I’m not just talking about baby Gordon Gekkos here – I’m talking about all of us. The curtain-raiser is well known to obstetricians. The foetus begins by injecting a crucial protein into the mother’s circulation which forces her to drive more blood, and therefore more nourishment, into the relatively low-pressure placenta. It’s a scam, pure and simple, which poses a significant and immediate risk to the mother’s life. ‘The bastard!’ says Andy. ‘Shall we get some olives?’ ‘And it’s by no means the only one,’ I continue. In another embryonic Ponzi scheme, foetal release of placental lactogen counteracts the effect of maternal insulin thereby increasing the mother’s blood sugar level and providing an excess for the foetus’s own benefit. ‘A bowl of the citrus and chilli and a bowl of the sweet pepper and basil,’ Andy says to the waiter. Then he peers at me over the menu. ‘So basically what you’re saying then is this: forget the Gaddafis and the Husseins. When it comes to chemical warfare it’s the unborn child that’s top dog!’ ‘Well they definitely nick stuff that isn’t theirs,’ I say. ‘And they don’t give a damn about the consequences.’ Andy smiles. ‘So in other words they’re psychopaths!’ he says. BABY

The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time.

Let’s face it, he could have gone with a poster of Obama dressed as an actual cannibal (loincloth, human bones around his neck), grinning as he stirred a huge cooking pot swirling with white babies, aborted foetuses, bloodstained dollar bills and topped off with the tag line ‘DO YOU WANT SOME FUCKING MORE OF THIS, WHITEY?’, and 30 per cent of America would have stood up and fucking cheered.

Reports confirm twins. ‘Thanks for saving my life.’ Foetus clasps her brother’s fingers. #finger by khadija afinwala

For although like you I could be a spokesman denying rumours from below that predefer to be stifled till the return of the repressed prodigal, I could also be a streetsweeper cleaning up the unmanuring dung dropped from above, which will have to be collected up and sorted out and recycled maybe into serviceable goods, as in psychoanalysis, a genie from a plastic bottle. When the magic cycle of genuine shit will have been replaced by the chemicycle of pure electronic thought ever expanding, more and more unbiodegradable, the heart of the earth will stop, shrivel to a curled up foetus to be ejected lifeless and wither to a moon without even the attracting planet to encircle except the distant sungod dead because unseen unfelt by anyone.

The lowest level of this modifying intermediate network is the spinal cord. The cord still possesses many features that were first developed in the segmented earthworm. It is largely made up of neurons completely contained within it, which form bridges between the sensory and motor elements throughout the whole body. Each peripheral nerve trunk still innervates a specific segment of the body, and still joins the cord at a specific level, creating a ganglion. Sensory signals entering into a single segment may be processed by its own ganglion, and cause localized motor response within the segment; or the signals may pass to adjacent segments, or be carried even further up or down the line, involving more ganglia in a more widely distributed response. In this way, the cord can monitor a large number of sensorimotor reactions without having to send signals all the way up to the brain. Thus stereotyped responses can be made without our having to “think” about them on a conscious level. Most of these localized and segmentally patterned responses are not the result of experience or training, but of genetically consistent wiring patterns in the internuncial network of the cord itself. These basic wiring patterns unfold in the foetus during the “mapping” process of the nervous system, and they have been pre-established by millions of years of development and usage. The spinal cord can be surgically sectioned from the higher regions of the internuncial net, and the experimental animal kept alive, so that we can isolate the range of responses that are primarily controlled by these cord reflexes. Almost all segmentally localized responses can be elicited, such as the knee jerk caused by tapping the tendon below the knee cap, or the elbow jerk caused by tapping the bicep tendon. These simple responses can also be spread into other segments, so that a painful prick on a limb causes the whole body to jerk away in a general withdrawal reflex. The bladder and rectum can be evacuated. A skin irritation elicits scratching, and the disturbance can be accurately located with a paw. Some of the basic postural and locomotive reflex patterns seem to reside in the wiring of the cord as well. If an animal with only its cord intact is assisted in getting up, it can remain standing on its own. The sensory signals from the pressure on the bottoms of the feet are evidently enough to trigger postural contractions throughout the body and hold the animal in the stance typical of its species. And if the animal is suspended with its legs dangling down, they will spontaneously initiate walking or running movements, indicating that the fundamental sequential arrangements of the basic reflexes necessary for walking are in the cord also. All of these localized and intersegmental responses are rapid and automatic, follow specific routes through the spinal circuitry, and elicit stereotyped patterns of muscular response. Most of them appear to consistently use the same neurons, synapses, and motor units every time they are initiated.

the world’s cheapest small car, Tata’s Nano, worth only $1500. This toy-like ill-fated vehicle, whose destiny it was to look as if it had been prematurely brought into the world, more foetus than car, and whose birth was near abortive and then indefinitely delayed, this car, when it finally took to the road, turned out to have an engine that at times exploded mysteriously. Until 2009, it was seen to be Bengal’s quirky but irreplaceable mascot for development.

foetus. In the beginning her wailing would be tolerated for a short while

Amid anxiety and distress, sudden calm at the thought of the foetus one has been.

The relationship between obstetric drugs and sometimes ultimately fatal intoxication in adulthood is not accidental. Through amniotic fluid, the foetus develops a taste for the foods his mother prefers; this transmission is thought to assist the transition to nursing and, after weaning, to solids. The same transmission of preference applies to substances, meaning that a pregnant woman who drinks or uses drugs passes the preference to her foetus. Logically, this principle applies to the placental transference of obstetric drugs.

Regardless of the structure a society has, certain consequences exist as a result of biological sex. Women's bodies tell them when they are going to be mothers, while men become aware they are going to be fathers when a woman informs them. No mother can doubt her motherhood, while a father can never be fully sure. Men can abandon a foetus by walking out the door, women require a doctor and abortion rights. Men can have hundreds of babies a month, women can have one baby a year. Becoming a mother involves physical pain, becoming a father does not. Being a mother alters one's body, being a father does not. Women can feed babies with their bodies, men cannot. Women bleed every month, men do not. A penis can injure a vagina, a vagina cannot injure a penis.

C'est la mère qui nous fait naître au monde. Lové en son sein, le foetus découvre ses premières sensations, épurées, adoucies. Lumières, sons, caresses. Il baigne dans un univers d'éther dont il est le soleil, soudé à une chair qui lui est vouée et dévolue. Le ventre maternel, la matrice. Un état sans conscience, délivré du désir et de la peur.

The Punjab census for 2001 states that the ratio of women to men in the population is now 874 per thousand. In 1991 it was 882. The most widely given reason for this is the abortion of female foetuses. The practice, as in the UK, is unlikely to be confined to Sikhs but certainly includes them.

The lower the place of an animal in the animal kingdom, the more fertile it is, and the smaller an animal, the shorter its gestation period, and the lower the resistance of the foetus." —"Pregnancy with Multiple Foetuses", a chapter in a book found in a room

I’d imagined that I could feel something growing in my belly, something that wouldn’t become a proper foetus, but something much worse: a blackened, dead, and rotten fruit.

I know God well. He’s not kind and benevolent. He’s like us, capricious and evil and corrupted by power. How twisted do you have to be to invent birth and death? One moment you’re just nothingness, air, vacuum and poof . . . suddenly you’re a foetus trapped in a womb, a helpless baby, a confused toddler, an angst-ridden teenager, a depressed young person, a burdened middle-aged person and then you slowly rot to death.

Even though these individuals had seemed perfectly healthy at birth, something that had happened during their development in the womb affected them for decades afterwards. And it wasn’t just the fact that something had happened that mattered, it was when it happened. Events that take place in the first three months of development, a stage when the foetus is really very small, can affect an individual for the rest of their life. This is completely consistent with the model of developmental programming, and the epigenetic basis to this. In the early stages of pregnancy, where different cell types are developing, epigenetic proteins are probably vital for stabilising gene expression patterns. But remember that our cells contain thousands of genes, spread over billions of base-pairs, and we have hundreds of epigenetic proteins. Even in normal development there are likely to be slight variations in the expression of some of these proteins, and the precise effects that they have at specific chromosomal regions. A little bit more DNA methylation here, a little bit less there. The epigenetic machinery reinforces and then maintains particular patterns of modifications, thus creating the levels of gene expression. Consequently, these initial small fluctuations in histone and DNA modifications may eventually become ‘set’ and get transmitted to daughter cells, or be maintained in long-lived cells such as neurons, that can last for decades. Because the epigenome gets ‘stuck’, so too may the patterns of gene expression in certain chromosomal regions. In the short term the consequences of this may be relatively minor. But over decades all these mild abnormalities in gene expression, resulting from a slightly inappropriate set of chromatin modifications, may lead to a gradually increasing functional impairment. Clinically, we don’t recognise this until it passes some invisible threshold and the patient begins to show symptoms.

By far the greatest numbers of our class are called placental (or eutherian) mammals. Humans, tigers, mice, blue whales – we all nourish our young in the same way. Our offspring undergo a really long developmental phase inside the mother, in the uterus. During this developmental stage, the young get their nourishment via the placenta. This large, pancake-shaped structure acts as an interface between the blood system of the foetus and the blood system of the mother. Blood doesn’t actually flow from one to the other. Instead the two blood systems pass so closely to one another that nutrients such as sugars, vitamins, minerals and amino acids can pass from the mother to the foetus. Oxygen also passes from the mother’s blood to the foetal blood supply. In exchange, the foetus gets rid of waste gases and other potentially harmful toxins by passing them back into the mother’s circulation.

So far, we’ve described imprinting in mainly phenomenological terms. Imprinted regions are stretches of the genome where we can detect parent-of-origin effects in offspring. But how do these regions carry this effect? In imprinted regions, certain genes are switched on or switched off, depending on how they were inherited. In the chromosome 11 example above, genes associated with placental growth are switched on and are very active in the copy of the chromosome inherited from the father. This carries risks of nutrient depletion for the mother who is carrying the foetus, and a compensatory mechanism has evolved. The copies of these same genes on the maternal chromosome tend to be switched off, and this limits the placental growth. Alternatively, there may be other genes that counterbalance the effects of the paternal genes, and these counter-balancing genes may be expressed mainly from the maternal chromosome.

Tell me, have you been blessed, and I use the term advisedly, with progeny?' 'Children?' 'Yes.' 'I have-' 'Don't. At our age they're not worth it.' 'I-' 'I'm talking from experience.' 'I don't doubt it,' says Poppy. 'Stone foetuses, all of them.' And Poppy, astonished, seems to know what this strange woman is talking about. It's what she has too. A fossil of grief that will never go away. Yes, thinks Ava in return, she knows what I'm on about. We can read each other's mind.

Hearing is one of the first senses to develop in a foetus-the ear has already begun to be formed in an eight-week-old foetus, and three months later is structurally complete. When we go to sleep, our perception of sound is the last sense to close off, and when we awake the first to start up again. And hearing, it's claimed, is the last sense to die at the end of life.

Knowing what causes differentiation in human skin pigmentation, fascinating though that is, does not furnish a satisfactory explanation for the phenomenon of racism. Similarly, the biological explanation for why one person is right-handed whilst another is left-handed, is of less interest than why, even recently, being left-handed was considered such a stigma (…).Do we need to know what ‘causes’ homosexuality or heterosexuality? (…)Would the discovery of a genetic basis to sexual attraction finally undermine discrimination against non-heterosexual people by establishing that variations of sexual orientation are all equally rooted in nature? Or would it furnish powerful homophobic forces with a new weapon in their drive to undermine and remove the rights of non-heterosexual people, perhaps even the right to life itself? The infamous remarks of a senior religious leader (a former Chief Rabbi) in the UK a few years ago that, if a gay gene could be discovered, he would consider it morally acceptable to test pregnant women and offer them the option of aborting any foetus likely to develop into a non-heterosexual person - homophobic extermination in the womb - indicate that the huge moral and cultural debates around sexuality and human identity will not be solved either way by the biological sciences alone

A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee.

In traditional Oriental societies, pregnant women were carefully screened from viewing or hearing any unpleasant sights or sounds, especially those which arouse anger, fear, grief, or any other extreme emotional response, in order to prevent adrenaline, cortisone, and other hazardous biochemicals from being released and transferred to their developing foetuses via the bloodstream. This may have prevented mental, emotional, and physical abnormalities in their offspring.

A child born of this method would have no biological father.” “True, but the father’s biological contribution is of minimal importance here. The mother will think of her husband as the child’s father, so her imagination will impart a combination of her own and her husband’s appearance and character to the foetus. That will not change. And I hardly need mention that name impression would not be made available to unmarried women.

Ze had niet gevraagd of ze het mocht zien. Daar voelde ze zich pas schuldig over toen vriendinnen haar begonnen te vragen of het een jongetje of een meisje was. En of ze hem of haar nog had vastgehouden. Ze schrokken toen ze hun zei dat er geen begrafenis of crematie was geweest. Ze schrokken echt. Wat was er met het lijkje gebeurd? Had het ziekenhuis een aparte verbrandingsoven voor foetussen? Of werd alle afval samen verbrand? Ze hoedde zich ervoor dat woord in het bijzijn van haar vriendinnen te gebruiken. Afval. Later had haar eigen gynaecoloog zijn duim en wijsvinger uitgespreid om te tonen hoe groot het kindje was geweest. 'Hooguit zeventien centimeter. En waarschijnlijk met een chromosomale afwijking. Beter zo, mevrouw. Beter zo.' Zeventien. Dat was groter dan ze had gedacht.

Abortion due to medical problems had been legal for ten years at that point, and checking the sex of the foetus and aborting females was common practice, as if ‘daughter’ was a medical problem.

Organ for exchange of food nutrients, oxygen and waste products between the mother and the foetus

Ironically, in the Middle Ages, before the discovery of the human sperm and eggs, the Catholic Church taught that the soul entered the human foetus at the time of quickening, when the mother can first feel the foetus move inside her. But this is about 18–24 weeks of gestation, well after the time at which most abortions are performed, and even longer since the foetus was a preimplantation embryo, so this teaching has been quietly forgotten.

Human pluripotent stem cells are considered a suitable source of dopaminergic neurons because the supply of early human foetuses as graft donors is limited. Also, since they are obtained as a result of elective abortion, there are inevitably some ethical issues. Abortion is opposed by more people than oppose the use of human preimplantation embryos to grow embryonic stem cells. So there is a significant body of opinion who consider it is all right to use human embryonic stem cells but not all right to use human foetal grafts. Accordingly, Parkinson’s disease is usually listed among the priority diseases for treatment with human ES cells, or more recently, with iPS cells.

Fun fact: at 33 weeks, the foetus weighs almost the same as a pineapple. I don’t know about you, but I do not like the sound of a pineapple coming out of my vagina. No thank you.

There was something tragic in that sloppy and immoderate fertility: the misery of a creature struggling on the border of nothingness and death; the strange heroism of a femininity triumphant in its fecundity over the deformity of nature and the insufficiency of man. Yet her progeny revealed the cause of that maternal panic, that frenzy of birthing that had exhausted itself in abortive foetuses and an ephemeral generation of phantoms without blood or faces.

Knocking on their door, a panther's paw that rubbed until it became a pounding no one responded to. He tried the handle. They were there all right, fancy pretending like that, it wasn't as if he had disturbed them from sleeping. He coughed, and gasped, while walking rapidly up and down the landing. Should he go back into his room, shout from there, scream in fact, as though in the middle of a nightmare? He remained at the top of the stairs, cutoff from the rest of the house, the neighbourhood. Had they gone out, or were they dead— copulating too fast, too much? He moved down one stair head bowed considering the best way into the next event. The other doors had, during his stay, remained part of the walls, a slight murmur or hum of a radio escaped occasionally through a crack. But if he knocked, enquired the time, wouldn't the crack immediately be sealed, not even space for an eye, let alone his finger? He hovered on the front door step, two hundred yards from the Palais de Dance. Coloured tickets, spent out balloons, contraceptives divided pavement from road. Berg leaned slightly forward in order to see the pub clock. On his back he stared at the buildings that were giants advancing. Snatch the stars, pull out the moon for my navel, a button hole for my own personal identification. A shadow pushed itself across his face. He spread out his arms. I implore to be left where I am, as I have been given, I am satisfied, attuned to my world. He shut his eyes, and foetus-curled from the pavement. His lips, dry leaves, slowly parted. Have I ever been inside? Edith's tears, not coping, timid amongst robust mums. You discovered: dormitory pleasures, what is considered a pretty boy at the age of nine, to be taken advantage of.

There were open paddocks winking with sugar cane, and distant silos and then a billboard that they all yelped at because it showed a huge picture of a foetus alongside a picture of a young woman with her face in her hands, and some writing about life and God and mistakes and suffering.

In her book Knowing Woman, Irene Claremont de Castillejo writes: Woman, who is so intimately and profoundly concerned with life, takes death in her stride. For her, to rid herself of an unwanted foetus is as much in accord with nature as for a cat to refuse milk to a weakling kitten. It is man who has evolved principles about the sacredness of life … and women have passionately adopted them as their own. But principles are abstract Woman’s basic instinct is not concerned with the idea of life, but with the fact of life. The ruthlessness of nature which discards unwanted life is deeply ingrained in her.

I am hiding in the unused fridge in the shed, curled up like a foetus. My heart is running a marathon. My breath can't keep up. I may die tonight from fear - or his hands.

As conscious interest in the subject waned, however, a peculiar phenomenon occurred: more and more people began engaging in activities that were in essence magical, but without seeing them as such. This was due to the success of Freemasonry. To be led blindfold in bare feet or with one foot slip-shod, with clothes rearranged to expose parts of the body to the gaze of unseen initiates, to be challenged at the point of a sword, to have a noose around one’s neck like a prisoner bound for the gallows or a foetus entangled with its umbilical cord, and to swear loyalty before being ‘reborn’ into the light and welcomed into a select group: this is an experience that is based upon the same principles that were used by the Ancient Mystery Schools. They can also be observed to this day in the rites of passage of indigenous peoples around the world. Clearly such a ceremony touches upon the most basic human experiences of birth itself, of fearing death and of surviving ordeals – and it was this activity, clothed in all the pomp and ceremony required to make it acceptable to eighteenth-century gentlemen, that made Freemasonry such an enduring and successful phenomenon.

Sorrow fiddles the ribs and no man should put his hand on anything, there is no direct way; there is no direct way. The foetus of symmetry nourishes itself on cross purposes; this is its wonderful unhappiness...

Sorrow fiddles the ribs and no man should put his hand on anything; there is no direct way. The foetus of symmetry nourishes itself on cross purposes; this is its wonderful unhappiness...

Sorrow fiddles the ribs and no man should put his hand on anything; there is no direct way. The foetus of symmetry nourishes itself on cross purposes; this is its wonderful unhappiness

Already, by thirteen weeks, the taste buds are mature. A thirteen-week-old foetus weighs maybe an ounce, with no fat under the skin, no air in the lungs. Yet already they can not only swallow but taste, and these sips of fluid leave memories.

Against all our historically-minded culture (out of compassion for our present state), the only excitement is to be found in anticipation (out of impertinence towards our future state). Infinite spaces (Pascal would have nothing to fear today) have become advertising spaces. It is advertising which will fuel all the sidereal infrastructure of communication. No more silent stars or astrological signs. It is advertising which will fuel the no-osphere. The more we colonize virgin space, the more we enter the blackmail space of the fully developed advertising form. Embryos frozen, unfrozen and then reimplanted in the mother's womb. What becomes of frozen embryos whose parents have died accidentally? Orphans of artificial insemination? Billionaire foetuses? Fortunately there is a committee for embryo-genetic control and a commission for the ethics of human reproduction. But the orphans of the concept? What becomes of a frozen concept whose parents have died accidentally?

Sorrow fiddles the ribs and no man should put his hand on anything, there is no direct way; The foetus of symmetry nourishes itself on cross purposes; this is its wonderful unhappiness...

The foetus, expert at attachment, didn't dream that cramped canal would open into sound and light and love - it clung. It didn't care. The future looked like death to it, from there.

Toby Young has always embodied contradictions, even if simply by being interested in eugenics while looking like an unviable foetus.

Events that take place in the first three months of development, a stage when the foetus is really very small, can affect an individual for the rest of their life.

It is strange that God, who is beyond the limits of time, manifests Himself within time and its transformations. If you don't know 'where' God is--and people sometimes ask such questions--you have to look at everything that changes and moves, that doesn't fit into a shape, that fluctuates and disappears: the surface of the sea, the dances o the sun's corona, earthquakes, the continental drift, snows melting and glaciers moving, rivers flowering to the sea, seed germinating, the wind that sculpts mountains, a foetus developing in its mother's belly, wrinkles near the eyes, a body decaying in the grave, wines maturing, or mushrooms growing after a rain. God is present in every process. God is vibrating in every transformation.

in the crimson darkness, stewing warm on their cushion of peritoneum and gorged with blood-surrogate and hormones, the foetuses grew and grew or, poisoned, languished into a stunted Epsilonhood.