I can’t remain silent.
I can’t disclose details, but sometimes a chart bruises my heart.
Sometimes, a chart relays something so horrific, I cannot compartmentalize it away.
Sometimes, I can’t detach.
There is no surviving an ectopic pregnancy without treatment. I looked and looked to find a case where a woman/person survived an ectopic pregnancy without treatment and it’s so vanishingly small a chance, I couldn’t find a single instance of a survival without terminating the pregnancy.
The problem with an ectopic pregnancy is that it grows in a place where the placenta cannot develop and access an adequate blood supply. The embryo grows with out nutrients or hormones. There will be no baby. Yes, the embryo still has cell division, but the embryo doesn’t develop into a fetus. The outlier is the embryo dies by the 13th week at the latest.
Embryos become fetuses around the 8th week when they embed into the uterus. An ectopic pregnancy never embeds into the uterus, therefore, it’s not considered a fetus (because that embedment does not occur).
The only treatment is terminating the pregnancy; however the techniques used are different than what is used for an abortion.
No, the embryo cannot be implanted into the uterus. It will not embed in the lining of the womb.
The developing placenta once removed from it’s initial placement, cannot reconnect to the mother’s blood supply once it is detached. The placenta in an ectopic pregnancy never attached to the mother’s blood supply.
Our current medical technology cannot produce this miracle.
Telling this fairy tale to women/person is cruel.
This fairy tale comes up every so often and a family believing the embryo can be implanted in the uterus declines to have any treatment including having the fallopian tube removed if it’s an advanced ectopic pregnancy. The women/person either comes back after the tube bursts risking sepsis, terminal blood loss and death or s/he doesn’t come back because s/he died.
No one survives an untreated ectopic pregnancy.
No one.
I haven’t found one instance of survival without treatment.
Untreated ectopic pregnancy is a leading cause of maternal death due to pregnancy.
Anti-abortion activists would have us believe all manner of junk pseudoscience. The reason an ectopic pregnancy cannot be reimplanted has to do with the embryo’s blood supply. For some reason the fertilized egg never made it through the fallopian tube to the uterus. It embedded outside the womb, 90% of the time inside the fallopian tube, 10% of the time outside of both the uterus and fallopian tube. The developing placenta does not have access to an adequate blood supply. The undernourished embryo grows with the mother feeling more and more lower abdominal pain. It grows until the tube bursts, which causes heavy bleeding and a lot more pain. After bursting, the embryo starts to decay inside the mother. If she doesn’t have surgery to remove the embryo and the ruined fallopian tube, she’ll become septic and death will soon follow. The current standard is to terminate the pregnancy ideally within 12 hours of diagnosis with 24 hours being the long outlier. This condition is very serious.
So why do anti-abortion activists continue to demand and ectopic pregnancy be implanted in the uterus? In their view, an ectopic pregnancy would implant like an in-vitro fertilized egg would implant. There’s a couple problems with this idea. Timing is the main problem. In-vitro embryo transfer occurs 3-5 days after egg retrieval and fertilization. The timing is subject to strict protocols and there’s next to no wiggle room for this process.
An ectopic pregnancy is never planned. It’s a finding. It’s usually diagnosed 4-12 weeks gestation. Far past the 3-5 days an in-vitro pregnancy targeted embryo transfer. Ectopic pregnancy is determined only after the mother/pregnant person is in quite a bit of pain. The best predictor of having an ectopic pregnancy is already having had an ectopic pregnancy, but even if one is detected ahead of disaster, the treatment is termination of the pregnancy. That’s all that can be done. One OB/Gyn once explained to me that embryo cannot be retrieved from a fallopian tube because even if they could successfully dissect out the embryonic sac and what would normally be the placenta; the uterus wouldn’t have an adequate endometrial lining ready to receive the embryo, and the damaged placenta wouldn’t embed. The placenta once detached will not re-attach, so it cannot embed. The reason OB/Gyns generally remove the fallopian tube is that even if they could open the tube retrieve the embryo and sac, the tube would develop scar tissue where it was sliced open. Making it more likely the another egg in a future cycle could get caught in the scar tissue as it flows down the tube. Our current medical technology does not have xenograft fallopian tubes. No such thing as a Gore-Tex fallopian tube graft like there are vascular grafts as is used for bypass grafts and renal dialysis/vascular access patients.
Reconstructing a fallopian tube is mostly abandoned medical technology because in-vitro works better and is more reliable and might be more cost effective. Often people have the tubes reattached only to not become pregnant or they have an ectopic pregnancy and they end up doing in-vitro anyway.
So, if any anti-abortion activist ever tells you that an ectopic does not require an abortion, you tell them that lie will kill pregnant people, mothers, wives, sisters, aunts and daughters, as well as non-cisgender people. That lie kills.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Update: I saw this story was not gender inclusive. This my fault. I went back to make these corrections and did, but I might not have caught all of them.