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The Human Female, Pregnancy, And The Birth Of One Or More Healthy Offspring? Essay

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For the human female, pregnancy is a period of time that is celebrated in most cultures. However, reaching the point where a pregnancy successfully results in the birth of one or more healthy offspring can take more than one attempt. Wilcox et al. (1988) provided the conservative estimate that thirty-one percent of all pregnancies were unintentionally lost, with twenty-two percent of pregnancies being lost before they were clinically detected using delicate detection of hCG hormone levels in a sample the pregnant woman’s urine. There are many unique health risks, such as a woman being diagnosed with endometriosis, that increase a woman’s chances of having a spontaneous abortion (Santulli et al., 2016). But for healthy women without any observable health risks, for the rate of spontaneous to be abortion this high when healthcare is arguably the best it has ever been in all human history makes it is worth examining the possibility that spontaneous abortion might carry an evolutionary advantage for humans that doesn’t make sense in a simply modern context. Before looking at the potential factors that cause a woman to have a spontaneous abortion, it would be beneficial to examine the parameters that define an atypical pregnancy. It is simple to define a typical human pregnancy as the birth of one healthy child per gestation, so an atypical pregnancy would result in something different. A common variation that occurs in human pregnancy is the gestation of multiple fetuses.

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