It’s not news that many men are a bit confused about what goes on down there in cis women — that is, in the general area where babies are made, from conception to childbirth.
It’s bad enough — although also very funny — to see this sort of stuff from internet randoes. But some guys are so proud of their opinions on the subject that they sign their names to it. And some of these guys — well, technically just one of these guys — are, I mean is, Salt Lake County, Utah, Councilman Dave Alvord.
Sorry, for a second there I wasn’t sure I was going to make it out of that sentence alive.
Anyway, here’s Dave:
Where to even start? I’ll start with the name. I don’t like it that this guy has the same first name as me, even if he’s using the shorter one-syllable version. This name ain’t big enough for both of us, and I ain’t gonna leave.
And second, “chord?” Really? A chord is something you play with multiple fingers on a piano, or strum on a guitar. A cord is, well, a thick string-like thing , which is what an umbilical cord is, though, and I’m simplifying here, it’s used more as a kind of pipe to transfer oxygen and nutrients to the fetus and remove waste.
Which brings us to the next point: Dave here (not me, the other one) thinks that the umbilical cord IS’NT ATTACHED TO THE WOMAN? Dude, of course it’s attached to the woman; she made it with her own body, along with the fetus itself. If the chord isn’t attached to the woman, how do you think the fetus gets food and air? That it’s just floating there in some lady’s tummy eating chicken tendies and taking the occasional hit from an air pipe?
And the placenta? It’s attached to the uterine wall, helping the umbilical cord with that feeding and air stuff. It’s not the same as the amniotic sac, in case you’re thinking of tweeting about that too, Dave.
Anyway, Dave got himself corrected by a large number of people on the internet. But he didn’t back down. Instead, he just kept going. He quietly dropped the bit about the umbilical chord cord not being attached to the mother, and started going on about how the placenta was part of the baby. Which is sort of like saying that a gas pump is part of a car (to once again simplify things a teensy bit). The placenta is an organ created in the body — and part of the body. The mother’s body creates it and uses it to keep the fetus going and growing and it’s a part of the mother’s body. The fetus doesn’t make it out of uterine Play-Doh. Which is not a thing, I’m pretty sure.
This stuff is legitimately a little confusing. I hope my simplifications don’t make me sound as dumb as Dave. But seriously, I don’t think I could top the idea that the placenta and umbilical cord are just floating around doing nothing in the womb. Anyway. I’ll stop now. All this talk of nutrients and air has made me hungry and gasping for breath.
Not really! Joke!
In conclusion, no one who can’t tell the difference between a chord and a cord has any business mansplaining human reproduction on the internet.
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Actually I believe the placenta genuinely is grown by the fetus and comprised of fetal cells. HOWEVER, it’s still pretty useless without being able to leech off the blood supply of the uterus, which does NOT belong to the fetus.
Alvord has apparently heard the fact that the umbilical cord and most of placenta are derived from fetal, rather than maternal tissue. His initial description of it got seriously garbled due to either misunderstanding or extremely sloppy communication.
Anti-choicers love to point out that the embryo/fetus is genetically distinct from the mother, right from conception. I think they’re really trying to express and justify, in vaguely understood scientific terms, their intuitive sense that a fetus must be a separate human being because it goes on to develop into one and live independently. Except the placenta/umbilical cord part of the fetus, which detaches from the baby (as well as mother) and dies.
Well, if the placenta detaches badly enough during pregnancy parent and child can both die without emergency medical attention, so that passes my personal definition of “connected”.
One of the things I like about the name David is it seems so everyday but it’s so ancient. Like Mark and Luke and Zach. I think its cool there might have been Daves walking round 10 thousand years ago. My own name is a 20th century one.
David has, sadly, failed to note the most unpleasant aspect of the above story.
People voted for this moron.
Guess this means a pregnant person can smoke or drink alcohol right up until delivery, right?
Sex ed is failing in the US.
@milotha:
Sex ed has always been terrible in the US. Part of the problem is the sue-happy parents who don’t want their poor widdle babies exposed to… that… that. It will corrupt their brains and get them all kinds of pregnant and maybe syphilis. So in most places all kids get is the absolute bare minimum, aimed entirely at cishets, with maybe a bit of lying and scaremongering mixed in. And they won’t even get that if they’re absent the one time it’s taught… or the parents can and do opt them out… or they move to a new school district where it’s taught in an earlier grade.
There’s been attempts to improve things a little in some states… but the backlash usually shuts that down hard.
@Snowberry:
Sex ed has always been terrible in the US. Part of the problem is the sue-happy parents who don’t want their poor widdle babies exposed to… that… that. It will corrupt their brains and get them all kinds of pregnant and maybe syphilis. So in most places all kids get is the absolute bare minimum, aimed entirely at cishets, with maybe a bit of lying and scaremongering mixed in. And they won’t even get that if they’re absent the one time it’s taught… or the parents can and do opt them out… or they move to a new school district where it’s taught in an earlier grade.
And then precious innocent little Chastity finds herself with no vocabulary or context whatsoever to explain what just happened with Pastor Pedobear or Coach Groper.
Sex ed in the USA – smh. In high school our coach provided sex ed and a lot of incorrect info. I booked a speaker from Planned Parenthood then. I don’t think schools would let teens book speakers nowadays.
Here’s some possibly worse crap from a male Repugnican politician: The baby [sic] grows inside the woman’s stomach. Yes, THAT stomach. The uterus just wanders around the woman’s body making her hysterical. [As the ancient Greeks knew.]
No, I couldn’t be arsed to save the tweets. But believe me, they were real.
Also recall the dumbass Repug man not too long ago who wanted physicians to perform pelvic exams on women via telehealth.
Wait, that first guy calls himself “unclefather”?
That has some nasty implications, and also explains why he doesn’t understand why a lady would have a WAP.
On the Sex Ed in the USA convo – do you folks get the menstruation talk around 11-13 years old? The UK is pretty patchy of the sex ed stuff – although I remember a few well meaning attempts (including one from a local Christian group regarding abortion. To be fair they were quite sweet). One thing they definitely covered though was periods, maybe because we were a girls school.
@GSS ex-noob
‘unclefather’ is actually a popular shitpost account on tumblr akin to thebootydiaries. This is just their twitter account.
Wait, hold up, hold on, hold the phone, are we just going to gloss over the part where he says “It is done in greater proportion to black babies”? To clarify, I’m not saying that his point is valid, I’m wondering why that particular canard wasn’t addressed.
@Lollypop:
On the Sex Ed in the USA convo – do you folks get the menstruation talk around 11-13 years old?
I (who had inside plumbing) was prepared for it by about 10, and knew what was happening when menarche hit the following year; in 1972 in my social circles, that was on the early side of the bell curve but well within the normal range. Nowadays, I’d start at about 8–age 9 being the lower end of what’s considered the normal menarcheal range.
I‘m not the person to ask when (or what) those of Us Folks with outside plumbing learnEd about that particular fundamental fact of human biology.
Slightly off topic, but his opening comment puts me in mind of something I read recently arguing that there’s reason to believe the uterus primarily developed not as protection for so much as protection against the developing embryo, which has no problem implanting in and starting to feed off of whatever tissue happens to be handy, however disastrous the eventual consequences may be. No, it’s not part of the woman’s body, and she should have the right to remove it if she so chooses.
runinbackground:
US anti-abortion zealots often claim (esp. to Black audiences) that abortion is “Black genocide” because it “targets” disproportionately Black “babies”. I think what might be happening in reality is that Black people are more likely (compared to white people or general population) to be poor, have poor access to contraception and the resources needed for parenting, and therefore need abortion more often.
Meanwhile, many US white nationalists (who are generally opposed to abortion, often zealously so) seem to be laboring under the impression that abortion is part of a system that keeps white birth rates down (also relative to other races, apparently) and therefore contributes to “white displacement” or “white genocide”. I think racists probably have difficulty considering the effect of abortion on Black birth rates, because they can only imagine Black people doing stereotypical Black things, and getting an abortion isn’t one of those.
@kwhazit
I read the same thing, I believe; this is the one I saw: https://www.reddit.com/r/prochoice/comments/vqbxt0/found_on_facebook_the_uterus_is_not_for_nurturing/
@full metal ox
Yes I agree, I started my period early and was pretty unprepared. My interest I guess is from instutitions that are bad at sex ed may not be great at reproductive health generally. I hate to think what that purity culture does to pap smear rates, for example.
In 5th grade public school, we watched a film about menstruation. I was prepared. I didn’t learn about birth control or tampons until later.
When I was a kid, we girls learned about menstruation. The boys were elsewhere, doing I don’t know what. I don’t recall any birth control info, other than it was strictly for married women and only for a short time, obviously. /s
Correction: the placenta is made of embryonic tissue. It’s genetically identical to the embryo, not the mother,
I was chatting to a lad about this a couple of months ago and in his school, while the girls were learning about periods, the boys were being told not to trespass on railway lines. So apparently they’re not just fine with boys being completely ignorant about all things menstrual, they also don’t care if girls get hit by trains?
My mother explained pregnancy, menstruation, embryos, placentas, genitalia etc when she was pregnant with my brother. I was two and a half.
Age 6 I got into a fight with a kid who said “bagina” instead of “vagina”. He had no trouble with the “v” sound, he just wanted to irk me. He succeeded.
Age 15 or 16 we had “hygiene” class in which we were told not to smoke, how babies were born, and what menstruation was.
Major case of shutting the barn door late.
fwiw, I was born in 1959.
@Mrs. Morley:
My mother explained pregnancy, menstruation, embryos, placentas, genitalia etc when she was pregnant with my brother. I was two and a half.
She sounds like an awesome mom. (There were gaps in the details of my formative sex education that didn’t directly concern reproduction or drainage—those illustrations in the Miracle Of Womanhood pink pamphlets that came with my starter kit, and the ones included in tampon packages, only ever portrayed cross-sections in profile, and good luck trying to find a hymen or clitoris. I was twenty by the time I figured out that I had the usual parts in the usual positions; Hustler magazine cannot possibly have been the resource my parents intended.)