Sex roles

I got this quote off this blog:

“Would the abortion debate be a different landscape if, every time two people had sex, it was a surprise who might end up pregnant?”

I don’t know if she had women’s rights, abortion laws or just philosophy in mind, but I just thought of the biological implications, the surprise part. Or rather, how it would affect parental investment. The reason why female humans are pregnant, is because already from the beginning they have more to loose. An ovule is very much larger than sperm and so from the start, a female has put much more energy into the offspring. Depending on how much care the young need, the parental investment can be large or small.

But just a few facts before I continue. Most of the animals on this earth leave their young to care for themselves. It is quite uncommon to be a parent at all. After that, most animals with a spine (just like us) live in water and of those who do look after their young, most of them are fishes and there the male cares for the young. Or maybe both, but then in equal amounts. So don’t think that female humans are pregnant just because all females are pregnant.

Because we were stupid enough to leave the water, we still need to keep out eggs wet. But when frogs keeps their eggs in the water and birds make shells to keep the water from evaporating, we just keep the eggs inside us. But what if we exchanged heritable material on the outside and the one individual in better condition was the one to be pregnant? That sounds much smarter to me. But then everybody needed to be able to make both kinds and basically be hermaphrodites (have two complete sets of reproduction apparatuses).

Over to abortion debate. I think the debate definitely would have been different if both could be pregnant and you never knew who it would be. But I don’t think it has that much to do with guys being pregnant, but rather that both sides could be. Now it is an issue because girls always get pregnant, they always end up paying the price (in time, not money necessarily). And everything is different because of it. Imagine if guys could get pregnant if raped. Or that the rapist (no matter the sex) could get pregnant? Right now it is impossible to separate the effects of being pregnant and the effects of being a girl on your life (just hear statistics talking here), so it would revolutionize our legal system, parent’s rights to their children and everything.

Now you just think about that for a moment.

2 thoughts on “Sex roles

  1. Hehehe. Veldig bra! Ser det for meg om det hadde vært 50/50 for hvem som ble gravid :p tror folk hadde passet ganske mye mer på!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *