JustPearlyThings - August 01, 2023


Pearl Gets A Biology Lesson On Human Reproduction

Topics
abortion and mental health
Hosted by
Hannah Pearl Davis
You Won't Believe Who She CHEATED With The TRUTH On Why Men End RELATIONSHIPS

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

171.11

Word count

1,702

Sentence count

135

Harmful content

Misogyny

10

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk about pregnancy and birth control, and the controversial topic of whether or not fertilisation is possible in the early stages of pregnancy. We also discuss the benefits and drawbacks of different types of birth control and how they can affect the success of a pregnancy.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Oh, the copper IUD, you said you know for a fact that one works after.
00:00:04.940 That one we're pretty much certain does, yeah.
00:00:06.800 Okay, why?
00:00:08.700 So the reason we know that is when you have a pregnancy that implants into the uterus, 0.75
00:00:15.120 it releases beta-HCG, human chorionic gonadotropin,
00:00:19.820 which basically is what you get in pregnancy tests. 0.55
00:00:22.280 So when you take a pregnancy test, either a urine or a blood one,
00:00:25.200 it will measure this hormone that is released around the time of implantation.
00:00:30.900 What they have found is that for many women who use the copper coil,
00:00:35.120 they get this hormone released from their body.
00:00:38.240 They can identify it.
00:00:39.120 No way.
00:00:40.280 And so that suggests that the implantation has occurred or at least is occurring,
00:00:45.640 which means that fertilization must have happened.
00:00:47.780 So that's how they know for the copper IUD.
00:00:50.480 And so what? 0.95
00:00:51.380 Okay, this is going to be very dumbed down. 0.93
00:00:53.440 Sure. 0.99
00:00:54.080 All right, so the couple has sex. 0.97
00:00:56.860 Yeah. 0.95
00:00:57.100 They do, the egg and the sperm meet.
00:00:59.620 Yeah.
00:00:59.920 And then it's like on its way.
00:01:02.360 So like what does the IUD do?
00:01:04.820 So, yeah, so when the sperm and egg meet,
00:01:10.480 they will meet, you know, typically in the fallopian tube,
00:01:12.980 and then it will roll down as a zygote or embryo
00:01:16.320 towards the sort of body of the uterus,
00:01:18.560 and then it will implant into the wall of the uterus 0.89
00:01:21.300 where it can begin to grow and develop as a baby.
00:01:24.080 And so isn't it,
00:01:27.260 because I feel like I've seen,
00:01:28.580 because I was looking this up once,
00:01:30.320 isn't it like a lot of times it wouldn't make it there anyway?
00:01:34.300 Is that right?
00:01:35.880 So it's quite common that,
00:01:37.600 yeah, it's quite common that the embryo fails to implant.
00:01:41.660 Okay.
00:01:41.920 Now, some people say that shows that it's not a human being,
00:01:45.420 because if it was a human being,
00:01:46.660 then it would implant and you would get a, you know, a baby growing.
00:01:51.040 I don't think this is convincing because, you know,
00:01:54.320 would you say the same about a six-month-old child
00:01:57.880 in a country where most six-month-old children die?
00:02:01.140 Right.
00:02:01.420 In many parts of human history or parts of the world,
00:02:04.720 infant mortality is really high.
00:02:06.500 Most children tragically don't make it,
00:02:09.060 but they're still clearly children,
00:02:10.860 they're clearly human beings,
00:02:11.940 they're clearly alive.
00:02:13.300 So the same might well be true with the very early embryo,
00:02:17.360 that many don't make it,
00:02:18.640 but that says nothing about whether it's alive.
00:02:20.840 What percent of embryos make it to implementation, like, normally?
00:02:25.320 Do you guys know?
00:02:27.180 Not reliably.
00:02:28.940 Okay.
00:02:29.360 It's, I can't remember.
00:02:32.620 There were some studies on this recently.
00:02:34.260 I think it was about half, but there's a big margin of error.
00:02:38.640 Like, we really don't know for sure.
00:02:40.040 Half is higher than they really painted it out to be
00:02:42.980 when I was looking.
00:02:43.660 Yeah.
00:02:43.960 I'm surprised.
00:02:45.020 50%, okay.
00:02:45.940 I think it's, yeah.
00:02:47.120 I know that there has been a lot of criticism
00:02:49.400 that typically they overestimate the number
00:02:51.660 that don't make it.
00:02:52.880 So a lot of people used to say that, you know,
00:02:54.860 90% of early embryos don't make it into, you know,
00:02:58.980 the later stages of pregnancy.
00:03:00.280 We know it's actually a lot less than that.
00:03:03.240 Pregnancy is more successful than we used to think. 1.00
00:03:05.060 Okay.
00:03:07.460 Plan B, what does that do?
00:03:10.120 So, yeah.
00:03:10.700 So plan B or emergency contraception is,
00:03:13.140 or the morning after pill, is contraception,
00:03:16.740 we think, usually, which you can take after having sex.
00:03:21.040 And the idea behind it is that normally it would work.
00:03:26.240 There are two kinds.
00:03:27.000 There's one drug called Levonorgestrel,
00:03:28.960 and there's another drug called Eulipristal.
00:03:30.680 One of them you can take within three days.
00:03:33.140 The second you can take within five days.
00:03:35.000 So they work slightly differently.
00:03:36.920 Now, you take this after having sex, 0.50
00:03:39.340 and the way that it's supposed to work normally
00:03:41.520 is by preventing ovulation. 0.59
00:03:44.240 So that's where the egg is released into the fallopian tube,
00:03:48.120 and that's where it meets the sperm. 1.00
00:03:50.400 So if you block ovulation, there is no egg in the tube,
00:03:54.400 and therefore the sperm can't react with anything
00:03:57.600 and create an embryo. 0.74
00:03:58.560 So typically that's how it works.
00:04:02.160 And because sometimes the egg has already been released,
00:04:07.100 if ovulation has already occurred,
00:04:09.100 then in theory plan B shouldn't work
00:04:11.520 because that was its main mechanism,
00:04:13.700 and it's too late for that.
00:04:15.320 So if you've just ovulated, then you have sex. 0.87
00:04:18.320 Plan B shouldn't work because the egg's already there,
00:04:21.520 and it doesn't work any other way.
00:04:23.200 Now, as I said, there's some people who think that it has other mechanisms,
00:04:29.060 that it also causes the lining of the uterus,
00:04:33.340 the endometrium, to thin out and be less hospitable.
00:04:37.660 Oh, so it's similar.
00:04:38.800 And therefore it blocks implantation.
00:04:39.920 We, as I said earlier, we just don't really know for sure if that happens.
00:04:45.200 We're pretty sure that it blocks, that it thins the lining of the endometrium
00:04:49.180 and blocks it, but we don't know if it ever actually uses that mechanism.
00:04:53.940 So some people think it does, and they're like,
00:04:55.580 I'm not touching it.
00:04:56.520 Some people think the evidence is not great,
00:04:58.840 so my conscience is okay with it.
00:05:02.020 So you mentioned,
00:05:04.220 so I was thinking something when you were talking earlier.
00:05:07.060 You're saying women have all these negative effects from abortion.
00:05:11.100 Now, I've got to be honest.
00:05:12.800 That is not what I have seen in real life.
00:05:16.760 I don't doubt that maybe they do,
00:05:20.680 but my question is if there's all these negative effects,
00:05:23.780 why do they keep going back and doing it?
00:05:25.960 And what I've found is like a lot of women that aren't really sad,
00:05:30.220 or I can think of one girl that was sad and remorseful about it,
00:05:33.740 but the majority of women I know that did it, 1.00
00:05:36.620 it actually shocks me how callous they are.
00:05:39.960 Like it shocks me how little, yeah, they care.
00:05:45.000 Yeah, it's interesting.
00:05:45.820 So I think there's a big question with a lot of potential answers,
00:05:49.220 so I'll try and summarize them.
00:05:51.100 So we know that there's a big cultural difference in this.
00:05:53.440 Yeah.
00:05:53.760 And so, you know, if you're, you know,
00:05:56.060 I think I said last time I was on,
00:05:57.340 in Romania 50 years ago, the average woman had eight abortions.
00:06:02.560 Eight?
00:06:03.120 Yeah, yeah.
00:06:04.200 That was on average.
00:06:05.620 What?
00:06:06.380 It was just the way they used birth control. 0.94
00:06:08.800 They didn't really have much other contraception.
00:06:10.920 They just thought, we'll get an abortion. 1.00
00:06:12.680 And this was before ultrasounds were widely available,
00:06:16.220 that sort of thing.
00:06:16.840 So, you know, there was a lot less knowledge about what is inside and how much it had developed.
00:06:23.160 Now, that has changed a lot.
00:06:24.920 But all that to say, the culture and the knowledge of people makes a big difference.
00:06:29.920 I think part of it is that people will suppress some of their, you know, their feelings of guilt or sadness.
00:06:39.140 Some of them will lie about it.
00:06:41.640 Not everyone, you know, some people genuinely, I agree, don't feel any negative things from it.
00:06:46.320 But I think, you know, the evidence we have from New Zealand, which is a fairly liberal country,
00:06:51.520 suggests that the majority do feel grief, guilt, sorrow, etc.
00:06:57.460 It was not...
00:06:58.160 What percent?
00:06:59.020 It was about like 60 to 70 percent.
00:07:01.300 So, you know, there's still a big chunk of women, a third of women, who don't feel those things.
00:07:04.720 Maybe those are the ones that's like the opposite data, like 40 percent that just keep doing it over and over again.
00:07:10.360 It's quite possible.
00:07:12.960 So that's, I think, part of it.
00:07:14.560 I think another part is that people often don't realise what has caused their mental health difficulties.
00:07:22.080 So I think this is a big problem in Western society generally, right?
00:07:25.200 Like a huge proportion of young people especially have mental health difficulties.
00:07:30.500 Depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, whatever.
00:07:34.520 And because there's such a medicalisation of mental health now,
00:07:39.080 there's a real lack of willingness to attribute it to circumstances.
00:07:45.000 They think, oh, I have a mental health problem.
00:07:47.180 I better get some medication.
00:07:49.320 And it's just seen as like a random thing that happened that you get medication for.
00:07:53.420 Now, I'm not saying medication is bad.
00:07:55.080 For many people with mental health problems, medication is the right treatment.
00:07:58.700 For some people, it's not.
00:08:01.140 But all that to say, there's a real lack of willingness by the medical profession as well
00:08:07.340 to engage with why did these problems happen in the first place?
00:08:11.600 Could it be due to unhealthy habits, loneliness, lack of community, lack of religion, we know plays a big part,
00:08:19.260 abortion, things like that.
00:08:20.960 And so you will get a lot of people out there who will have mental health difficulties that were caused
00:08:27.780 or at least made more likely by an abortion, but they would never tie the two together.
00:08:33.780 Part of the reason for that is because for most mental health problems,
00:08:38.040 it's not always obvious what's caused them.
00:08:42.020 Now, the exception here is post-traumatic stress disorder
00:08:44.940 because with post-traumatic stress disorder, the symptoms are specific to a trauma.
00:08:49.640 So, you know, if you have a car crash, you might get flashbacks to the car crash.
00:08:54.540 If you had a trauma in a particular place, you might avoid going to that place.
00:08:59.680 And therefore, you can tell usually what has caused post-traumatic stress disorder.
00:09:05.720 And we know that about, it's a bit of a broad range,
00:09:10.060 but between 1.5% and 14% of women who have abortions get PTSD as a result.
00:09:18.000 Wow.
00:09:18.180 So it's not the majority, but, you know.
00:09:21.440 It's significant.
00:09:22.240 It's significant.
00:09:22.920 I mean, when you look at standard complications for surgery or for any medical treatment,
00:09:28.600 anything above 1% is counted as common.
00:09:31.400 Anything above 10% is counted as very common.
00:09:34.580 So we know that PTSD is a common or a very common consequence of abortion.
00:09:40.160 And, you know, to put it in the numbers,
00:09:41.960 in America there's, we said, a million abortions a year, just a little bit less.
00:09:45.260 That means that there's somewhere between, like, 14,000 and 140,000 women having PTSD every single year from abortion.
00:09:56.000 So that's a lot of women. 1.00