On Tue, 18 Jul 2000, Jim & Winnie Mading wrote:
> All this talk of birth interventions etc brought to mind a Star Trek
> episode of a number of years ago.  A human female was about to give
> birth to an inter-species baby.  The father's body had a number of
> bony projections so the baby was likely to have them also and the
> concern was whether or not the woman would be injured by a vaginal
> birth.  No problem.  They simply used the transporter to "beam" the
> baby from the mother's uterus to the waiting crib next to her!
> (They never did explain how they dealt with the placenta.)  Now
> wouldn't that be a way to avoid the whole labor/birth process.  If
> the technology were available I can see a rush to use it just like
> there has been for epidurals.

Actually, in this episode, the ship was under attack and the labor was not
going well because the mother was stressed.  The baby went into distress
and the transport was last resort to save the baby (they don't normally do
this because it is bad for the baby, albeit TV show babies).  That baby
ended up dying.  Of course the strange twist to the whole episode was that
some strange space-time continuum anomaly had created a duplicate of the
ship, and the mother on the other ship delivered normally.  There is a lot
more to the story (for instance, the baby that lived ended up with the
mother on the first ship whose baby had died), but this is not a Star Trek
list, so I will refrain.

To tie in with LACTNET, there was a mention (not sure if it was this
episode or an earlier one where she was in for a prenatal checkup) where
the doctor said that breastfeeding should be no problem, except that they
would have to see if the baby got the fangs the father's species normally
grew at about six weeks.  The baby is now a young girl, I see no evidence
of fangs, just the ubiquitous head bumps.

Mary Conner

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