Thread by @UrsulaV

It’s gonna sound weird, but what really brought this home to me was hatching chicks from eggs. Chickens externalize everything, and lots of eggs just don’t hatch at all, or get far enough along that it looks like something’s happening, but it stops.

https://twitter.com/QuetaAuthor/status/1435984390945976328

And a fair number of chicks get as far as hatching, then keel over because something is wrong internally. You really see the numbers game in action when there’s eighteen or twenty eggs from under the hen and you get maybe six that survive.

But since women obviously aren’t hens, every chance is emotionally fraught, and hardly anybody is thinking “an embryo developing is an enormously complicated system with all kinds of room for glitches,” because that’s just not how most of us think!

Anyway.

I know nothing, I am not maternal in any way, I just have had incubators full of eggs in my studio. If anybody needs a random stranger to say “It’s not your fault!” though, I’m saying it. It’s not your fault.

(And if you need someone to say that who knows mammals, ask Shep sometime about All The Stuff That Goes Wrong With Lambs.)