Like, how do the sperm and egg get outside the womb?? And how do they then like, still work to make a baby? Can ectopic pregnancies ever survive? I’m assuming that, if they can, they’d have to be birthed via c-section, right?
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I think other people have done a good job of explaining how ectopic pregnancies happen.
I will say that very, very, very rarely, ectopic pregnancies do survive. Most of the time, ectopic pregnancies implant in the Fallopian tube, where there is no room to grow. Occasionally, they will completely escape the reproductive system altogether, though, and implant somewhere else. This is called an abdominal pregnancy and it’s *fantastically* dangerous. Almost everyone with an abdominal pregnancy simply dies unless they get immediate treatment, and often die even with treatment. An embryo trying to implant is just going to shred your spleen, for example, and you will bleed to death.
The world is big, though, and once or twice a decade lightning strikes and someone shows up at the hospital in terrible pain and discovers their fetus is viable but not where it should be. This mostly happens in countries or areas where ultrasounds are not routine. An immediate surgery can *sometimes* save both mother and child. I can’t emphasize enough how rare and dangerous this is, though.
Here’s [a case study of this](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3158531/).
I’d wager every living survivor of an ectopic pregnancy could split a single large pizza, assuming they manage to agree on toppings.
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