Why do humans menstruate when most animals don’t?
In: Biology
Essentially because procreation is so hard for humans. The foetus behaves more like a parasite than anything else, including having the ability to regulate the mother’s heart rate, temperature, and blood pressure. The body will also divert resources away from the mother and into the foetus: vitamins and minerals such as calcium which means many mothers come out of pregnancy with teeth and bone depletion and other insufficiencies. Then, if the mother is able to breastfeed with the amount and duration the body is designed to that’s another couple of years of diverted resources. So menstruation is about making sure only the best, most viable zygotes survive and in the best environment possible. Thats why chemical pregnancy (a loss caused by ineffective/insufficient implantation into the uterine wall, always before 6 weeks) is the most common loss. It’s hard to track because most women dont realise they’ve had one, it generally just manifests as a late period, but some estimates put the number as high as half of all conceptions, including all other miscarriages.
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