Why can't you save an ectopic pregnancy by pushing the fetus to where it belongs instead of aborting it?

 Ectopic pregnancies do not make it to the fetus stage, so there is no fetus to push anywhere.

When ectopic pregnancies are typically discovered, it is during the embryo stage, between 4 to 6 weeks of gestation, usually.

A human embryo at 6 weeks gestation is the size of a grain of rice, and looks like this:

See that frilly thing attached to the embryo’s belly? That’s the placenta. Notice those tiny frills? Those are all the places where the placenta attaches to the mother, usually the wall of the uterus, but in the case of an ectopic, usually within the fallopian tube.

And the attachment points are integrated maternal and fetal tissues, interdigitating at the cellular level (reactivation of placental genes is one of the primary mechanisms by which malignant tumors infiltrate and spread into surrounding healthy tissue, incidentally, exploiting this very same mechanism)

The fallopian tube itself has a diameter of about 1 cm.

So, to move the ectopically implanted embryo you would have to cut into the fallopian tube, at 1.0cm diameter, detach the placenta, which along with the embryo in total is the size of a grain of rice (a few mm across) by carefully cutting EACH AND EVERY SINGLE ONE of those blood vessels in the frills you see above. And then you have to move the embryo into the uterus, where you have to implant it back into the uterine wall, REATTACHING EACH AND EVERY SINGLE ONE of those tiny blood vessels.

You have to do all this without damaging that placenta (size of half a grain of rice), or damaging any of those vessels, or injuring the embryo itself. You also have to disconnect the embryo from the fallopian tube without causing fatal hemorrhaging inside the fallopian tube.

And once disconnected, the embryo is cut off from its oxygen and food supply, (that’s what the placenta is for). A full grown adult can survive about 5 minutes without oxygen before irreversible brain damage occurs. Just how long do you think an embryo the size of a grain of rice could survive without oxygen?

So you have to now reattach that placenta (size of half a grain of rice) into the uterus, reattaching every single one of those tiny blood vessels without damaging the placenta or embryo further, and then you have to reproduce 6 weeks of intrauterine adjustment to accommodate a growing placenta within the maternal uterine tissue itself, which the uterus never got a chance to do in this case because the placenta never originally implanted within it. All within the handful of seconds you have before the embryo dies of oxygen deprivation.

You’d need science-fiction level nanotechnology to even think about trying such a medical/surgical feat.


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