Word: womb
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fetuses of alcoholic mothers also reveal that ethanol easily crosses the placenta from mother to child. Smith reports that the amniotic fluid that had surrounded one of the babies he examined had a definite odor of ethanol. A second baby born to an alcoholic mother emerged from the womb with the smell of ethanol on his breath. A third was in even worse shape. At birth, his blood contained an ethanol level of 150 milligrams per 100 milliliters. An adult with the same alcohol level in his blood would be considered grossly intoxicated...
...with a young black woman improbably named Ursa Corregidora and plunks her down in a seedy Kentucky dive in the 1940s where she works as a blues singer. Enter Ursa's jealous husband, Mutt Thomas, who hurls the heroine down a staircase, injuring her so badly that her womb has to be removed. Twenty years pass. Ursa's second marriage fails. Her career takes her no higher than another dive across town. But love is a torch song. In the end the blues singer goes back to bad old Mutt...
Such a story hovers between horrific realism and howling symbolism (the loss of a womb equaling not merely the loss of fruitfulness but the whole power to love). Indeed Corregidora could be dismissed as musings on the sordidness of some of life's more desperate characters if the novel did not manage to illuminate the wider question of the way all men need women. Mutt is the masculine principle in its surly, street-brother aspect. For him pride seems uppermost-the pain is mainly hers...
...Doctors, clergymen and ethicists have never been able to agree on the point at which human life begins. Does it start at conception? When the fetus becomes capable of survival outside the womb? At the moment of birth? Dr. Dominick Purpura of New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine offers a new definition. He says that life starts when brain life begins, and he defines this point as some time between the 28th and 32nd week of pregnancy. Purpura bases his conclusion on 16 years of laboratory studies and more recent examinations of 30 premature and full-term...
Whether produced with the help of fertility drugs or naturally, premature babies always suffer from being expelled from the womb before they are ready. Figuring that preemies miss the security of the womb, Dr. Louis Gluck of San Diego's University Hospital has designed a tiny, heated water bed to simulate the warmth and buoyant pulsations of the baby's uterine environment. He also attached a tiny motor that provides motion similar to what the fetus experienced when the mother's heart beat and as she walked about. The preemie's sense of security is further...