Word: womb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...checkup in the womb...
...healthy, or does a defect destine it to an early death or a life of debilitating illness? In many cases the answers to these worrisome questions can be found in laboratory analysis of a small sample of the amniotic fluid drawn from the sac surrounding the baby in the womb. Using amniocentesis, as the technique is called, doctors can accurately predict serious disorders like Down's syndrome (mongolism) and Gaucher's disease (a metabolic disorder); faced with a grim certainty, prospective parents can opt for abortion. But amniocentesis has its limitations; it cannot foretell all defects. Now comes...
...aloneness, for an hour or more at a time in small tanks filled with 250 gal. of 93.5° salt water. Why? To achieve, through "sensory deprivation," surcease from tension, reconciliation with the id, relief from jet lag, hangover, back pain or nicotine withdrawal, for rediscovery of the womb, a flow of delta brain waves-or just a snooze. The experience might be called the caviar of self-indulgence. Float tanks, as they are called, originated on the West Coast. The idea behind them was developed in the 1950s by Neurophysiologist John C. Lilly, who is most widely known...
...which means that it might be possible to convince him and everyone else that he was produced "like a toaster" on some other planet and brought to earth in a spaceship. The mad scientists put the hero in a water tank for days to take him back beyond the womb. They induce false but highly persuasive memories of his origins and, incidentally, provide Arkin with a tour de force mime sequence in which he acts out the old saw about ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny...
...whose fallopian tubes are either hopelessly blocked or too damaged to permit natural fertilization. Then it will be placed in a laboratory dish with the husband's sperm. (Unmarried women are not eligible.) About two days later, the fertilized egg will be inserted into the wife's womb...