Is It Possible to a Virgin Woman to Carry a Baby in the Womb?

Virgin births: Practise nosotros need sexual practice to reproduce?

Fatherless pregnancies happen in nature more we thought, says Frank Young man, so what'southward stopping human beings from doing the same?

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Sometimes it's hard to be a woman, as the singer Tammy Wynette famously said. As if doing the reproductive heavy lifting wasn't bad plenty, nature played a catholic prank in making women demand men to complete the task, and giving them a limited window in which to accept children.

Perhaps it would be simpler if women could go information technology alone. After all, non all animals are then hung up on sex. As New Scientist reported earlier this month, virgin births in nature are mutual. The females of several big and complex animals, such as lizards and sharks, can reproduce without males, a procedure called parthenogenesis – and now we're realising information technology happens in the wild more often than we thought.

So could humans learn this biological trick, allowing women to fall significant on their own schedule – without men getting in the manner?

It'due south a given that, at the very to the lowest degree, women need sperm if they are to conceive. Only there'south no reason why that source of sperm ought to be a man. X years ago, Japanese researchers unveiled a mouse that had two mothers simply no father. Named Kaguya, later on a mythical moon princess born in a bamboo stalk, she was created in a laboratory by combining genetic material from ii female person mice.

Some female sharks isolated from males can become pregnant (Thinkstock)

With a footling fleck of help, stem cells from a female donor can be induced to grow into sperm cells – something that would never normally occur. So information technology might be possible to create a kid from two mothers, each of whom contributed half the genetic textile. Of course, it's not quite that simple, as Dr Allan Pacey, a reproductive biologist at the Academy of Sheffield, explains: "Nosotros tin can make something that looks like a sperm jail cell down a microscope, simply whether it is programmed genetically in the same way is a really hard affair to institute. I don't know if at that place's a way to check that except to use the sperm and meet if the babies develop usually. You lot can practice that in rats and mice but it's a big step potentially to practise that in a human being."

Solo pregnancy

Fifty-fifty if researchers could clear that roadblock, a partner is still required. What if women didn't need a second person?

In the wild, most females that resort to parthenogenesis exercise so just when it is strictly necessary – typically when they have become isolated from any males. Should several female person komodo dragons launder up on a virgin island, they'll exist able produce males and boot start a brand new colony. As well, parthenogenesis in sharks came to lite later on several incidents in which lone females kept in aquariums inexplicably barbarous pregnant. But these are testing times for the animals. "Well-nigh large animals do not reproduce asexually, because evolutionarily information technology is not in their interest to practice so," says Pacey. They lose the genetic variety that keeps a population healthy, he explains.

In theory, it might be possible to produce a child from ane woman's genetic cloth in the laboratory. The toll they would pay, however, would be an alarming genetic bottleneck. When a gene pool is minor, the risk of birth defects and other illnesses rises. Accept the European royal families, nearly all of which are in some fashion related. Prognathism, a deformity that causes the lower jaw to jut out, is then common inside the European royals that they lent the condition its common proper name, the Habsburg lip. Poor Prince Charles Ii of Spain suffered such an extended jaw that he could not even consume properly. In a normal population this status would be diluted out, merely in the tightly-knit European royals information technology emerged once again and once more.

Genetic timebomb

Just as inbreeding reduces genetic diverseness of a population, cocky-fertilisation tin can reduce the genetic diversity of your offspring. If you chose to reproduce entirely on your own, your child would simply have i parent, and thus half the genetic diversity available to a normal child. Each subsequent generation of single-parent reproduction would continue that tendency, with the increasing gamble that commonly hidden defects would surface. In this manner, your offspring would suffer a plummet in genetic diversity far worse than whatsoever European royal faced. "Information technology's not a practiced route to go down," says Pacey. "You lot would only really want to practise this for one generation or two."

Sperm is usually necessary for reproduction - but it can come from other sources than men (SPL)

So, if a woman was serious near giving up on sexual reproduction, it would be prudent to fix aside some genetic fabric, a master copy that descendants would use to replace the diversity lost in intervening generations. It would certainly brand for a very confusing family tree.

Unfortunately this leapfrogging fox merely forestalls the inevitable. Comprehend the idea of virgin births exclusively, and your children will only e'er exist a fading echo of yourself. Tammy Wynette also sang "stand by your man" – while her sentiment may be outdated, the reproductive communication is pretty sound.

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Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140530-do-we-need-sex-to-reproduce

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