The Unsorted BBS Collection/thegreatunsorted.tar/thegreatunsorted/texts/txtfiles_misc/vamp20.faq

Text File | 1995-03-26 | 8KB | 98 lines

Vampires and Pregnancy

       What should be expected from the interaction between
  vampirism and pregnancy depends on what characteristics one
  chooses for the vampiric infection, and may also be affected by
  one's suppositions as to whether a fetus should be considered
  human and/or alive.  As an entity with a firm attachment to its
  hide in an intact condition, I hasten to add that these musings
  represent the purest speculation.  No true wanderers of the
  night have any cause for outrage, regardless of their position
  in the choice/life/whatever street riot.  The strains of
  vampirism tend to run along a continuum from biology to
  possession.  The more mystical variants should be just as likely
  as other forms of magic to act on individual selves and lives,
  whose definition may become important.

       Biological Models:  Some types of vampirism, of which the
  infections described by P.N. Elrod or Lee Killough may be
  considered typical, operate very much like conventional diseases.
  Among humans, some pathogens cross the placenta and affect the
  fetus while others do not.  The outcome of the vampiric
  conversion of a pregnant woman would probably depend on whether
  or not the entity responsible for the infection does so.  If it
  does, the fetus should be sustained by the infection quite as
  well as the woman would be.  The fetus might or might not ever be
  born, but there is no reason to expect a miscarriage.  If
  pregnancy progresses, the infant should be a vampire also.  If
  the infection does not cross the placenta, a female vampire,
  almost certainly non-breathing, would be unable to support a
  still-human fetus.  It would die, and, one _hopes_, miscarry
  promptly.

       Spirit models:  Ricean vampires are infected with the spirit
  of a poltergeist that invaded the ancient queen Akasha.  Many
  other wanderers of the night share a similar condition, in which
  the infection is not a living organism but a ghost or force
  transmitted according to more or less arbitrary rules.  Here,
  one also ought to enquire whether the pregnant woman is (1) one
  life carrying another equivalent life, (2) a single entity, in
  which one life encompasses all, or (3) one life carrying a
  non-equivalent life or potential life in a relationship akin to
  parasitism.

       Spirit model (two equivalent lives): The woman,not the
  fetus, is being infected.  The infection could behave like either
  the placenta-crossing or non-crossing biological infections
  above.

       Spirit model (one life): If the pregnant woman is a single
  life, a symbiotic entity, the vampiric spirit should maintain the
  unit in an unchanged condition... permanent pregnancy.  Ouch.

       Spirit model (two nonequivalent lives):  This might result
  in miscarriage.  If it did not, the outcome would imply that
  *all* of the living occupants of the human body participate in
  the vampiric transformation.  The normal bacterial of the human
  intestine, any possible mundane pathogens, and any possible
  parasites, would all be transformed.  Vampire tapeworms, anyone?

       Further thoughts:

       Any of these models may permit (according to auctorial
  tastes) a woman to become infected in a way that does not kill
  her immediately.  Very interesting (in the Chinese sense of the
  word) problems might arise if a living but infected woman became
  pregnant.  Consider that a very large proportion of human
  pregnancies, probably more than half counting from fertilization,
  abort spontaneously due to implantation failures or defects in
  the fetus.  What happens if the infection invades the fetus?  Now
  a still-living woman is hosting something that, if it dies, will
  not stay dead.  64 cells, undead and hungry, might not become a
  problem.  On the other hand, it might behoove a woman in this
  situation to seek sterilization with all possible haste.

  **With regard to dinoflagellates and taxonomy:  The five-kingdom
  scheme isn't just a textbook convenience.  It is intended to
  follow a proposal for the evolutionary origin of all eukaryotic
  organisms including the protista.  (Crudely, anything fancier
  than a bacterium is a eukaryote.)  The idea is that these
  organisms originated from parasitic or symbiotic associations
  between originally free-living bacteria-like ancestors.
  Mitochondria and chloroplasts do have some DNA of their own, so
  the arrangement is plausible.  The kingdom Protista puts the
  single-celled eukaryotes together, because the details that give
  "plant", "animal" or "fungus" characteristics tend to emerge in
  multicellular organisms.  Dinoflagellates are not the oddest
  example around.  Wierder are beasties like _Euglena_, which
  normally has chloroplasts but can get by without them.
  Disagreements over this sort of thing amount to holy war, pursued
  by means of drive-by publication.  (If you call viruses alive, it
  never stops.  Viruses have all sorts of parasitic genome of their
  own.  One would eventually have to call a single RNA or DNA
  base-pair a life-form, to the eternal amusement of chemists.)

  Remember ... Biology is the study of plants and their parasites!

                            -=- Javelina -=-