Korto wrote:The sponge is attractive, but I got to thinking. My wife uses an IUD; it's great. No fuss, no bother, she's effectively sterile until it's removed (except for one time she got pregnant anyway, goddamn useless bit of plastic, but other then that...) What if they got a T shaped bone from some unfortunate critter, soaked it in vinegar to make it all flexible (and sterile, incidentally, but whether they realise that is another matter), and used that as an IUD. I can mention it off-handedly once, and never have to worry about whether she can get her supply of spermicide again.
There may be problems to having an animal bone stuck up your uterus, but if so I'm sure someone here can tell me.
If there are any of the animal's proteins left in it the body will likely attack it as a source of foreign infection, which can lead to all sorts of mayhem.
Also likely is that the body will secrete calcium around it, encasing it in "native" bone as it were. That occasionally happens naturally with something like a lithopedion. It does not prevent conception. In fact, the link has a picture of a lithopedion that occupied a woman's uterus during 5 subsequent and uneventful pregnancies.
IUD's depend on the presence of either copper or progesterone to function as a contraception.
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Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.
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Yeah? Well there you go. I'd always thought that it operated as a physical obstruction, upsetting the works in some way just by being there, and the hormones just made it even more effective. Learnt something today. Cool.
Of course, technically making a copper IUD and inserting it should have been well within the reach of even the ancient Egyptians, I would think, they just never discovered it; but there's no reason I can think of that they couldn't have. Since they were already sticking things up there, all it would have needed was a belief in inserting the sacred copper amulet (with smooth edges, one hopes) as far up as it can go, and a bit of trial and error over the years, and IUDs could have been discovered thousands of years ago.
So she might end up with a copper IUD, and be done with it.
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Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor
