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#but yea being like ''the tiny tissue lump reveals the polly pocket creature'' okay i got u – @sarcasticmrfox on Tumblr
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@sarcasticmrfox / sarcasticmrfox.tumblr.com

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shounenchild

oh my god, ok, to clarify: THESE ARE NOT PICTURES OF EMBRYOS. DO NOT THINK THESE ARE PICTURES OF EMBRYOS. THESE ARE PICTURES OF GESTATIONAL TISSUE (like the caption says).

Gestational development goes from "1 to 1 million": Starting with the fertilized egg, it begins to multiply upon itself, going from 1->2->4->8 etc (becoming the blastocyst after about 3 days, or roughly 64 cells). It's a clump of cells that becomes denser and more detailed, eventually elongating into an embryo. It does NOT fan out like a jellyfish, lmao. That's how you know you're looking at tissue (specifically, this is the tissue that surrounds said embryo). And you see the size of these tissue segments? The embryo they surrounded would've been even smaller.

There is a lot of intentionally disingenuous language around gestational development. A lot of it is straight up fearmongering, mixed with certain brands of religious idealization (that is, the idea that pregnancy starts with a "tiny baby", identical in all ways to one that's already born and completely independent to its parent in all life-sustaining biological functions, and it spends 9 months just... getting bigger. That's not the case, and anyone who tries to sell you that shit is a liar).

There's a reason that when the website Catholic News Agency tried to rebuke these photos a few days ago, claiming that they were intentionally hiding the "real baby photos" (even though their own counterpoints basically surmounted to church function gossip), they showed a photograph of an embryo at 9 weeks, and ignored any of the available imagery of embryos from weeks earlier- that's probably the absolute earliest point that you can get an embryo at "obviously humanoid" on sight. Everything prior to that is very... uhh... "dinosaur chicken nugget"-esque.

Then, the other big issue is that so many of the "images" of embryonic development we see online- the ones seen by potential parents, and shown in educational courses- are not photographs. They're artistic recreations, usually computer generated. They're not REAL. Or, they're incorrectly attributed in time, willfully cropped, or otherwise sensationalized.

If you would like to see what embryos look like at the same stages of time shown in these pictures, you can look at a series of photos from appropriately developing ones that were unfortunately spontaneously aborted (aka miscarried) here (EXTREME TW in the previous link for medical imagery, blood and flesh. Also hey, these are high def incredibly magnified images of early embryonic development, which looks... kinda weird! You can actually see the embryos surrounded by the material in the pictures above, but said material above was washed of blood prior to photographing. I'm not sure how to better describe it which is why im not embedding them here, so if you have any problems with those general aspects then be advised)

It takes a bit of doing, but you can also explore the University of New South Wales embryology department wiki here. The same pictures are used here (as well as MRI scans!), and they've added more pertinent details, including embryonic sizes and attributes, and when certain things develop. Same TWs apply, although there are a lot more black and white medical scans that might be easier to digest.

And the last thing I want to mention before I end this is that the MYA Network, which sourced the images in the Guardian, did not lie. Like I said up top, it clearly says that this is tissue, not the embryo itself. Their own website, which hosts the same images, is very clear about that. However, I cannot ignore that this information was presented in an obviously misleading (if effective) matter, typical to journalism of any viewpoint.

The 6 week image, for example, brings up the inane "heartbeat bill" concept, but if you were to take these images as ones of actual embryos, you would think the idea of an embryonic heart is entirely made up (It's incredibly simplistic. The "sound" at 6 weeks is grossly exaggerated. It is not in any way a sufficient "justification" to make abortion unthinkable at that point, bc nothing ever will be. But it is there).

TL;DR: ..... i dunno. "Knowledge is power"? I just saw a lot of people running with the "this is what (the embryo) looks like?!?!?!" thing and I just had to say no, it's not, and going along with that misunderstanding, unintentionally or not, is not going to help anything. (Also hey, look up some literature on the pregnancy process. Go through it with your friends if you have to. I just think more people should know about this thing that 50% can do, lol.)

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